The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has introduced measures to help current and potential applicants during the economic downturn.
These include reduced match-funding requirements, with the minimum financial contribution applicants must raise for grant requests of more than £1m falling from 25% of the total project cost to 10%, and from 10% to 5% for applications of less than £1m.
In addition, applicants for projects with capital works costing more than £200,000 will be able to count estimated management and maintenance costs as a match-funding contribution.
Applications for grant increases will also be viewed more favourably.