Small capital grant

The small capital grant is designed to help you purchase new, essential and specific equipment that will help you to improve your use of resources, improve your productivity, and reduce your environmental impact.

This grant offers between £15,000 and £100,000, and can fund up to 50% of the cost of your new equipment. The exact percentage will be confirmed once you apply, and will depend on how much funding is necessary to allow you to proceed.

This grant involves a claims process, so you won’t receive your funding up front.

Once you’ve made your purchase(s) (which you should only do once we’ve approved your funding and you’ve signed the contract), you can then claim the funding back from us. During the claim process, you’ll need to provide evidence that you’ve made this payment.

To be eligible, you’ll need to:

• Have been invited to apply for this grant
• Be looking for support for eligible costs
• Be able to deliver key outcomes
• Be committed to fair work and net zero principles
• Be purchasing this equipment with an aim of growing sustainable activities, reducing your environmental impact, or reducing your emissions

This grant can support:

• Acquisition of manufacturing technology that builds the capability of businesses and increases competitiveness
• Energy-saving plants or equipment and related technologies
• Replacement of existing equipment, only where it is linked to significant carbon reduction
• New production plant for manufacturing components or devices related to net zero ambitions
• New production tooling for the manufacture of new products
• Improvements to owned or leased property which will significantly improve the environmental performance of the building — for example, clean rooms or internal layout (not included: extensions to physical building)

Please note, we can fund new or pre-owned equipment for SMEs, but can only fund new equipment for large companies.

The only eligible cost for this grant is capital expenditure. This means we can’t support other costs like salaries, consultants, travel or materials. Eligible expenditure can include:

• Outright purchases
• Hire purchases
• Finance leases
• Mortgages and bank loans

Some additional conditions you should be aware of include:

• Our payment of grant shall not exceed the cash amount the company has paid by way of deposit and instalment.
• Costs of assets cannot be funded by operational lease or rental.
• Assets purchased (with a Scottish Enterprise contribution) must be retained for a minimum of three years from the date of the final payment of grant. We reserve the right to seek repayment of grant if this condition is not met.
• VAT is not eligible, so your grant amount will be based on the net cost of your equipment. When you apply, you’ll need to provide a quote showing the VAT and net cost.

During the application, you’ll need to:

• Tell us about your business and the activities you’re planning – usually referred to as your project.
• Tell us about your expected costs, and provide evidence of these costs. Since the only eligible cost for this grant is capital expenditure, you’ll need to provide a competitive quote from a supplier detailing the equipment and the costs, including net costs and VAT costs.
• Describe the outputs you expect from the project and give some estimations. For example, if you’re planning on creating jobs or increasing sales, you’ll need to tell us how many jobs and what amount of new sales. As this grant is aimed at net zero activities, you’ll also need to tell us about environmental outputs like a reduction in CO2.
• Disclose any de minimis funding you’ve received in the current or previous two fiscal years. If you don’t know what de minimis is, or whether you’ve received any, see our guide to de minimis.

Once you’ve submitted your application, we may be in touch for further information.

Please note that we shall not disclose any information which you designate as confidential, or which should be reasonably regarded as confidential, to any third parties (which does not include our employees, officers, contractors, agents, representatives or public partners) without obtaining your prior written consent.

This will not apply to disclosure of information required by law or applicable regulatory requirement or code, including the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, or to disclosure to regulatory bodies.

There are a couple of things you should be aware of before you apply. This is so that if your application is successful, you understand what’s required of you going forwards.

If you’re successful, you’ll need to:

• Retain all original documentation related to your expenditure or project activity, and provide these to us if we ask for them — for capital costs, this includes invoices from your supplier (we may also ask for bank statements that show these payments leaving your account)
• Only make a claim for a payment once the work has been completed and paid to the supplier
• Be able to show that expenditure you have requested support for has been paid from your business bank account. This bank account must be in the company name
• Provide an update at the end of the project, highlighting what you’ve achieved using the funding — this will usually involve an update on the outputs you told us about during your application

If you don’t think you’ll be able to meet these requirements, you should not apply for this funding.

You can only apply for this grant if you’ve been invited to do so. Your relationship manager or Scottish Enterprise contact will likely have been in touch with details of how to apply. You’ll first need to create an account on our funding application platform.