Grants and funding for ESG and decarbonisation

First, the honest bit: the reporting is not grant-funded

It would be easy to imply that an ESG programme comes with a pot of public money attached. It does not, and pretending otherwise would mislead you. A carbon baseline, a SECR disclosure, a TCFD-aligned report and a net-zero roadmap are professional services you pay for, in the same way you pay for an audit or legal advice. There is no grant scheme for the reporting itself.

Be honest with clients: the report is a cost of compliance and of winning work, not a fundable measure. The value is compliance, tender eligibility, assurance-readiness and a credible plan. The grants below fund the physical measures a decarbonisation roadmap might recommend, and each must be verified as current before it is relied on.

What can attract funding is different: the physical decarbonisation measures a roadmap recommends once the reporting has shown where your emissions actually are. Insulation, heat pumps, on-site generation and efficiency upgrades are the things that occasionally qualify for a grant, a relief or a favourable finance product. Below we set out the routes that are genuinely relevant to a corporate decarbonisation programme, each with the caveat that matters and a link to the official source, because these schemes change and a figure that was live last year may be closed this year.

Funding routes for the measures a roadmap recommends

These apply to the capital measures in a net-zero roadmap, not to the reporting. Read each caveat carefully: several of these schemes are narrower than they first appear, or are winding down, and we would rather flag that honestly than let you build a plan on funding that will not be there.

How funding fits a net-zero roadmap

The sequence matters. You do not chase grants first and reverse-engineer a plan around them; you build the baseline, find where the emissions are, and let that decide the measures. Only then does funding come into the conversation, and for most businesses the honest truth is that decarbonising to improve your reported emissions is a self-funded or financed capital programme, occasionally grant-assisted at a local level rather than through a single national scheme. The net-zero roadmap page explains how we sequence measures — efficiency first, then electrification, then on-site generation, and credible offsetting only for the residual.

Two nuances are worth understanding. The first is that some reliefs are far narrower than the headlines suggest: the zero rate of VAT on energy-saving materials, for example, is targeted at residential accommodation and qualifying charitable buildings, so its relevance to ordinary commercial premises is limited to any residential or charity-occupied elements of an estate. The second is that the flagship industrial scheme, the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund, is effectively closed to new applications following the 2025 Spending Review — it is included here for context for larger manufacturers who may hold existing awards, not as a live route to rely on.

Green finance, not free money

For most corporate decarbonisation, the realistic funding route is finance rather than a grant: commercial energy-efficiency loans, asset finance, and lender green-loan or sustainability-linked-loan products. These are repayment finance, but sustainability-linked lending has a genuine connection to the reporting we do, because it can tie a lower margin to hitting the very emissions targets an ESG roadmap sets. That is one of the more concrete commercial reasons to get the reporting right: a credible, science-based target with a defensible baseline behind it is exactly what a lender needs to structure that kind of facility. Availability of local and combined-authority schemes is patchy and time-limited, so we check what is genuinely open for your area rather than quoting a scheme that has closed.

What to check before you rely on any scheme

Funding for decarbonisation measures is unusually volatile: schemes open and close, thresholds move, and a headline figure that was accurate last year may be wrong today. Before you build a business case around any of the routes above, it is worth confirming three things. First, is it actually open — several prominent schemes, the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund among them, are now closed to new applications, so eligibility on paper does not mean money in practice. Second, does it apply to your premises and measure specifically — the zero rate of VAT on energy-saving materials, for example, is targeted at residential and qualifying charitable buildings rather than ordinary commercial premises, and a heat pump grant applies to particular property types and technologies. Third, is it a grant or is it finance — most of what is available for corporate decarbonisation is repayment finance, not free money, and treating a green loan as a grant will distort your numbers.

Every figure and date on this page is verified against the official source as at 2 July 2026 and carries a link so you can re-check it, and we would always confirm the current position before a client commits to a measure on the strength of expected funding. We would rather tell you a scheme has closed than let you plan around money that will not arrive.

Why funding follows the reporting, not the other way round

It is tempting, when budgets are tight, to let available funding dictate which decarbonisation measures a business pursues. That gets the sequence backwards and usually wastes money. The reporting comes first: a properly built carbon baseline tells you where your emissions actually are, and a materiality-informed view of Scope 3 tells you which parts of the value chain matter. Only against that picture can you judge whether a given measure — an efficiency upgrade, electrifying heat, on-site generation — genuinely moves your reported numbers enough to justify the capital, with or without support. A grant that funds a measure with little impact on your footprint is a poor decision even when the money is free; a self-funded measure that removes a real hotspot may be a good one even when it is not. The value of getting the reporting right is precisely that it lets you spend your decarbonisation budget where it counts, rather than where a scheme happens to point.

A note on solar, PPAs and funding

Because we are an ESG reporting consultancy, not an installer, we are careful about how on-site solar and power purchase agreements are presented in a funding context. A PPA is a commercial contract, not a grant, and on-site solar is a capital measure with its own economics; both can reduce your market-based Scope 2 emissions, but neither touches Scope 1 or Scope 3, and the credibility of the resulting claim depends on quality and additionality. We model these where they earn their place in the roadmap and cost them honestly, and we point you to specialist installers for delivery rather than pretending the reporting funds the hardware.