Applicant journey

We will be hosting a series of webinars to provide guidance and support for applicants.

Our webinars are designed to:

• Provide and discuss relevant guidance on the scheme. 
• Provide an opportunity to meet the Scotland team. 
• Answer any questions you may have.

The webinars will be held on April 3 at 2pm, April 9 at 11am, April 16 at 2pm, May 1 at 11am, May 22 at 11am.  Please visit our events page for further information.

If you have any questions related to the scheme, you can also contact our team at [email protected]. 

To access the application portal you will be required to log in. 

If you have an existing account, please check your login details prior to the application portal opening. 

If you do not have an existing account, you can register for one here. 

**Important** please note, this is a different account to SERS (Salix Energy Reporting System) used in Recycling Fund management.

Read the Phase 2 of Scotland’s Public Sector Heat Decarbonisation Fund Guidance Notes which include everything you need to know about the scheme. 

The guidance notes will provide you with additional detail and information around eligibility, project criteria, responsibilities and competencies, assessment, funding allocation, monthly monitoring requirements, payment process, key dates and more. 

The application portal is our source of truth to gather the information we require to process your application. 

We recommend that to familiarise yourself with the application portal and process, you download a copy of the application portal questions. These questions are separate from the application form and are required in full alongside your uploaded application form and all supporting information. 

The terms and conditions for Phase 2 of Scotland’s Public Sector Heat Decarbonisation Fund will be published in due course. 

Please also refer to the privacy notice for further information on how the Scottish Government will use your personal data and your rights.

The application portal will be open from 2pm on Tuesday 29 April 2025 to 2pm on Tuesday 27 May 2025. Once the portal opens you should log in to your account and begin the application process. Please enter key information and attach all required and supporting documents.

**IMPORTANT** The application process must be completed by the public sector organisation, not by any third-party consultants involved in the project.

To ensure that your application meets the scheme criteria, and all mandatory supporting documents are attached, we will conduct a quality check of your application. 

If you fail this step, we may contact you to request additional information. 

If you pass the quality checks in step 7, your application will proceed to the technical assessment.

Note: the technical assessor could be external to our team at Salix so please keep a close eye on your inbox for emails relating to your application.

The technical assessor will assess your application as it was received and there will be no opportunity to submit further evidence. This highlights the necessity in submitting a robust and fully evidenced application. Please refer to Section 7.1 in the guidance notes for the full list of required documentation. 

The assessors will only ask for clarification if a score is unable to be determined. As such, we request that someone within your organisation will be available to deal with any queries that may arise. During the technical assessment process, the chosen representative from your organisation should endeavour to respond to any queries within 3 working days. Delays to responses may result in the failure of the assessment and, in adverse cases, could result in a withdrawal of your application. 

Where clarification is requested, this will not be an opportunity to provide additional information after the submission deadline. This is to ensure fairness across the fund and that the quality of application is determined from the outset.

Once applicants have passed the technical assessment, they will be contacted by a member of our Scotland team for a delivery call. 

This call is not assessed, however it provides an opportunity to discuss the project delivery and social impact sections of the application, as well as to provide information necessary for the Grant Offer Letter to be drafted. 

For Phase 2, with the limited time frame for delivery, the call will be an opportunity to discuss the proposed milestones and spend profile of the project,  to ensure that the grant can be fully spent by the grant end date  and that other risks to the project have mitigation measures in place. 

Once all applications have been fully assessed and results finalised, applicants will be notified of their assessment outcome. 

Successful applicants will receive a Grant Offer Letter (GOL) to formally confirm the funding awarded. The GOL will include any project-specific conditions that need to be met throughout the project life in order to receive grant funding. Further information on GOLs can be found in the scheme guidance notes. 

Provided there are no delays during the assessment process, we will endeavour to send GOLs to successful applicants by August 2025.