When grant money misses the target, it’s not for lack of rules

Most UK funders I talk to think a lot about how to improve their grants systems. Better portals. Clearer guidelines. Simpler application forms. Cleaner data. Tidier reporting.

That’s not a British thing. We see the same focus areas for grantmakers we work with across the world.

The Australian arm of SmartyGrants has just published a review of 66 audit reports on Australian government grants, covering 2015 to 2025 and every jurisdiction in the country. Australia runs public grants under a Westminster-style framework it inherited from the UK: independent auditors reporting to parliaments, central lifecycle guidance, the same annual pressure to get money out of the door before the year ends. There are differences between UK and Australian systems, but there are also a remarkable number of similarities.

Our report uncovered six problems that occurred across the decade, across jurisdictions and across programmes of every type and size. Chances are, some of them occur in your programmes too:

The most useful finding in our review is perhaps the most pedestrian. The problem, we found, is no longer an absence of good policy. Every Australian jurisdiction now has a grants framework built on transparency, proportionality, risk management and outcomes, and most of them say sensible things.

You probably have a great set of policies too.

The problem is that there is a gap between the framework and what happens on the last day of the financial year, when the money has to be committed and nobody has properly defined what it was meant to change.

SmartyGrants’ Australian-based Group Managing Director, Denis Moriarty, ran grants programmes as a senior public servant before founding Our Community (SmartyGrants’ parent company). Denis saw the cycle from the inside before he shifted to the outer.

“Whenever an Auditor-General's report arrived, the departmental response followed a familiar script. We welcomed the report, accepted the recommendations, acknowledged there were lessons to learn and reassured everyone that public money was always being managed to the best of our ability,” he says.

“The media release was drafted, the Minister was briefed, a few interviews were conducted, and before long, everyone moved on.

“The uncomfortable truth is that very little fundamentally changed.”

SmartyGrants was invented, at least in part, to try to interrupt this cycle. Our accompanying white papers and other help documentation are similarly aimed. Here’s where we recommend funders set their focus:

• Be explicit, not exhaustive. State what matters (in your guidance notes, on your website, in your forms) without producing huge manuals that nobody reads. Add effort, documentation and scrutiny only where justified.

• Define carefully, build once, reuse everywhere. Platforms like SmartyGrants support grantmakers in maintaining central templates, core data fields and shared training, which reduce systemic weakness and workload at the same time.

• Treat grantmaking as a professional discipline. Train people carefully. Resource it properly.

• Close the loop. Feed everything you learn from you last round into the next – better guidance, better forms, better decisions.

Download the whitepaper here: Government Grants: A decade of repeating the same mistakes

Kathy Richardson is Executive Director of SmartyGrants UK. Government Grants: A decade of repeating the same mistakes is published by the Institute of Grants Management, part of the Our Community group of enterprises.