How do I write the need section of a funding application?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle — this is writing guidance, and it does not turn on national law. Northern Ireland: the same position, for the same reason. What does change by nation is where your local evidence comes from, and there is a section on that below.

Is there a legal standard for a statement of need?

No. No statute, regulator or funder anywhere in the UK publishes rules about what a need statement must contain. There is no Tier A source for the advice below at all. It is craft: what assessors say works, distilled into a shape.

The need section is the evidence-bearing part of the case you made when you wrote your case for support. It is written against the criteria map from when you read and decoded the funder’s criteria.

That is worth saying out loud rather than burying. This site is only useful if the reader can tell which pages rest on law and which do not. The pages in this guide that say “must” are pointing at a statute. This one does not, and will not.

One thing on the page is sourced, and it is the failure mode. BBC Children in Need publishes its reasons for not funding projects, and one of them is about this section specifically:

weak evidence of the difference made to children, insufficient disadvantage criteria, or insufficient inclusiveness or consultation

So the advice below is practice. The cost of ignoring it is documented.

The shape: four questions, in this order

A statement of need is the part of a funding application that sets out the problem the project addresses and the evidence for it. It answers four things. Most weak ones answer the first and skip the rest.

1. Who is affected. Named beneficiaries in a named place, not a category in the abstract.
2. How many. A figure for the place you work in, not a national one.
3. How you know. Where the figure came from, named, with its date.
4. What happens if nothing changes. The consequence of the funder not acting, stated without melodrama.

The order matters. An assessor reading the first sentence should already know who you mean and where they are. If the first paragraph could have been written by any charity in the country, it will be read as though it was.

The deliverable rule: a source for every figure

Every number in the need section carries the source it came from and the year it refers to. Not a footnote at the end. Next to the figure, in the sentence, so an assessor checking one claim does not have to hunt.

This is the same rule this guide applies to itself, and it exists for the same reason. A number without a source is not evidence, it is an assertion in the costume of evidence. Assessors read a great many of them, and they notice.

Three practical habits make it easier:

• Prefer a small local figure with a source over a large national one without. “Our own waiting list, at the date we counted it” beats a national statistic every time.
• Give the year. An old figure honestly dated is more credible than a recent-sounding one with no date at all.
• Keep a note of where you found each figure while you are looking, not afterwards. Reconstructing sources at the end is where fabrication creeps in.

Where local evidence comes from in each nation

The need section wants local numbers, and this is the one part of the page where your nation changes the answer.

Census and neighbourhood statistics come from a different body in each nation:

• England and Wales: the Office for National Statistics
• Scotland: the National Records of Scotland
• Northern Ireland: the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency

Deprivation is measured on a separate index in each nation too, and those indexes are not comparable with one another. A rank in the Welsh index means nothing in the Scottish one. Quote the index for your own nation and name it.

Then use the sources that are usually better than any of them:

• your own records and your waiting list
• a survey of the people you work with
• the local council’s own needs assessment
• what a partner organisation sees

Consultation with beneficiaries is itself something funders look for, and one of them publishes its absence as a reason for refusal. What you may lawfully do with what beneficiaries tell you is covered when you get consent and handle beneficiary data ethically.

A true sentence that cannot be funded

Here is a sentence that is entirely true and completely unfundable as written:

Loneliness among older people is a growing problem.

Nobody would dispute it. It still gives an assessor nothing. It names no beneficiaries, no locality, no number and no source, and it does not distinguish this application from every other one on the desk.

What a fundable version does differently:

Rewriting is mostly a matter of replacing each vague noun with a specific one and attaching a source to each figure. It is not a matter of adding adjectives.

Reading the draft as an assessor would

When the draft is done, read it once cold. Ask of each sentence whether it could have been written by a charity in another town, about other people. Every sentence that could be, is not yet doing any work.

Then check the mechanical things. Every figure has a source and a year beside it. Every claim about what people need traces back to something you observed, were told, or read. Nothing in the section contradicts the budget or the outcomes you are about to write in the next steps.

With the need evidenced, the next step is to set your outputs and outcomes against it.

Common mistake: describing need in general terms without local evidence

National statistics are easier to find than local ones, so they are what ends up in the draft. BBC Children in Need names insufficient disadvantage criteria and insufficient inclusiveness or consultation among its published rejection reasons. A need section built on national figures alone is exactly what those reasons describe.

Worked example

Wrenfield Village Hall runs a weekly lunch club for older people. Its first draft of the need section opens: “Loneliness among older people is a growing problem.”

The rewrite changes nothing about the hall’s work and everything about the paragraph. It names the villages the hall serves and the bus route that was withdrawn.

It gives the number on the lunch club’s own waiting list, with the date the committee counted it. Beside that sits the number of single-person households over retirement age in the same wards, attributed to the census body for its nation and dated. The rewrite also records what the club’s own members said when asked, because the committee asked them.

It ends with the consequence. Without a second session, the waiting list does not move, and the people on it are the ones with no other weekly contact.

Every figure in it has a source beside it. Not one of them is national.