It may be of interest to some.
It`s interesting to know where ratepayers money goes, no doubt many of these organisations are well worth the amounts they receive & do lots of sterling work......... Not sure about some though.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/grants_to_organisations_in_the_b
Worth bearing in mind that these are straight forwards grants/donations. The list doesn't inlude payments for commissioned services and contracts and payments when HBC acts as a distributor of funds from Central Government for specific programmes. eg Future Jobs Fund etc
With some schemes, for example, payments are made for each person who completes a training course and one way to generate income from this is to put friends and family through lots of courses - or at least say that they have completed the courses.
Other schemes, such as the now defunct Future Jobs Fund, required frequent reviews of objectives achieves, quality of training and required further training. This would require frequent One-2-One interviews with those participating. On the other hand, you could get around this by simply asking them to sign a blank A4 sheet of paper and then write whatever you like onto it afterwards when you could be bothered.
You can also make sure that the additional money received, over and above that intended as wages and which is meant to be used for the participant to buy protective clothing, tools, stationary etc., never actually makes it to the participant but goes straight into the organisations bank account to be spent on something else - like a 50 inch TV, for example.
Not that anything like this could go on in Hartlepool, of course. ;)