2025 Dormant Assets Allocation: Consultation outcome and next steps

What we heard – and how we've responded

On 2 June 2025 the Government published its Dormant Assets Strategy, setting out its intention to allocate £87.5m from the 2024-28 Dormant Assets release to Access for social investment. 

The following day, Access published our draft Investment Approach, setting out how we proposed to use the £87.5m to contribute to the delivery of the Community Enterprise Growth Plan (CEGP) – a plan developed and backed by a range of business organisations, voluntary sector and community representative bodies, enterprises and social investors. We launched a six-week consultation, inviting feedback on the draft Investment Approach, whilst we awaited the Government’s Spending Direction (the point at which that £87.5m will be formally committed to us). 

How we engaged and who we heard from

Our six-week consultation period ran from 3 June to 15 July, during which we: 

• Held two webinars to talk through our Investment Approach and answer questions, reaching over 100 organisations.
• Invited detailed feedback through written responses or one-to-ones with a member of the Access team, hearing from 44 different organisations.
• Held seven focus groups to hear from a range of stakeholders on specific topics, attended by 53 different organisations.  

In total, we heard from 75 different organisations across individual responses and focus groups. These organisations spanned a wide range of stakeholder groups including social investors, grant-makers, charities, foundations, banks and other capital providers, sector networks, local and national government bodies, other local and national infrastructure organisations, VCSE support providers, other Dormant Assets wholesalers and more. 

We are grateful to everyone who took the time to participate in the consultation. The broad range of views and perspectives has been invaluable. The views of all 75 organisations were carefully considered by the Access team and have informed our final approach agreed by our Board. 

What we heard and how we have responded

Throughout the consultation feedback there were some areas of clear consensus, whilst in other areas respondents had equally strong but often opposing views. A few themes from the consultation feedback include:   

• Many respondents had concerns that the £87.5m allocated to Access is insufficient to deliver the Community Enterprise Growth Plan and that every area that we intend to fund will therefore be under-resourced. We are aware of the significant overdemand that we will face, and we will be mindful of that as we flexibly make commitments.
• There was significant support for our ‘single-pot approach’, so we are proceeding there as planned.
• Respondents felt that the requirement for all applicants to raise their own match funding for Enterprise Grant products was unrealistic, so we have removed that. We will approach other funders to try to leverage this funding directly instead.  
• Respondents felt that Enterprise Grant products would be most effective at the smaller end of the scale, so we have now set an expectation that the majority of grants will be less than £30k, down from the £40k that we had originally suggested.
• There was significant support for the continuation of the Reach Fund, so that will continue (with consideration given to some of the helpful suggestions that respondents made for further improvements to the programme).  
• Respondents had concerns about the appropriateness of our plan to require approval/ endorsement of market development project applications by a single sector body, so we are rethinking that. We will explore alternative ways to achieve meaningful participatory decision-making in this area.
• We learned that we had not been sufficiently clear about the intentions behind organisational/ balance sheet investments, so we have endeavoured to explain this product and eligibility criteria more clearly.  

For the Full Detail: Our Post-Consultation Report

We received a huge amount of detailed and varied feedback on a wide range of topics which we simply couldn’t do justice to in a blog. We have therefore published a detailed Post-consultation Report setting out: 

• What we heard during the consultation
• Our response to the feedback and to a number of questions that we received
• The decisions that we have taken in our Investment Policy

This report is not something that we expect applicants/ others to read unless they want to. However, because so many people gave such thorough and thoughtful responses to our consultation, we felt it was important for us to provide a detailed response for anyone who may be interested in it. 

Where we are now

Today we have published: 

1. The Post-consultation Report (for information)
2. A draft Investment Policy setting out how we hope to deliver the £87.5m (for applicants to refer to)

We are not yet open to applications. We are awaiting the Government’s Spending Direction, which will formally commit the £87.5m to Access and direct us on its use. Until that takes place, the Investment Policy remains in draft form and subject to change. If the final Spending Direction requires any changes to the draft, we will publish an updated Investment Policy before opening for applications. 

We are however happy to start having exploratory conversations with potential applicants (or potential co-funders) if you have any questions or if you would like to begin to discuss your ideas, on the understanding that the Investment Policy is currently in draft form. Feel free to reach out to any of us in the Programme Team or to info@access-si.org.uk if you’d like a conversation at this stage. Please note that we are a small team and some of us may be away at points during the summer, but we will get back to you as soon as we can. 

As soon as we are able to open to applications, we will finalise the Investment Policy and will publish application forms and guidance on this page on our website. We will also notify everyone who has asked to be kept informed. 

*Access is a wholesaler of subsidy into social investment structures. This means that we do not fund charities and social enterprises directly – we fund the social investors and other intermediaries that do. If you are a charity or social enterprise seeking social investment please visit goodfinance.org for information.