Fragmented Funding – report for Local Government Association (LGA)

TRL Insight was commissioned by the LGA to look into the fragmentary nature of central funding to local government. The final report, published in 2020, identifies over 400 grants issued over a four-year period. It presents new analysis based on a wide range of publicly available governmental data; it also draws on interviews with twelve senior council officers working across four key service areas. It highlights:

• how many of these grants are very small in total value;
• how many of them required councils to submit bids;
• how short-term many of them are;
• how many government departments and agencies the grants are channelled through;
• how much of the total funding is for services over which councils have very little control;
• the resulting impacts on the four service areas (adult social care, homelessness, children and families, and public health).