Covid19: Increasing Debt Advice Capacity 2020 (In England) - Grant Funding

MaPS is an arm's-length body sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and it has a joint commitment to provide access to the information and guidance people across the UK need, to make effective financial decisions over their lifetime.

Increasing Debt Advice Capacity in England

It is critical people have access to debt advice when they need it and the UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing sets out a goal of 2 million more people receiving debt advice by 2030.

As Coronavirus moves into the next phase we expect the demand for debt advice services to increase. To help combat this, in June MaPS secured an extra £38 million to help providers deliver advice to more people in England who may be experiencing financial problems due to coronavirus. It will also help providers who have seen a fall in their income streams, enabling them to continue their vital work. The £38m has been broken into a number of funding streams. Work has already been underway to allocate funding to maintain existing capacity within the sector and make sure providers can continue to offer services.

Creating new capacity

We are delighted to announce the next tranche of this grant funding - an initial £4,074,666 in FY 2020/21 - will be aimed at increasing the capacity of high-quality, free-to-customer debt advice by recruiting and training additional debt advisors in England. This funding stream is for the provision of both telephone and digital debt advice at a national (England) level. We are inviting organisations that meet the eligibility criteria to apply to the Covid-19: Increasing the Capacity of Debt Advice Grant Scheme.

Delivery expectations:

• The positions created must be able to function remotely, so can either be home-workers or office based but with the potential to work from home
• They must be able to demonstrate the ability to provide a national (England) telephone and digital debt advice service
• Additional resource must be used to deliver advice through a combination of telephone and digital channels

Who is eligible?

A set of criteria must be met for an organisation to be considered for funding for new advisers through this initiative. An organisation must:

1. Hold the relevant FCA authorisations to provide debt advice and be an existing debt advice service.
2. Provide free to customer debt advice (and customers supported by MaPS funding should not be entered into fee-charging solutions where a free to customer equivalent is available)
3. Hold a MaPS accredited quality standard or hold the relevant FCA authorisations for handling client money.
4. Meet the existing debt technical supervision requirements (these can be found at: https://www.maps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20.21-GA-Technical-Supervisor-requirements.pdf

Additional information: Please note that this opportunity is for Grant Funding and not for a Service Contract.

HOW TO APPLY

1.Interested organisations must be registered as a 'Supplier' on the MaPS eSourcing portal to participate: If you have not already done so, please use the following link https://maps.app.jaggaer.com/web/login.html

2.To register, you must have a valid DUNS number (provided by Dun and Bradstreet) for the organisation which you are registering, who will be entering into a contract if invited to do so.

3.If you do not have a DUNS number, please contact D&B UK directly on 0870 243 2344 (option 3), or online at http://www.dnb.co.uk/duns-form.asp.

4. Once registered on the portal, your organisation will be able to access the MaPS documents for this project in the 'Live Tenders Section within the Jagger Portal'

5. Please email commercial@maps.org.uk should you require further assistance with "20-85G" in the subject title.

6. Please note all further communications including the submission of your online bid will be via the portal.