Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to (a) protect and (b) improve access to leisure facilities in rural areas.
Answered by Stephanie Peacock - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Government recognises that leisure facilities are important to communities up and down the country. High-quality, inclusive facilities help people get active. Everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, should have access to high quality facilities and opportunities to participate in sport and physical activity.
The ongoing responsibility for public leisure facilities lies at Local Authority level. Local Authorities work in partnership with operators who manage leisure services. The Government and Sport England continue to work closely with Local Authorities to monitor pressures in the sector.
The Government has committed to continued funding for grassroots facilities. £123 million will be invested UK-wide via the Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme throughout 2024/25. Grassroots sport is also funded through the Government’s Arm’s Length Body, Sport England, who invest over £250 million in Exchequer and Lottery funding each year.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what fiscal steps she is taking to help develop tourism in rural areas.
Answered by Chris Bryant - Minister of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Government recognises the importance of tourism to rural constituencies, including its contribution to economic growth and pride in place of an area.
DCMS, through VisitEngland, has accredited 35 Local Visitor Economy Partnerships (LVEPs) so far; which aim to drive investment and spend across the regions - including in rural and coastal areas. In November 2024, Telford and Shropshire became an accredited LVEP and continues to provide strong local leadership and governance.
We understand a high proportion of businesses in tourism and hospitality are micro and small businesses. In the October Budget the Government announced a new, permanent 40% business rate relief for retail, hospitality, and leisure. We will also continue the UK Shared Prosperity Fund at a reduced level for a further year by providing £900million for local authorities. This transitional arrangement will allow local authorities to invest in local growth.
DCMS continues to work with VisitBritain/VisitEngland to champion visits to the British countryside to a worldwide audience. VisitBritain’s new GREAT-funded international marketing campaign, ‘Starring GREAT Britain’, uses the hook of Britain’s rich film and television history to encourage more international visitors to explore across Britain, including many rural destinations.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to help increase the availability of detached youth work in rural communities.
Answered by Stephanie Peacock - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
This Government fully recognises the importance of youth services to help young people live safe and healthy lives, and the vital role that youth workers play in delivering those services and building trusted relationships.
This government has committed to co-producing a new National Youth Strategy, which is an opportunity to look afresh at the training, recruitment and retention of youth workers, including detached youth workers. As part of the Strategy, we will be engaging closely with young people and the youth sector from across the country over the coming months to fully understand their needs and the issues they consider to be most crucial in addressing.
The Strategy will be published next year.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to support places of worship in rural areas with building conservation projects.
Answered by Chris Bryant - Minister of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
There is a range of funding available via DCMS and the Department’s Arm’s-Length Bodies that supports places of worship, including in rural areas. These include Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme; the National Lottery Heritage Fund's £15m Heritage in Need: Places of Worship initiative, funded through the National Lottery between 2023 and 2026; the Churches Conservation Trust, which funds repairs and maintenance of over 350 churches in the CCT portfolio; and Historic England's Heritage At Risk grants, funding £9 million worth of repairs to buildings on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register between April 2024 and March 2025.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to help leisure centres conduct renovations to reduce their energy consumption.
Answered by Stephanie Peacock - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Government recognises that leisure centres are important to communities up and down the country. High-quality, inclusive facilities help people get active.
The ongoing responsibility of conducting renovations to public sport and leisure facilities lies at Local Authority level. Local Authorities work in partnership with operators who manage leisure services.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to support sports development in rural communities.
Answered by Stephanie Peacock - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Government is committed to improving access to sport and physical activity for everybody. This is central to achieving the aims set out in the manifesto around the health and opportunity missions. Everyone, no matter who they are or where they are in the country, should have access to the best possible facilities and opportunities to get active.
The Government has committed to continued funding for grassroots facilities. £123 million will be invested UK-wide via the Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme throughout 2024/25, working with our delivery partner the Football Foundation. Grassroots sport is also funded through the Government’s Arm’s Length Body, Sport England, who invest over £250 million in Exchequer and Lottery funding each year.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, whether her Department plans to continue the Libraries Improvement Fund.
Answered by Chris Bryant - Minister of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
Any decision as to the future of the Fund is a matter for the current Spending Review process.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to help support grassroot sports initiatives in (a) Wolverhampton and (b) the West Midlands.
Answered by Nigel Huddleston
Sport and physical activity are incredibly important for our physical and mental health and this government is committed to ensuring that everyone, regardless of background, should have access to and benefit from quality sport and physical activity opportunities.
The significant core public investment of £778 million for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games has accelerated investment and regeneration in Birmingham and the West Midlands. This includes infrastructure developments like the Alexander Stadium renovations and the new Sandwell Aquatics Centre that will be a legacy for the community to use long after the Games is over. Sport England is also investing £35 million for physical activity legacy, which will cover both targeted interventions in the West Midlands region as well as national investments to open up sporting opportunities to all.
Since 2018, the department has also invested £333,674 into a wide range of grassroots sport projects across Wolverhampton through Sport England, such as to the Finchfield Hockey Club and Ormiston New Academy. This is part of the £23.2 million invested in the West Midlands during the same period.
The Government also invests £18 million each year in community sport facilities via the Football Foundation. In partnership with the Football Association and Premier League, this results in £70 million being invested into community sport facilities every year. The Football Foundation has granted over £4.7 million to the West Midlands to develop football and multi-use grassroots sports facilities in 2021/22.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to tackle potential barriers to volunteering; and whether she plans to make funding available to tackle those barriers.
Answered by Nigel Huddleston
The Government recognises that volunteering is critical to a vibrant and resilient civil society; it benefits volunteers and the organisations involving them and has transformational impacts on beneficiaries and their communities.
As a department, we are focused on simplifying routes into volunteering and seeking to make volunteering more inclusive.
Through the £7.4 million Volunteering Futures Fund, volunteering opportunities are being created to remove barriers to volunteering in arts, culture, sports, civil society, youth and heritage sectors. Young people, people with disabilities and those experiencing loneliness will be given the opportunity to volunteer and help others. DCMS is investing £6.25 million in the fund, together with £1.17 million provided by matched funders.
Our delivery partners for this programme are the Arts Council England, NHS Charities Together and Pears Foundation. The 19 Arts Council England funded projects will work with over 160 partners across heritage, arts, libraries, festival, community and sport organisations to increase accessibility to volunteering.
We are also supporting the development of the sector-led Vision for Volunteering, through which an ambitious ten year action plan is being developed to improve the volunteer experience. One of the five themes of the Vision is ‘Equity and Inclusion’, in recognition of the barriers that some people face to participating in volunteering.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - South Shropshire)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to help ensure the long-term sustainability of the community radio sector.
Answered by Julia Lopez
The Government has for a number of years provided financial support to the community radio sector by way of the Community Radio Fund (CRF), which distributes £400,000 on an annual basis to help fund the core costs of running licensed community radio stations and enable the sector to move towards self-sustainability. Furthermore, in the last two financial years, we have supported the CRF to go beyond this core funding, with significant uplifts targeted on tackling loneliness and to reflect the sector’s important contribution to the government’s ambitions on levelling up.
We have also recently commissioned a full external evaluation of the CRF, the report of which will be published shortly. We will be working closely with Ofcom, as the administrators of the Fund, on potential improvements to the running of the Fund in the light of the findings of that evaluation, to ensure that it works as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In addition, we have in recent years worked to support the growth of small-scale Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), both through passing the necessary legislation and in working with sector stakeholders to support the rollout of licences. Small-scale DAB represents a low-cost route to broadcasting on a terrestrial digital platform, and we envisage it enabling a significant number of new community services to launch as well as allowing existing stations to move onto digital over the coming months and years.