Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if he will publish the circumstances in which a delivery partner of National Citizens Service would be required to pay back money to the NSC Trust due to not meeting their contractual participation target thresholds.

NCS Trust has established seasonal checkpoints to adjust the number of contracted places if a Regional Delivery Partner has not signed up the required number of participants. In this instance 100% of the released payment is recovered.

At the end of the programme season NCS Trust require that Regional Delivery Partners self-report on profit against participation numbers. Should Regional Delivery Partners make more profit than was stated in their original bid, and not hit their participation targets, NCS Trust will recover funding.

Additionally, the NCS Trust perform independent spot check audits of cost reconciliation data. For Summer 2016 the Trust recovered £218,413 of unspent funds in regions where delivery was below the contractual performance thresholds.