Government guidance offered in bids for remaining 140m recycling fund

The deadline for applying for the 76.3 million on offer for 2003-04 is September 30 2002, but councils are advised to get submissions in as early as possible in order to reduce delays in the process.

The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has released a guide to the application process in order to rule out the kind of confusion that is thought to have led to many councils failing in the bidding process for the first round of the fund.

Local authorities who were successful first time round will not be guaranteed any special favour in the second round of bidding, and any bids over the 1 million mark will be subject to additional scrutiny to “ensure the fund is getting value for money”. DEFRA has set a limit of 3.5 million for any one project.

Applications will be evaluated by the fund's expert panel taken from across the industry (see letsrecycle.com story), and with final decisions on funding being made by government ministers. It is expected that a decision on the second round funding will be made by early December 2002.

Guidance
After the first round of funding was announced by DEFRA, it appeared that many councils failed in the bidding process because of simple mistakes. Attempting to rule out such mistakes in future, the government has released a guidance document to local authorities.

Guidance includes the following stipulations for bids:

• A local authority may submit two applications for funding for two different projects. However, applications must be sent separately.
• Applications must be kept to a maximum length of 15 sides, using size 12 font with minimum formatting (i.e. bold, underline) and simple tables only, in Microsoft Word/Excel format. There must be suitable spacing, with approximately three centimetres in the left-hand margin.
• Any application for funding that runs past 31st March 2004 will not be considered.

Funds are available in the following categories: partnership working (21m), turning around low performance (17m), high performance innovation and best practice (11m), developing community initiatives (1.8m) and general projects (25.5m).

The full guidance document is available here.

Further advice is available from Simon Mander, tel: 020 7944 6436 or Karl Nsiah, tel: 0207 944 6408