The Funding Service in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has revealed details of its development of reusable data standards for grant funding.
Technical architect Wayne Busby has described the work in a blogpost, saying the aim is to reduce the time taken to onboard funds onto digital services, reduce the burden on grant applicants and recipients, and improve the consistency and quality of data collection.
“We believe that standardising funding data will both benefit grant teams and improve the quality and efficiency of grant delivery across the whole department,” he said.
The Funding Service – through which MHCLG delivers its funding to other organisations – has run an eight-week project to document existing standards and agree an initial set of new ones.
It identified three sets to prioritise – risk, organisational and financial data – and is now making progress with the definitions.
Next steps
The service is now considering what standards it should produce next and recommendations for implementing them in within MHCLG’s digital services; and has called for input from the funding services of other government departments.
“Defining data standards is not an individual or even a team activity,” Busby said. “For the grant funding data standards to succeed, there needs to be an ongoing collaborative effort between business and policy teams, subject matter experts, and operational and delivery teams.
“These differing viewpoints help to us give a 360-degree view of data and how it is used within MHCLG. They also provide a level of assurance and confidence that the data standard is well defined.”
