THE Kids’ Cookery School relies on lottery funding to be able to continue teaching deprived, inner-city children in West London about nutrition.

In five months its funding runs out and it has yet to hear whether it will be renewed. Its present application has been held up by months of confusing bureaucracy at the National Lottery Distribution Fund.

Maria Earle, a spokeswoman for the school, said the charity is desperate to know whether it has a secure future. “We are lucky enough to receive lottery funding, which is fantastic, but the money runs out in March and we have yet to hear whether we are getting any more.”

The Kids’ School is hoping that it will not suffer the same fate as the Mid-Sussex Volunteer Bureau, which provides vital voluntary staff to charities and other organisations in the county. Last month it announced its imminent closure after lottery funding was withdrawn.

John Durrant, its chairman, said: “We set up in 1998 with the help of £220,000 lottery funding. When the money ran out we went through the process of reapplying for lottery funding. We got through the first hoop then suddenly we were told we did not meet the criteria. They don’t tell you what criteria you haven’t met.”

Other charities have the applications rejected then approved. When the Samaritans applied for a £300,000 lottery grant to renovate its Sheffield premises last year, it was rejected because it was not targeting groups such as asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities.

At the same time, an application from the UK Network of Sex Work Projects, a group that helps prostitutes, received £360,000.

According to charities’ experts, the case is a typical example of how thousands of good causes desperate for funding are being rejected for lottery cash because they do not meet stringent criteria.

To add to the problem, the detailed applications take up months of valuable volunteer time and are often rejected without explanation.

Isobel Bincow and fellow volunteers at Sheffield Samaritans, who receive 22,000 calls a year from suicidal people, had spent almost 18 months preparing the detailed bid.

She said: “Because we don’t favour particular groups we failed. Our callers come from all parts of society. We don’t discriminate. We talk to everyone regardless of faith, race, colour, sex or class.”

After a storm of protest, Sheffield Samaritans were finally promised £100,000 by the Big Lottery Fund, in what appears to have been an embarrassing U-turn.

In January, the Severn Area Rescue Association’s request for £5,000 to replace the 14-year-old Land Rover used to launch its lifeboats was turned down because it could not provide details of the social backgrounds of the people that it had rescued.

Charities experts lay much of the blame on the Big Lottery Fund (BLF), which was created in June last year by merging the Community Fund, the New Opportunity Fund and the Millennium Commission. It distributes 50 per cent of good causes’ money. Many believe that it has concentrated more on funding government initiatives, such as the Schools’ Food Trust set up by Ruth Kelly to improve school dinners, to the detriment of voluntary and community organisations.

The sudden interest in spending £45 million of lottery money on a government drive to improve nutrition was a bitter blow to The Kids’ Cookery School. Two years ago, its application to open another Kids’ School in East London was rejected. Ms Earle added: “We are still trying to press ahead with plans to open the new school. It’s frustrating that all this money is available but we can’t get hold of it.”

Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, said: “There are many thousands of applications from smaller organisations which go in every year but only a third get funded. The ones that fail are told that there are insufficient funds.“Changes in lottery funding have led to smaller organisations not getting support. The Big Lottery Fund, in particular, has been more interested in government priorities than in the voluntary sector.”

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