Voluntary Work: Young People

(asked on 21st March 2019) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what the source of funding is for the £10 million brand refresh for the National Citizen Service; and whether he can confirm that no government funding will be spent on this contract.


Answered by
Mims Davies Portrait
Mims Davies
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 26th March 2019

To date, over 500,000 young people have taken part in the NCS programme. The most recently published evaluation has found that 82% of young people felt more positive about people from different backgrounds, and participants are more likely to use their time to help others after NCS[1]. Marketing is a key recruitment driver for NCS, ensuring that more young people across the country benefit from the programme.

The brand refresh is one part of the overall marketing and creative services tender which includes communications planning, creative strategy, brand platform, experience, advertising campaign development, and content production. The £10m figure was stated in a NCS Trust procurement document as an upper limit over 4 years. The actual cost of the contract is likely to be around £1m per year, for 4 years of the contract.

The NCS Trust is forecast to self-generate c. £3m income in the upcoming financial year. The brand refresh element of the marketing and creative services contract in question will be paid from those funds and we can confirm that no government funding will be spent on this element of the contract. The remainder of the contract will be funded by Government funding.

[1] This figure is based on the 2016 programme evaluation, which can be found here. The 2017 evaluation report is currently being finalised.

Reticulating Splines