We won! Government amends the Subsidy Control Bill

We have some exciting news to share - our year-long campaign to improve subsidy data has been successful!

The Government last week amended the Subsidy Control Bill to cut the threshold at which subsidies must be published from £500,000 to £100,000. This is a huge reduction that will bring millions of pounds of subsidy into public scrutiny.

It’s enormously welcome that the Government has finally accepted that the benefits of collecting this data outweigh the costs - we applaud BEIS and its Ministers for changing their position.

And while ideally the publication threshold would have been set at zero, this will still give us all much better evidence on how levelling up and ‘net zero’ cash is being spent.

Why it matters

We won’t cover the detail here (for that, see our briefing), but in short, this public data on any subsidy over £100,000 supports the Government’s own goals for its subsidy spending, which amounts to billions of pounds per year.

This new data will help:

• Businesses, which will be able to challenge subsidies that give rivals an unfair advantage, and spot opportunities

• Researchers and policy analysts, who will now have far better evidence on where subsidies are going and which actually work

• The taxpayer, who can see how more of their own money is being spent, and feel confident that subsidies are transparent and effective.

All of this is being achieved at very low cost. (In fact, we don’t believe the cost will even be as high as the Government’s modest estimates, which still assume that lots of data will be processed manually.)

This is the power of reviewing policy through a data lens, and adding modern provisions about data collection and publication.

What we did

Here at CFPD, we spent nearly a year working on this - from the earliest consultation stages all the way to the House of Lords.

Government anti-corruption champion John Penrose MP has supported the issue since early on, and his amendments in the Commons were supported by a host of Conservative MPs. We also published a joint briefing with the Centre for Policy Studies, and worked with a range of other civil society organisations.

Eventually, cross-party amendments and a strongly supported debate in the House of Lords resulted in the Minister putting forward the Government's own amendments to the Bill, which passed last week.

What comes next?

Firstly, we’ll continue to push for a lower limit, since the Bill allows for changes in future, and lower limit could be implemented easily and would have many benefits.

And secondly, while we welcome this change, it’s concerning that it took so long for BEIS to accept that stronger data was an opportunity, not just a cost. We’ll be looking at the lessons that future Bill teams can learn from this.

You can download and search the new subsidies data, and do get in touch if you’d like to talk.