Islington Discretionary Grant Fund

As an affordable workspace provider in Islington, we received the following from Islington Council which we’d like to share with our members.

We hope this is helpful and applicable to as many of you as possible - we are happy to help you where we can.

Islington’s Discretionary Grants Fund: https://www.islington.gov.uk/business/coronavirus-information-for-business/finance-support-for-businesses/discretionary-grants-fund

Check out other support available at: www.arkcoworking.com/online.


Dear Workspace Operator 

I am pleased to be able to tell you about Islington’s Discretionary Grants Fund, which will open for application next week.

We have been awarded £2.8m by the Government. They have set out guidance on priority areas, but have given the council discretion over allocation for this funding.

We would like to invite you to apply for a grant of up to a maximum of £5,000.

This scheme is open to small/micro businesses located in affordable and independent workspaces and operators of affordable and independent workspaces.

To apply, businesses will need to meet the following criteria:

·         Businesses with fewer than 50 employees

·         Businesses that were trading on the 11th March 2020

·         Businesses with a significant fall in income due to the COVID-19 crisis

·         Businesses with ongoing property-related costs from 1 March 2020

·         Businesses who are not eligible for the existing public sector COVID-19 responses, grant schemes

·         Businesses which agree to engage with council initiatives

·         Businesses which agree to engage with monitoring and evaluation activity to measure the impact of the fund

·         SMEs, which means you must satisfy two or more of the following requirements in a year:

       Turnover: Not more than £10.2 million

       Balance sheet total: Not more than 5.1 million

       Number of employees: a headcount of staff of less than 50  

Application process

The process will open on 15 June and applications will need to be made online via our Discretionary Grants Fund page. We will provide full guidance on our website to help you complete your application and you will need to provide the following scanned documents as evidence along with your online form:

  • Bank statements for the last 12 months or from your first day of trading (whichever is earliest)

  • Xero / Sage / Quickbooks or equivalent Profit and Loss summary from April 2019 to March 2020

  • Xero / Sage / Quickbooks or equivalent Balance Sheet

  • Business certificate of incorporation

  • A copy of your tenancy or rental agreement, your lease, your co-working membership agreement, your trading license or similar here

If you have any questions about completing your application, please get in touch with us by emailing businesssupport@islington.gov.uk

The number of grants we can approve are limited

There is likely to be more demand for the funding than funding available. Submitting an application and meeting the criteria set out below does not therefore guarantee approval of a grant. We have not been allocated sufficient funds to support every business we expect to qualify. We will close applications when we have received 150 applications and only re-open if we have not allocated all available funding at that point.