Dormant Assets funding in England: analysis of consultation responses
What would you do if you found a wallet with £3.7 billion inside?
Naturally, you’d deliver it directly to your local police station. But what if decades passed without a lead, or search efforts led to a dead end? How could those funds be put to good use?
The UK government’s Dormant Assets Scheme settles a similar conundrum, handling long-untouched funds, lost or forgotten by their owners, on a national scale. The value of the assets in scope of the Scheme is set to increase by £3.7 billion under the Dormant Assets Act of 2022. While the Scheme prioritises finding and reuniting owners (or their descendants) with their assets, this sometimes proves impossible. And in those cases, the funds can be unlocked to support causes in the public interest.
Just how much goes unclaimed? In England alone, £738 million is to be freed up over time to tackle the nation’s top social and environmental challenges. However, sharing these funds among competing causes is no easy task. Potential recipients include initiatives providing key services to young people, community wealth funds supporting local infrastructure, and many more. So how should policymakers prioritise this spending?
Seeking the public’s views on current and prospective recipients of funds through the Scheme, @DCMS asked Alma Economics to design, run, and analyse a comprehensive consultation. More than 3,300 stakeholders – charities, businesses, academic think tanks, and others – shared their suggestions and concerns via our engaging, user-friendly online questionnaire alongside discussion sessions our team held over 12 weeks.
How were these diverse opinions translated into policy insights? Alma’s experts utilised thematic analysis to tease out commonalities in open-question responses, and segmentation analysis on multiple choice question responses to explore the differences among key groups.
The government’s response to the consultation was published today. Explore the details here.