Oral Answers to Questions
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Julia Lopez
I thank the hon. Lady for her interest in this issue. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is not responsible for the overall negotiating position, but as I say we have been in close discussions with other Departments. We have made progress on some of the specific issues raised with us, such as splitter vans, and we have also provided a lot of support to the wider events sector. We have made sure that carnets will not be required and we have been doing a whole bunch of other stuff.
As I said, I am meeting UK Music representatives on Monday to discuss the remaining outstanding issues, but we have also had a number of conversations with EU member states. In the vast majority of those, people no longer require permits or visas to carry out this kind of work.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Nigel Huddleston)
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport works very closely with its public sector bodies to support the libraries and museums sector. Through the libraries improvement fund, for example, we are investing £5 million in 25 library services to upgrade buildings and technology and equip them to meet the changing needs of local communities. DCMS will directly support regional museums with £18.8 million of investment through the museum estate and development fund this year and through the DCMS Wolfson museums and galleries improvement fund, which opens in May.
Jack Lopresti
I thank my hon. Friend for the significant financial support from the cultural recovery fund that his Department has already given the Aerospace Bristol museum and STEM learning centre in Filton in my constituency. Will he give serious consideration to its application to become an Arts Council national portfolio organisation for 2023 to 2026?
Nigel Huddleston
To date, the cultural recovery fund has given out £1.5 billion in grants and loans to around 5,000 organisations. I am pleased that our investment has helped support fantastic cultural organisations such as Aerospace Bristol, which I have had the pleasure of visiting with my hon. Friend. Arts Council England decides independently which organisations to fund; the national portfolio programme is a competitive process, in which the Arts Council makes decisions on funding based on the applications it receives and, obviously, the criteria. I therefore cannot comment on this particular case, but I wish Aerospace Bristol all the best in its application. It is a great institution.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Nigel Huddleston)
Over £1 billion-worth of funding from the culture recovery fund has already been allocated across all four nations of the UK. The funding is supporting over 3,000 arts and heritage organisations in England alone and more than 75,000 jobs.
Jack Lopresti [V]
Aerospace Bristol in my constituency is very grateful to the Government for the support it received from its successful bid during the first round of the culture recovery fund, which was in excess of £500,000. Like many other museums, it will continue to need revenue support until it can reopen. Can my hon. Friend assure me that the current bid by Aerospace Bristol under round 2 of the fund will be given a sympathetic hearing?
Nigel Huddleston
I was very pleased that the excellent aerospace museum in my hon. Friend’s constituency received money from the culture recovery fund in the first round. It is a wonderful showcase of world-class British engineering, and I can confirm that organisations in receipt of grant funding from the first round of the CRF were eligible to apply to the second round. I am sure that the Aerospace Bristol museum will get a fair hearing as he requests, but it is important to say that all decisions on CRF grants are made by our independent arm’s length bodies, which are committed to a transparent and robust decision-making process.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Helen Whately)
That is an excellent proposal. I have already visited the Tate since becoming a Minister, and I am well aware of the huge amount of work that it and other museums and galleries do to ensure that their collections are available around the country and to support other parts of the country as well as London.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
A number of my constituents are stuck with a single broadband provider, which is in a monopoly position, so it is charging very high prices for very poor service. What steps are the Government taking to ensure greater competition, which will drive down prices and improve the service?
Matt Warman
We are acutely conscious that the best possible market is one driven by competition. As we take forward our huge investment to ensure a better connected country, one of our key long-term aspirations will be to develop greater competition.
Historic Battlefields
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank and pay tribute to my very good friend and constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore), for securing this important debate and, predictably, for an interesting and brilliant speech.
I am an ardent lover of battlefields and their powerful history. Whenever I travel to Europe and the middle east, for instance, I invariably end up looking for an historic battle site. I enjoy searching for them and relish finding them. They are inspirational places of heroism, honour and sacrifice. The United Kingdom has a wonderful native array of battlefields from across the span of history. Historic England lists 47 battlefields on its national heritage list, but the Battlefields Trust calculates that there are more than 500 battlefields or sites of conflict across the United Kingdom. They range from the obvious—castles and city walls—to culturally important targets of Viking raids, such as monasteries and ports, and from well-defined battle sites to more vaguely understood sites where there is record of a conflict.
Indeed, Little Solsbury Hill, overlooking Bath—about 12 miles from my constituency—has been identified by historians as a possible site for the battle of Badon Hill, in which, during the 5th century, a British Arthur-like figure led the resistance to the Saxons invading from the east. It is a beautiful site and it is well worth a walk to the top of the hill.
The castles and cities that saw important sieges and struggles, from the Norman conquest, through the wars of the roses and into the civil war, are already well protected from inappropriate development or destruction. However, although battlefields are just fields, they are culturally significant and are often filled to the brim with interesting and vital archaeological remains, but as we saw with the recent proposal to build on part of the site of the battle of Bosworth, people do not always treat them as valuable, historic sites.
More than that, battlefields have a number of concerns that built history does not, and it is not only the physical location of a battlefield that needs protection. Visitors and researchers alike can gain a wealth of information from visiting the site of a battle. To truly preserve them, we need to preserve the topography, the fields of view and the setting of the field. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood said, all those features were of great importance to the armies and commanders who fought on the field, and all are of interest to anyone seeking to understand how and why they fought where they did and the impact of territory and strategic points. As Winston Churchill said, one must “tread the terrain” to really understand a battlefield.
That is true of Landsdown Hill, the closest of the Historic England battlefields to my constituency. The 1643 battle there was a key part of the parliamentary defence of Bath, and so the whole strategic defence of our capital. Royalist forces and Cornish pikemen sought to force parliamentarian forces from the hill. I hope the parliamentarians here are pleased to hear that they failed against the steep slope and the protected position that parliamentary forces held on the top of the hill. Both sides retreated under darkness but, importantly, Bath was saved.
There is already a monument to Sir Bevil Grenville—erected before enlisted soldiers were commemorated—but the value of the battlefield is much greater than just the monument. To understand the history of Lansdown Hill, one needs to be able to see that it overlooks Bath, how steep the ascent was for men who had spent the day harassed by fast-moving cavalry and how easy it was for armed men to shelter at the top of the hill.
Lansdown Hill is not at any immediate risk. Historic England’s entry on the national heritage list for the hill makes for reassuring reading:
“The landscape of 1643 had much in common with that of today… Two key viewpoints are publicly accessible and a complete circuit can be achieved from public highways and footpaths.”
That is what the protection of battlefields has to look like: not only access to a restricted section of history, but freedom to enjoy and experience historic landscapes as they were used by the people—the men—who literally put them on the map.
The case of Bosworth Field is shocking not only because of the potential ruination of a battlefield, but because of the key role that that particular battle played in our nation’s story, and because it ignored the warnings of recent history. As my hon. Friend said, any building on recognised battle sites will disturb archeologically important remains, whether bodies, weapons or just material evidence of the armies that fought there. That not only is a risk to academic research into these battles, but will damage education across the school system. The new history GCSE encourages children to understand our nation’s history better and includes a requirement to study a local historic site, explicitly including battlefields.
I hope that hon. Members will forgive me, because I have cut a lot out of my speech. I hope that the battlefield at Bosworth remains protected and undisturbed. I also very much hope that the Minister will acknowledge that some larger good could come out of this, with developers and councils all across the country coming to value our incredible heritage more and understanding why it has to be preserved.
Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)
We now come to the first of the Front-Bench spokespeople. The guideline limits for speeches are five minutes for the Scottish National party and for Her Majesty’s Opposition.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
In my constituency, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, based in the University of the West of England, is recognised as the UK’s leading academic centre for robotics. Can my right hon. Friend tell me what steps his Department is taking to support emerging technologies, and AI in particular?
Matt Hancock
We are enormously enthusiastic about the advances in robotics, including in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I would love to hear more about that laboratory. We put £1 billion of public and private funds into AI just two weeks ago, and there is a lot more to do to ensure that we remain world leaders in this amazing technology.