Agenda item

Report of the Chief Grants Officer.

The Committee received a report analysing the statistics of grant applications received in the first two years of the Investing in Londoners grants programme (from September 2013 to August 2015).

Members discussed the report and, in response to questions, it was noted that:

·      Officers were visiting Barking and Dagenham to build networks and raise the profile of the Trust in order to encourage more applications from the Borough.

·      The London Borough of Islington appeared to get a disproportionately large amount of funding, but this reflected the number of pan-London bodies based there; officers undertook to try to remove pan-London data in future reports to enable fairer comparisons to be made.

·      Extra resources had been secured in order to take a more pro-active approach to grant-making, including two new members of staff to ensure more applications were processed within four months and to handle the anticipated rise in number of applications, owing to the increase in the grants budget; and the changes in the operating environment: in particular, the reduction of about 40% in London Boroughs’ budgets and the reduction in grant funding available at a time when many organisations face increased demand.

·      Officers advised that awareness of the need for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses had been raised nationally by central government and the press; it was hoped that this would result in a higher number of applications to the ESOL grants programme.

RESOLVED – That:

a)    officers remove the data for grants to pan-London organisations from the ‘Spend by Borough’ table;

b)    the next bi-annual statistical report (and, subsequently, the first of each financial year), analyse the work delivered, the beneficiaries and impact of grants made, instead of the profile of applications received; and

c)    the report be noted.