I did not really want to get involved with this but the mentions of grants did remind me of my dealings with Scarborough Borough Council vis-a-vis Whitby Folk Week.
At the time we (myself and Edmund Jenkinson) were running the festival for the EFDSS we did manage to extract a fairly meaningful grant from the council together with the provision of "free" ie discounted use of certain council facilities.
Once we became an independent organisation quite a lot of that so called goodwill disappeared.
I (Edmund had pulled out due to pressures in the real job) tackled them on this and they agreed that it would be fitting for them to contribute in some way to the festival.
After some debating and being buggered about (councils seem good at that) it was agreed that we would receive a certain figure but would need to pay for an entry in the local tourist guide whether we wanted it or not.
That was fine for a couple of years until the price of the entry went up and the grant went down such that they equalled each other. I still had to go through the usual rigmarole of filling in multitudinous forms, pay for the entry in advance and wait at least six months for the corresponding grant. Needless to say I ceased to bother. The person who was employed to administer these grants was on a salary in excess of the grants he was administering and was most shocked when I responded to his reminder that I had not yet applied for the following year by pointing out the bleeding obvious.
We/I had a similar sort of relationship with Yorkshire Arts until the grants (never huge) were discontinued. I used their one time artists in residence scheme to boost the payments we could make to eligible artists (100% to the artist) and I did manage to outfox them when a new officer was installed and was offering capital grants. We got a new shower unit for the main campsite - still in use I believe. The money bought us the box and the materials - the labour was provided by myself and the transport by Mike Rust.
Happy days