Welsh Government issues thousands of award letters every year to a wide range of stakeholders, such as local authorities, the third sector and private sector organisations for a really wide range of purposes, and they are intended to help us drive forward our policy objectives. Monitoring our grant funding is an integral method to ensuring that those projects deliver what is intended, but it is the case that monitoring activities are quite rightly varied and they should be specific to the funding that is being awarded, and those grant managers are responsible for establishing the correct level of monitoring that is needed.

So, a wide range of activities can be used to obtain the assurance that we need that the grant requirements are being met. They can include progress reports, monitoring of targets and milestones, meetings and site visits, written reports, and claims from both the grant recipient and/or an independent third party. And as I said in the response to your first question, those form part of the legally binding award letter and those terms and conditions should be considered from the outset. Grant recipients should only be agreeing to those if they are convinced that they can meet those terms and conditions.

I will say that grant managers are now able to seek advice, support and guidance through a range of sources, including our grants centre of excellence, corporate governance, legal services and their own operations team, so we do have a wide range of support and guidance available to grant managers to ensure that they're able to undertake that monitoring correctly. Active grant monitoring is absolutely key.