Funding Service: How digital innovation will help us to deliver grants faster, better and cheaper  

The Funding Service is a multidisciplinary team in MHCLG transforming the way the department delivers grants to councils and communities.  

In this blog post, we share how our service aims to make MHCLG’s grant delivery more cost-effective, consistent and user-focused, and what we’ve achieved so far.  

This piece forms part of a series of case studies bringing to life MHCLG Digital’s objectives and guiding principles. These examples demonstrate how digital ways of working, collaboration and innovation support the delivery of our departmental objectives and outcomes, offering better, faster and cheaper services to citizens. 

Our mission in Funding Service 

MHCLG is one of the biggest grant funders in government, delivering over £7 billion in general grant funding in 2022/23 to a wide range of organisations, including local authorities, housing associations and community groups. Our job is to enable the department to deliver funding quickly, more efficiently and at lower cost. 

This aligns with the government’s wider commitment to simplify the local government funding landscape and reduce the burden on local authorities, as outlined in the Local Government Finance Policy Statement 2025/26. 

We are responsible for ensuring every step of the grant process is optimised – from design and launch, up until close. Our goal is to provide a consistent user experience, whether for council officers submitting monitoring data or for grant teams assessing impact.  

MHCLG Digital’s new strategic vision and the objectives and principles it sets out will be key to this. As well as helping to spark conversations and training opportunities, it will enable us to support teams within the department (and beyond!) as we: 

design and build new digital tools to improve funding delivery  provide user-centred expertise right from the early stages of policy and fund design 

Actions we’re taking to drive change  

Getting senior buy-in 

Securing a mandate from our executive team has ensured that the Funding Service becomes a core part of the department's operations. By integrating our digital solution into policy-making, we’re creating a seamless and more effective system for distributing funding. 

Driving operational excellence 

In Funding Service, we have developed reusable tools and are establishing data standards. These will reduce the time taken to onboard funds onto digital services, ease the burden on our users, and improve consistency and quality. 

Putting our users first 

Key to our efforts is the creation of a user-centric service that simplifies funding applications, assessments and post-award monitoring data collections. By placing user experience at the forefront of our design, we aim to make the funding process easier, quicker and more accessible for all those involved.  

Embedding digital in policy  

In the Funding Service, we champion ‘codesign’ – a design approach which involves users and stakeholders right from the beginning of a project through to rollout. In a nutshell, this means we start working with grant teams in policy early on to understand what their grant is about and what their requirements are, and then collaborate with them over the following weeks and months to launch the grant within given timelines. 

Our aims and outcomes to date 

Digital is about bringing together people, processes, tools and data to be efficient and effective. Our service aims to: 

save time and money – a single service for all MHCLG grants removes duplicate design and delivery  provide better data and insights – data standards and common tooling provides a uniform and structured way to collect and use grant data  improve reputation – a streamlined, user-centred service presents an enhanced experience for grant teams and recipients. 

We've already made efficiencies, with both proven results and projected savings, including: 

standardising our digital platforms across complex funds, with potential savings estimated at £500,000 per fund  reducing the time a government data science team spent producing dashboards to monitor fund performance by 89%  estimated annual savings of £13 million for our department through reduced fund delivery costs 

Find out more about the Funding Service 

We’re excited about the innovative changes the Funding Service will bring to how MHCLG delivers grant funding. Follow our progress by subscribing to the MHCLG Digital blog or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to speak to the team. 

Read more about MHCLG Digital's objectives and guiding principles and the work digital teams are doing to improve outcomes across MHCLG.