Transforming Local Infrastructure, a £30m government grant fund aiming to create strong local support for the voluntary sector, shows early signs of having been a success, according to an analysis by Navca.

The Cabinet Office’s £30m Transforming Local Infrastructure (TLI) Programme launched in 2011. It offered short-term grants to local organisations providing support to frontline charities and funded work designed to improve the way the organisations worked with each other and their local communities.

Funding from the TLI ends in September. And a Navca analysis of the two-year programme finds it has been broadly successful.

Transforming Local Infrastructure: early indications says the most successful areas were those where the funding had been used to do something different, to explore a fresh approach or to find the space to make change that had already been identified as critical.

TIL was successful in supporter mergers between infrastructure bodies. The most high-profile was its support for ten infrastructure charities merging in Suffolk in January.

TIL also been successful in helping infrastructure bodies collaborate, helping them increase earned income – including the development of charging models, and helping infrastructure bodies identify ways to improve the way they work with businesses.

There were, however, some criticisms, including that emphasis has been placed on organisational change and not enough on staff and trustee development; and that some partnership bids included organisations that made no real contribution and did not match the definition of voluntary sector infrastructure.

Navca also says the competitive process in which only half the applicants could receive money resulted in investment not always going to the areas that needed it the most. A large part of the North East received no funding at all, for example.

Joe Irvin, chief executive of Navca, said: “Although this is just an initial exploration of what TLI has achieved. There are some promising signs and plenty of examples where you can see the direct impact TLI has had in helping local infrastructure evolve.”

The report has been written using evidence from Navca members, local reports and a number of telephone interviews.