Grant compliance for UK funders: what to get right

Compliance is not the exciting part of grantmaking, but it is the part that protects everything else. For UK funders, compliance is less about a single rulebook and more about doing a handful of things consistently and being able to prove it. Here is the shape of it.

Due diligence

Know who you are funding. Check applicants against the relevant registers, the Charity Commission and Companies House for UK organisations, confirm identity, and flag anything that needs a human's judgement. The standard to aim for is honest and proportionate: deeper checks for larger or higher-risk grants, and a truthful "unavailable" when a register cannot answer rather than a false finding. See UK charity due diligence.

Data protection

You hold personal data about applicants, so UK GDPR applies. Process it lawfully, keep it only as long as you need it, secure it, and honour rights, including the right to erasure. Doing this well means designing erasure in from the start, so you can remove personal data without breaking your decision records. See right to erasure for funders.

Safeguarding

Where your funding reaches vulnerable people, assure yourself that grantees safeguard them, proportionately to the work. Record what you asked for and saw. See safeguarding for grant funders.

Transparency

Increasingly, funders are expected to be open about what they fund. Publishing your grants as 360Giving open data is the practical expression of this, and it improves your own data discipline as a bonus. See publishing to 360Giving.

The thread through all of it: records

Notice what every one of these has in common. Compliance is only as good as your ability to demonstrate it. The funder who can produce a complete, verifiable account of a decision, the checks, the rationale, the safeguarding, the payments, in minutes, is compliant in the way that matters. The funder reconstructing it from emails is exposed, however good their intentions.

This is why a tamper-evident audit trail underpins real compliance: it turns "we did the right thing" into "here is the proof". See what audit-grade actually means.

Grantledger builds compliance into the workflow: due diligence at intake, audited decisions with rationale, recorded safeguarding, right-to-erasure, and one-click 360Giving, all on a verifiable audit chain.