Grants Management Function
The role of the Grants Management Function, the Centre of Excellence service offer, and the Functional Standard for Grants.
About grants
Grant funding is a common funding option for government, to support policy objectives in areas such as education, research, civil society and innovation and abroad through international aid projects. Government grants amounted to £172 billion in 2021 to 2022.
Grants can be used for many purposes including:
- supporting government policies such as health and employment
- funding research, development, and innovation
- providing financial subsidy.
The 2023-2025 Government Strategy for Grants Management outlines government’s priorities for grants administration over the next two years.
What we do
The Government Grants Management Function works to maximise all grant outcomes and minimise risk, delivering the greatest benefit to the economy and citizens.
Government grants statistics and data
In line with the government’s transparency agenda, the GGMF collates and publishes the Government Grants Register to show how public funds are spent through grants. It is the most comprehensive view of grant spending across government and classified as an Official Statistics. The data is accompanied by a statistics bulletin providing context to the data, an overview of grant spending and guidance notes on how the data has been compiled.
The Functional Standard for Grants
The Grants Management Function has developed a Functional Standard. The Standard describes the responsibilities and accountabilities of the Cabinet Office Grants Management Function and the associated functions in departments and grant making arm’s length bodies. The Standard also incorporates and expands upon the ‘Minimum Standards for Government General Grants’ which were published in 2016.
Grants Centre of Excellence
The Cabinet Office Grants Management Function is the recognised Centre of Excellence for grants and we support grant making in central departments and arm’s length bodies through a number of forums. These include:
- The Grants Centre of Excellence Digital Service, which is a central store for guidance, templates, toolkits, and training on grant management. Those working in grant making departments or arm’s length bodies can easily self-register for access.
- The Grants Academy, which develops and hosts training modules to support grant makers in building capability in grant making. Our learning offer is detailed on our digital service and available on Civil Service Learning (CSL).
- The Complex Grants Advice Panel, which is an independent, cross-government expert panel coordinated and chaired by the Cabinet Office. The Panel provides independent advice in relation to government grant spend that is higher risk.
- The Grants Best Practice Network, which brings together colleagues working with government grants in quarterly meetings to share learnings.
Spotlight
Spotlight, government’s online automated due-diligence tool, complements existing pre- and post-award checks and highlights areas of risk to inform grant-making decisions.
Spotlight speeds up initial pre-award checks by processing thousands of applications in minutes replacing manual analysis that, typically, can take at least two hours per application. The tool also provides post-award notifications, generated in real-time, if the applicant’s circumstances should change.
Spotlight saves time, improves decision making and reduces the risk of fraud.
Spotlight is available across all government departments and arms’ length bodies. For more information, email spotlight@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
The Spotlight video below explains how the tool works and the due-diligence checks available:
Spotlight - automated due-diligence tool with enhanced checks
Grants Efficiency Programme
We have created new digital services for accessing government support to save taxpayers over £200 million - Find a Grant and Apply for a Grant.
These UK-wide digital services form a single portal for organisations applying for government grants and, if used to their full potential, could save millions through efficiencies and fraud prevention. Currently most departments that provide grant funding have their own services, which duplicate each other and can often be hard for external organisations to find and access.
The first of its kind Find a Grant service offers a free central place on GOV.UK for business, individuals and organisations to find and apply for government grants. It is now mandatory for departments and ALBs to advertise their eligible grants on Find a Grant. The services also enable government grant-makers to step up due diligence and fraud prevention, through an interface with the Spotlight tool. Reflecting the government’s priority to boost economic growth across the whole of the UK and levelling up, the UK-wide service increases the accessibility of grant applications and encourages competition for funding from a wider range of applications. The pilot has already seen an increase in funding awarded to beneficiaries in the north of England.
Find a Grant not only builds and hosts grant adverts: we have also built an application form builder to create tailored application forms - Apply for a Grant. Seamlessly integrated with Find a Grant, grant administrators can simply add their own questions for each grant scheme, while also benefiting from universal mandatory questions for essential due diligence checks.
Having secured additional funding, we recently embarked on a two-year programme to pilot an end-to-end managed service, which is technology-enabled and aims to offer departments a competitive alternative for the administration of grants which do not require specialist handling.
The Government Grants Managed Service programme is conducting a Discovery to gather sufficient insight to determine the feasibility of a centralised service and its target operating model. The aim will be to design a service that will deliver efficiencies and free up specialists in departments to focus on policy, informed by richer and more accurate data. Similarly to Find a Grant, the service will also aim to provide a simpler and more consistent user experience for grant applicants.
Contacts
For any further queries about the Grants Management Function or government grants, email us at grants-management-function@cabinetoffice.gov.uk. Please note - we are not directly involved in the administration of government grants schemes. Queries relating to specific schemes should be directed to the relevant government department or arms length body.
Documents
Last updated 3 January 2024 + show all updates
-
Refreshed the body text of the page.
-
Added a link to the following pages: 2023-2025 Government Strategy for Grants Management, Government grants data and statistics Renamed the Grants Applicant Programme to Grants Efficiency Programme
-
Updated to reflect the change from Department for International Trade to Department for Business and Trade
-
Updated to include details and links to the Find a Grant link beta and the Government Grants Community.
-
Added information about the Grants Applicant Programme, a new online grants applicant service.
-
Updated information on grants data and statistics to the latest publication.
-
Sections updated include: 'What we do', 'Government grants landscape', 'Grants Centre of Excellence' and 'Spotlight'. Also, updated to include more recent figures of grant spend.
-
First published.