When Boris Johnson announced Lockdown 3.0 recently, Rishi Sunak was quick to stand up and announce the next round of grants to support businesses.

We’ve already talked about the two grant options, but have received one question several times this week, and understandably so!

How do I access the grants?

1 Business Rates Grants:

One-off grants for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses in England, linked to the rateable value of the properties they occupy, as follows:

• £4,000 for businesses with a rateable value of £15,000 or under
• £6,000 for businesses with a rateable value between £15,000 and £51,000
• £9,000 for businesses with a rateable value of over £51,000

These grants will come from the same part of your local authority as the earlier business rates grants that were paid out last year. It’s likely that there will be something posted by now on the local authority website, so do take a look there, or get in touch with anyone you had contact with about the last payments.

Unfortunately, the people to speak to will differ by authority, so we can’t be any more specific!

2 Local Authority Grants

These are grants aimed at supporting businesses who were forced to close as part of the new lockdown, but who don’t pay Business Rates. The payment of these grants will be decided by each local authority in England.

To access these grants, you will need to visit your local authority website, and see how they are structuring the application process.

Central Bedfordshire Council have published their information, which is here.

If you’re unsure which is your local authority, you can find that here.

Local Authority Guidance

Gov.uk includes a page of Guidance for the local authorities, that tells them how they should be paying out the grants. You may want to take a look at that, which is here.

This guidance includes areas such as levels of funding, eligibility criteria for funding and managing the process.