The Cabinet Office standards aim to ensure that grants will be effectively managed across government.
The standards will be adopted by all departments to make sure that taxpayers’ money, awarded through government grants, is properly agreed and spent.
The standards include a new Grants Advice Panel to consider ‘high risk, new and contentious’ expenditure, and any significant increase in funding to existing grant schemes. In addition, all departments will be required to have a robust grants approval process for spend over £100,000, and all grants need to be reviewed annually as a minimum.
The programme incorporated recommendations from the Public Accounts Committee and Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee inquiries into the Kids Company charity, as well as reviewing grant programmes already underway.
Some of the poor practices highlighted included:
- lack of accountability
- limited data to inform strategic decisions
- limited consideration of alternative routes or match funding
- lack of competition
- little investigation of grant recipients prior to award
- insufficient scrutiny of what was being delivered by recipients
- monies being paid up front, making it difficult to claw back if misuse was identified.
There are around 2,000 grant schemes across government, which together received more than £117 billion of government grants during 2016 to 2017.
