Where our money goes – ASH awarded over £700k by government since 2018

On Monday I noted that the anti-smoking group ASH has been awarded a grant of £95,000 by NHS England.

You can read about it here.

I can now reveal that in the last year (2021-22) ASH was also awarded £192,000 by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

This follows grants of £140,000 in 2018-19, £140,000 in 2019-20 and £191,680 in 2020-21.

Responding to a freedom of information request submitted last month, the DHSC adds that:

The work was to support the Tobacco Control Plan and activities were in line with the original funding themes, which are publicly available at Tobacco control plan: funding.

My FOI request included five questions, one of which was to ask if the work carried out by ASH in return for the grants awarded in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 had been evaluated. ‘If so, please provide copies of the relevant evaluation reports.’

In response the DHSC sent me a single document - Final report to the DHSC on the evaluation of project grant to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), 2018-2021.

Under 'The evaluation process and results' it reads:

This is the final report by the independent evaluator nominated by ASH [my italics] in their application.

I'm not making this up. It would appear that ASH has not only received hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money 'to support the Tobacco Control Plan' but their work has been marked (apparently) by an evaluator (not identified) of their own choosing!!!

Since then, other than persistently lobbying the Government to introduce a new Tobacco Control Plan, I'm not sure what ASH has done to justify a further grant of £192,000 for 2021-22.

Unfortunately we’ll probably never know because, according to the DHSC, ‘There will be no evaluation report for the 2021-22 work'.

Seriously?

A grant of £192,000 has been awarded by government and there will be no evaluation of the work carried out?

Meanwhile, if you include the additional £70,000 that was awarded to ASH for a Quit4Covid campaign in 2020, that’s more than £700,000 from the DHSC alone since 2018.

Add the £95,000 just granted to ASH by NHS England and the total sum of public money awarded to ASH in the last four years appears to be in excess of £800,000.

And we haven't yet asked whether the DHSC has awarded ASH a further grant for 2022-23.

Watch this space.

See also: ASH demands £350k from Government to fund ailing Quit for Covid campaign (May 2020) and ASH campaign grant slashed from £350,000 to £70,000 (August 2020).

Comments

[Andrew Carey]

Kudos Mr Clark. Submitting FOI requests that meet the criteria to get an answer is a bit of a craft as well as hard work.