Central Government

Redesigning Funding

A three year project to bring a redesigned central government funding service to Beta, working in an embedded team with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The problem

Central government funding programmes were historically fragmented, inconsistent, and costly to run. For applicants, processes were difficult to navigate and unpredictable. For government, each new fund often meant rebuilding systems, retraining assessors, and absorbing risk.

This programme set out to change that by turning funding into a repeatable, end-to-end service: one that could support multiple funds, adapt to policy change, and operate at national scale while remaining compliant with the Government Service Standard.

I worked as Design Lead within an embedded, multidisciplinary team over three years, supporting the service from early discovery through to public Beta and live operation.

As Design Lead, I held responsibility for design direction, ways of working, and design quality across the programme. My role combined hands-on design, facilitation, and leadership in a politically sensitive and fast-moving policy environment. In practice this meant:

  • Establishing and evolving design ways of working for a newly formed team
  • Creating clarity and shared understanding across design, product, engineering, policy, and delivery
  • Leading service design and later, in addition, product design for onboarding new funds to the platform
  • Designing and facilitating participatory workshops, including vision, mapping, and alignment sessions
  • Producing and commissioning core artefacts such as service blueprints, lifecycle models, and journey maps
  • Providing ongoing critique, direction, and support to designers and multidisciplinary colleagues
  • Mentoring and building capability across the team at multiple levels

The work was delivered using GOV.UK principles, patterns, and components, and assessed against the Government Service Standard.

What I did

I began the programme as Service Design Lead, responsible for establishing design direction and ways of working, and for making sense of a complex and unfamiliar problem domain. This involved extensive mapping, modelling, and synthesis to create shared understanding across policy, delivery, and technical teams.

As the programme matured and trust in the design approach grew, my role expanded. I later led the team designing the onboarding experience for new funds, moving the focus from service framing into product design and delivery.

The work was delivered by a large, multidisciplinary team over several years. While too many people contributed to name individually, the outcomes reflect sustained collaboration across design, policy, delivery, and engineering.

The funding lifecycle

A key early task was making sense of the end-to-end funding lifecycle — not just from an applicant’s perspective, but across policy teams, delivery teams, assessors, and operational staff. We mapped the full lifecycle that every fund must pass through, including:

1. Onboarding funds and understanding the policy and delivery needs of the fund teams

2. Opening the fund, by publishing and promoting the fund details in the form of a prospectus

3. Allowing applications to begin, and supporting the applicants through the process

4. Preparing assessment teams for the assessment process, and supporting assessors through the process

5. Supporting funding decisions and publishing outcomes in ways that build clarity, confidence, and public trust

6. Exploring and delivering the necessary tech and design changes to the product to deliver a fund

7. Closing the fund, and evaluating the process against performance and quality targets

8. Reporting on progress of the projects funded, feeding learnings into a knowledge base

Key moments

Developing a vision

As delivery progressed sprint by sprint, I identified a risk of divergence: moving quickly without a single, shared picture of where the service was heading.

I designed and facilitated a series of product vision and strategy workshops, bringing together multidisciplinary team members and senior stakeholders. Resulting in a clear, defensible vision for the service that helped align priorities, guide decision-making, and reduce delivery drift across a large programme.

Building relationships

The success of the service depended on close collaboration with teams and services across government, many of whom held established processes and differing perspectives on change. Through structured, collaborative workshops, we moved from initial scepticism to shared understanding, creating the conditions needed to align on goals and make sustained progress.

Measuring performance

For much of the programme, success relied on adherence to user-centred methods and service standards. Once the first funds went live, we were able to measure real-world performance and validate design decisions against outcomes.

Seeing the service perform under live conditions, and improve operational efficiency, was both a relief and a turning point for stakeholder confidence.

The results

During my time on the programme, the service met and exceeded several key operational and user-experience metrics, including:

  • 90% reduction in the time required to prepare and train assessment teams
  • 75% reduction in fund onboarding time
  • Reduced time for applicants to complete applications
  • Reduced time to assess applications

Multiple funds were successfully onboarded and delivered through the service, with low support demand and a high application success rate.

An iterative delivery model was established, ensuring that learning from each fund improved the next, and creating a sustainable foundation for future policy and delivery teams.

We built interest in the work, with regular show and tells and blog posts, winning over several key stakeholders and collaborators.

What happened next?

As planned, the supplier team worked itself out of the role. The service is now fully staffed and operated by civil servants and continues to evolve.

More broadly, the programme has contributed to a shift in how policy teams think about, discuss, and deliver funding — from one-off programmes to a service-led approach grounded in evidence and reuse.

“The client trusts and admires his approach to design and stakeholder management. He can handle our toughest stakeholders with grace and we honestly wouldn’t have gotten this far without him.” — Delivery Lead