The government’s guidance on appraisal: how to define a problem, generate options, and assess the costs, benefits and risks of each before committing public money. It is the document against which your business case will be judged by a Treasury or departmental approver. The 2026 edition reframes value for money and benefit-cost ratios and is considerably shorter than its predecessor. 

The Green Book alone is not enough. This collection holds the business case guidance that sets out the five case model, plus the supplementary guidance you will actually need in practice: discounting, wellbeing, value for money, optimism bias, multi-criteria decision analysis, and the departmental guidance on transport, health, climate and environmental valuation. Bookmark the collection rather than any single document, because the individual items are updated on their own timetables.

The companion to the Green Book, covering evaluation: scoping, design, conduct, use and dissemination. Its supplementary guides are where the practical value sits, in particular those on handling complexity in policy evaluation, realist evaluation, quality in qualitative evaluation, and the newer annexes on test and learn and transparency in government evaluation research. Read it before you design a programme, not after it has started.

The government’s framework for identifying, assessing and managing risk. Short, readable and the reason your programme is expected to have a risk register that someone actually reviews. It sits behind the management case in any business case.

Guidance on analytical quality assurance: what commissioners, analysts and approvers each owe the analysis, and how much assurance is proportionate to the decision at stake. The 2025 revision adds material on multi-use models, assuring ‘black box’ systems including AI, and working with contractors and academic partners. If your appraisal rests on a spreadsheet model, this is the document that says who has to check it.

The practical companion to the Aqua Book for anyone whose analysis is code rather than a spreadsheet: version control, testing, documentation and reproducibility. Increasingly relevant as local authorities and combined authorities build their own data teams.

Guidance on identifying, protecting and exploiting knowledge assets held by public bodies: intellectual property, data, know-how, brands and research outputs. Relevant to innovation and university-facing work, and to any place trying to commercialise assets it already owns.

Not colour-coded, but the constitutional backdrop to all of the above. It sets out the duties of accounting officers and the tests of regularity, propriety, value for money and feasibility that any use of public funds has to meet. The document to reach for when someone proposes a grant, a loan or a guarantee that feels irregular.

The departmental application of the Green Book to housing, regeneration, land and place-based intervention, and explicitly written for use by local authorities as well as by the department and its agencies. It is more specific than the Green Book about the things economic development practitioners actually appraise: land value uplift, housing additionality, town centre and public realm schemes. It sets the default assumptions and metrics, which means it is also the document your appraisal will be marked against.

The long-standing reference for deadweight, displacement, leakage, substitution and multipliers, and the source of the default ratios that still appear in regeneration business cases across the country. Note the status: it was formally withdrawn in 2022 and its role has passed to the MHCLG Appraisal Guide, yet it continues to be cited in live business cases a decade after its last revision. Cite it for the concepts if you must, take your assumptions from the MHCLG guide, and be ready to explain the difference.

The most developed appraisal methodology in UK government, and the one that sets the practical standard for how connectivity, agglomeration and wider economic impacts are valued. Relevant well beyond transport schemes, because its treatment of wider economic benefits is frequently borrowed.

The public register of government evaluations, planned and completed. Search it before commissioning anything, because the intervention you are about to evaluate has often been evaluated somewhere else already.

The network of centres synthesising evidence on what works, including the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, whose evidence reviews on business support, skills, transport and area-based initiatives are the closest thing the sector has to a settled account of the evidence.

The standard for grant making across government. It sets ten minimum requirements: a named senior officer responsible for each grant, governance and approvals with data capture, referral of complex grants to the Complex Grants Advice Panel, a business case, competition for funding, grant agreements, risk and assurance, performance and monitoring, annual review and reconciliation, and training. Read the minimum requirements first; they are short, and they explain the shape of almost every scheme you will bid into.

The practical companion to GovS 015, and the more useful document of the two for anyone designing a scheme: how to run a funding competition, what belongs in a grant agreement, how to set proportionate monitoring, and how to handle underspend and recovery.

The self-assessment tool that grant-making bodies use to test their practice against the standard. Worth reading if you administer a devolved or delegated fund, because it is the closest thing available to a maturity model for grant administration.

The replacement for EU state aid, and the rules every public authority awarding a subsidy must have regard to. The thresholds are the part to commit to memory: Minimal Financial Assistance is capped at £315,000 per recipient over three financial years; awards above £100,000 under a scheme or under MFA must go on the transparency database; subsidies above £25 million, or above £5 million in sensitive sectors, must be referred to the Subsidy Advice Unit before award. It runs to 267 pages, which is itself a fact worth reporting: this is the single largest compliance burden on discretionary local economic development spending in the UK.

Six pre-assessed routes that allow a subsidy to be awarded without a full principles assessment, provided the conditions are met: community regeneration, arts and culture, research development and innovation, energy usage, local growth, and housing. Check these before commissioning a bespoke assessment, because most place-based interventions fit one of them.

Written for the business or organisation receiving the money rather than the authority awarding it. Send it to applicants early. A recipient who understands cumulation and the £315,000 cap before they apply saves everyone a difficult conversation later.

The commitment that departments will use existing funding routes and allocative approaches rather than inventing new competitive pots, and reduce the reporting burden on local authorities. Useful evidence when a department proposes a new competition, though the doctrine has been in force since January 2024 and the bidding culture it was written to curb has proved durable.

Governs whether a grant is the right instrument at all, as against a contract or a loan, and the regularity and propriety tests any award has to satisfy.