Public Health Wales held a webinar on Wednesday Morning (12th August 2026) detailing the Welsh Government’s own approach to using £1.4m of Levy funds to support VCSE prevention activities in Wales over the next two years.
The webinar was to inform organisations who may wish to apply for funding to deliver Gambling Harm Prevention activity in Wales to understand the application process.
The key points presented were:
- £700k (up to) allocated each of 2 years.
- Grants of up to £75k per year, for up to 2 years.
- Applications for 2 year funding will need pass 10 mth Yr 1 assessment to get Yr 2
- This is a pilot – and not expected to be repeated.
- There will not be a separate Yr 2 application process – Yr 1 only opportunity available.
- Currently not based on needs assessment but projects awarded will then feed into future needs assessment.
- Strong need to evidence knowledge and impact on Welsh communities
- Grants to be regionally allocated (similar to OHID in England).
Further details on applying can be found on the WCVA website
Our initial feedback on what we heard was that assuming the regional allocation is across the 7 Local Health Boards in Wales then if we were to anticipate one award of the maximum £75k per annum across each of these would equate to a total expenditure of £525k, leaving a maximum £175k available for national level commissioning activities. Admittedly this is a very rough and ready estimate, especially given that the Local Health Boards representing the more populous South Wales region may be expected to receive a greater proportion of funding allocation (to allow population as well as regional parity) then it does raise concerns over what will be available to support National level activity. It also brings into question whether there will be a preference for allocating smaller awards (as opposed to maximum £75k pa) in order to get a better range of activities across all areas.
While GLEN are very keen on regions being given equitable and fair access to prevention support – giving local communities more involvement in what happens – are we are concerned that some delivery around prevention works more effectively when able to be applied consistently across all regions. We also believe that national public health bodies have a responsibility to develop national impact campaigns which individual service providers may not have the resources or coverage to match.
Another learning point from the Levy implementation in England is that Year 1 grants were not based on pre-existing needs assessment but rather on an ad-hoc basis of “what are you offering?”. With Public Health Wales confirming that this is a “pilot” and it is not expected to be repeated (in year 2 or thereafter) there is a risk that the services commissioned in this pilot may become the default services for the foreseeable future despite not having been asked to address or meet pre-identified specific needs.
It is slightly reassuring that when pressed on this by GLEN during the webinar this was readily acknowledged as being a known issue and that the aim is to use the outputs across all three strands of Levy allocation (Treatment, Research and Prevention) over the next two years to create a learning feedback loop to inform future Welsh commissioning.
Even more promising was hearing repeated reference to accessing Lived Experience (or End User to repeat the terminology used) in order to gauge success metrics based on mapping the “user journey”. This is an approach which GLEN have long supported and advocated for – using the actual experiences of those accessing services to better understand how well services are meeting those individual’s needs… and adjusting the system as appropriate based on that LE input.
As always, however, we feel that this works best when it genuinely involves co-production and not just one-direction passive input. GLEN would of course be only too happy to help suggest ways of ensuring this is the case.
We will be watching with interest to see what services are supported and funded in Wales. Our primary reason for this being that we are less bothered by who is chosen to undertake delivery than that the delivery itself meets the needs of the communities it is designed to help protect and serve.
For any organisations interested in applying for PHW Prevention grant money the key dates are:
Application Window Opens – 31st August
Application Window Closes – 19th October
Notification of award – w/c 30th November
Project start date – 7th December
As a parting note we would possibly suggest that this timeline potentially replicates some of the timing issues found to be stressful by sector providers in England as a gap of (effectively) 3-7 days between being notified of an award and being expected to start delivering on that award is pretty tight.