The business of Government as we know from its heart is to either give money or take it away. If this is one simplified acknowledgement, the management is a large, important and complex area of the Government. Its main objective is to support the policies across the term and government in all the sectors like education, health, rural affairs, innovation and research as well as international affairs and its aid for the public growth. As it requires both process mobility and mandatory security while monitoring to ensure safe case management and the payment of grants. And while the funding mechanisms, rules and scopes may fluctuate, grant management is something nearly every sector of every government does. The need to improve the efficiency of the grants administration, grant funding and reduction in the losses from the fraud driving innovations are some of the problems face by all the governments across.
The Grants Management Function in the Cabinet Office is continuing with its determinations to make grant management more effective, efficient and safe. The UK’s exit from the EU is ensuring that the grant management is rising up the agenda across many other departments as they re-think how grant funding can better the support policy. Framing specifically, the end of EU farm subsidies represent one the major changes made in the farming policies in half a century. With the end of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Defra will resume the responsibility of designing, implementing and managing its own domestic agricultural policies and schemes. And it’s starting its 7 year transition towards a system that pays farmers to improve the environment, animal health and welfare and to reduce the carbon emissions. Moving from the decade old practices of funding based on the land sizes to instead reward the farmers for the work that only they can do. Whether it is ensuring the survival of threatened species or locking up carbon on their land. Work that benefits everyone in society. This initiative will have to be driven by both long-term policy and conservative to the needs. Yet, the UK grant management function is underpinned by boards and processes formed in the 1950s. Platforms that are clunky and rigid and not accurately up to the job of delivering what government and society wants.
To underpin a reimagined grants management function with a new platform to ensure it meets its ambitions, the Government could establish a way starting from the scratch and build something that for once that actually work. As the projects often fail to deliver on time, exceed the budget, and do not provide the value promised, so an alternative might be look at others work. It might be better to adopt proven solutions that create agile, future-proof systems, based on open components that ensures full flexibility and the opportunity for ongoing innovations. Considering this approach the government can spend 20 per cent of the effort by getting 80 per cent of the way to the digital national scale grants solution that they need.
The little effort of the government can create a cutting-edge grant management system whilst owning it and being responsible for it, leaving more space to innovate around the edges creating the incentives, through data led funding and subsidies strategies, to create behavior changes that will most certainly benefit the society.
