The Modernising Government Fund (MGF) was first announced to Parliament in February 2000 as a means to support innovation in the public sector, to address policy priorities for modernisation and particularly to support and promote 'joined up' working.

The first MGF awards covered a range of common modernisation themes, and a £26 million package was put in place to support 36 projects. The results and achievements of these projects were reported in the Modernising Government Fund Round 1 Final Report, published in 2003.

Following the success of the initial MGF initiative, a second round of project submissions was considered, resulting in awards for the second round of MGF totalling £39.5 million, a significant continuing investment in modernisation of public services.

MGF3 (Customer First) will build upon the work of MGF2 and extend the consortium working across the Scottish public sector; work with the key service providers to develop a core infrastructure that can support Scotland wide integrated public services; and work with service providers to identify areas where national applications could usefully be developed to support local service delivery.

More details are available on the Scottish Executive website.

Local Authority practitioners can access documents relating to the projects being taken forward by the Customer First Programme by using Quickplace, the Improvement Service on-line repository. For more information on this, please e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Quickplace is not available to members of the public or suppliers.

Within the Customer First, there are 4 sub programmes:

• National Infrastructure
• DNA-S
• CRM/CA
• Entitlement Cards