We have had unprecedented demand for the ARG discretionary business grant scheme which opened yesterday, Monday 1 February. We received over 680 applications on the first day, at this rate of applications the fund would be quickly oversubscribed by the end of the week with demand far outstripping the available financial support.
It is an important principle of this grant scheme that we don’t hand out the money only on a first come first served basis, we need to ensure that we are fairly distributing funds to businesses that are most in need of support.
We have identified the following priority sectors for this round of discretionary funding.
- Fishing businesses
- Childcare providers
- Trade's people and businesses who supply businesses that are required to close (e.g retail and hospitality)
- Creative and event businesses who work from home and their venues are ordered to shut
- Businesses who pay packaged rent and rates who are required to shut or who supply businesses that are required to close and have been significantly impacted due to restrictions
Applications will be approved in tranches on a fortnightly basis. For the first tranche of funding we will initially focus on approving applications received from within these priority sectors, as we have done in previous rounds of the ARG.
If you are in a priority sector it is therefore important that you apply as soon as possible, so we are able to properly review the applications against our limited grant allocation.
This will then allow us to review demand and determine how we proceed to ensure the scheme is administered as fairly as possible to everyone. We will issue a further update next week.
We know that getting the money into business bank accounts as quickly as possible is really important but please bear with us. Once your application has been submitted please allow a minimum of 2 weeks to hear from us as we work through processing and approving applications.
Find out more on Discretionary grants webpage.