Due to recent changes at the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, applications for the ‘Briefing and Analysis Fund – Scottish Parliament Elections’ should now be sent to programmes@therobertsontrust.org.uk before the deadline (noon on Wednesday 9th July). Any questions about the Fund or your application before the deadline should also be sent to this address.
If you have experienced any delay in submitting your application due to the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust site being temporarily down, please get in touch.
The changes mean that, while the call will continue as planned, we will be leading on this work with potential support from the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust staff team. This will not affect the overall value of funds available, but we do expect there may be a delay to original timescales and turnaround times. Applicants will be informed of updated timescales for decision making and any knock-on delay to awarding of funds after the deadline closes.
We appreciate that any delay to awards may affect proposed work and will do our best to work with successful award holders to minimise and mitigate the impact of any delays.
Our aim is to honour the call as publicised, and we will continue to use the funding criteria originally set out to assess applications.
Applications for this call will be considered for work to produce independent economic analysis, social research and policy work addressing the key challenges in relation to living standards in Scotland, as well as the opportunities, barriers and costs to doing so. We will consider funding proposals aiming to:
- Produce high-quality analysis, including distributional effects of reforms, including their effect on poverty, to inform the development of policies and pledges across political parties
- Provide impartial and robust assessment of existing and proposed policies, including policy delivery considerations
- Improve understanding of the factual evidence on key economic and social policy issues including public service performance among the public, media and other commentators, to support high-quality debate
Key areas we are interested include public finances, taxation, public service spending, employment, living standards, transition to net zero and social security. We are particularly interested in distributional impacts on poverty and/or those living with trauma across these areas. While we expect most of the analysis will be quantitative in nature, we will consider projects that centre lived experience where this is integral to understanding the problem or the solutions.