Thérèse Coffey

The taxpayer-funded High Streets Heritage Action Zones programme ran from 2019 to 2024, operating in England only, and administered by Historic England. The programme has funded the transformation and restoration of over 60 high streets, creating economic growth and improving quality of life in these areas.

There was one programme in Suffolk, in Lowestoft. The total grant funding awarded from 2019 to 2023 was £804,926.

The UK Government has a clear plan to grow the creative industries by a further £50 billion and support another 1 million jobs by 2030. This was set out in June 2023 in the Creative Industries Sector Vision, which was accompanied by £77 million of new funding to support the sector’s growth. This is on top of a range of tax reliefs introduced or expanded since 2010 covering film, television, animation, video games, orchestras, theatres and more.

Creative Industries GVA grew at more than twice the rate of UK GVA between 2010 and 2022 (50.3% vs 21.5%), and helped support more than a million new jobs since 2010.

Measures in the Sector Vision include the £28.4 million Create Growth Programme (CGP) to support high-growth creative businesses in twelve English regions outside London to scale up and become investment ready. The CGP is being delivered in twelve local area partnerships, including Suffolk.

It also includes £1 million for the Creative Careers Programme, which raises young people’s awareness of creative careers and pathways by providing specialist advice and information through a range of industry-led engagement. It is delivered in regions around England, including Suffolk.

The Arts Council England Investment Programme is also investing £444 million each year into arts and culture in England. The Arts Council is providing around £5.36 million per year to cultural organisations in Suffolk, of which over £1.6m allocated to cultural organisations in Coastal Suffolk.

Following Covid-19 and a strategic review, in 2023 the NCS Trust launched a new delivery model for the NCS programme. The new programme consists of residential, community and digital experiences. NCS Trust provides grant-funding to local organisations across England to deliver these community experiences.

In Suffolk, two organisations have received a total of £321,445 grant-funding. Volunteering Matters have received a grant to work with targeted groups of young people in Suffolk. Hear2Listen have received a grant, and are delivering programmes for young people in their local communities through Inspire Suffolk and Ipswich Town Football Club. Currently NCS Trust have not funded organisations that work exclusively in the Suffolk coastal constituency, however the grant funded organisations they work with in Suffolk cover this area in their remit.

The Government is committed to levelling up access to community and grassroots sport - physical activity should be accessible to all, no matter a person’s background or location. As part of this commitment, the Government is delivering an historic level of direct investment to build or upgrade thousands of grassroots facilities across the UK. The total of this investment is £409 million. This includes:

• £327 million to provide up to 8,000 new and improved multi-sport grassroots facilities and pitches across the whole of the UK between 2021 and 2025.

• £21.9 million to renovate over 3,000 tennis courts across Scotland, England and Wales between 2022 and 2024.

• Over £60 million via the Swimming Pool Support Fund in 2023/24 to support public swimming pool providers in England with immediate cost pressures, and provide investment to make facilities sustainable in the longer-term.

In total, Suffolk has received over £1.9m in funding through these programmes:

• Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme: Over £1 million has been awarded through 38 grants since 2021. Over £74k has been invested into Suffolk Coastal specifically through 16 grants. All funded sites are listed on gov.uk here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/multi-sport-grassroots-facilities-programme-projects-2021-to-2025

• Swimming Pool Support Fund: Over £900,000 has been awarded to 7 individual facilities across 5 Local Authorities in the Suffolk region by March 2025. All funded sites are listed here on Sport England’s website: https://www.sportengland.org/news-and-inspiration/swimming-pool-support-fund-helps-facilities-prepare-future

Funding for football and multi-sport projects awarded in England prior to 2021 were delivered by the Football Foundation, funded through Sport England. Sport England’s funding to the Football Foundation is available on their website, along with all awards made by Sport England to football clubs since 2009: https://www.sportengland.org/

Further details of local authorities and swimming pools/leisure centres awarded funding from Phase I and Phase II of the Swimming Pool Support Fund are available on Sport England’s website at:

https://www.sportengland.org/news/swimming-pool-support-fund-keeps-leisure-centres-afloat

https://www.sportengland.org/news-and-inspiration/swimming-pool-support-fund-helps-facilities-prepare-future

Sport England has also invested an additional £85 million into projects which facilitate participation in grassroots football. For a breakdown of the projects funded across this period, Sport England publishes an updated register of grant awards on a quarterly basis, with awards dating back to 2009 listed in full.

Information on the school workforce, including the number of teachers in each school, is published in the ‘School workforce in England’ statistical publication. The publication can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

As at November 2022, and according to the latest data available, there were over 468,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state funded schools in England, which is an increase of 27,000 (6%) since 2010. This makes the highest number of FTE teachers since the School Workforce Census began in 2010.

As at November 2019, there were 570 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state funded schools in the Suffolk Coastal constituency.

School workforce figures for 2024 have not been collected yet. In November 2022, and according to the latest data available, there were 568 full-time equivalent teachers in state funded schools in the Suffolk Coastal constituency. Figures for November 2023 will be published in June 2024.

The department shares the ambition that children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) should receive the vital support they need.

Where local authorities are failing to deliver consistent outcomes for children and young people with SEND, the department works with them using a set of improvement programmes and SEND specialist advisors to address weaknesses.

In March 2024, the department announced Unity Schools Partnership would run a new special education free school in Suffolk for pupils with severe learning difficulties. This is in addition to the six open special free schools in Suffolk already.

The department is opening over 200 special free schools and, in total, providing over 21,000 places for pupils with special educational needs. Over 10,000 of these places have already been delivered.

A joint local area SEND inspection was undertaken by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission in November 2023. The local area partnership received an outcome of ‘widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns’. The inspection report was published on 30 January 2024. The Local Area Partnership has since produced a Priority Action Plan which sets out how they will address the two Areas for Priority Action and has also updated its strategic SEND Improvement Plan.

Total high needs funding for children and young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is over £10.5 billion in the 2024/25 financial year, which represents an increase of over 60% from the 2019/20 allocations. Of this, Suffolk County Council is due to receive a high needs funding allocation of £113.9 million in the 2024/25 financial year, which is a cumulative increase of 31% per head over the three years from 2021/22. This funding will help local authorities and schools with the increasing costs of supporting children and young people with SEND.

The department is providing over £4.1 billion by 2027/28 to fund 30 hours of free childcare per week, or 38 weeks per year, for working parents with children aged 9 months to 3 years in England. This will remove one of the biggest barriers to parents working by vastly increasing the amount of free childcare that working families can access. Already, over 200,000 two year olds are now confirmed to have places for 15 hours a week of free childcare, as part of the largest ever expansion of childcare in England, and the rates for the new entitlements have been independently confirmed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) to be above market rates. The take up nationwide for the validation codes already stands at 87.8%.

Funding will be key to delivering the existing and expanded childcare entitlements, so the department has substantially uplifted the hourly rate paid to local authorities to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers. In 2024/25 alone, the department expects to provide over £1.7 billion to support local authorities and providers deliver the expansion to the early years entitlements, on top of over £400 million additional funding to deliver a significant uplift to the hourly rate paid to local authorities for the entitlements. Furthermore, to ensure local authorities are fully supported in delivering the new entitlements, the department is funding local authorities an additional four weeks in 2024/25, at an estimated cost of £120 million, for the under 2s working parent entitlement starting in September 2024.

The department’s methodology and the uplift to the rates are informed by data it receives from providers and parents to ensure the department is meeting the pressures faced by the sector. The department regularly surveys a nationally representative sample of over 9,000 providers to gain insights into how they run their provision and the challenges they face. The department also regularly surveys over 6,000 parents to understand their usage of childcare.

For 2024/25, the department’s hourly funding rates for Suffolk are £10.52 for under 2s, £7.74 for 2 year olds and £5.50 for 3 to 4 year olds.

To support the workforce, on 2 February 2024, the department launched ‘Do something Big, work with small children’, which is a new national recruitment campaign to support the recruitment and retention of talented staff to support the expansion of the 30 hours offer. This campaign will raise the profile of the sector, support the recruitment of talented staff and recognise the lifelong impact those working in early years and childcare have on children and their families.

The department is ensuring a phased implementation of the expansion to the 30 hours offer to allow the market to develop the necessary capacity. The department will continue to monitor the sufficiency of childcare places across the sector. The department’s ‘Childcare and Early Years Provider Survey’ shows that both the number of places available and the workforce has increased since 2022.

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring that the provision of childcare is sufficient to meet the requirements of parents in their area. Where local authorities report sufficiency challenges, the department discusses what action the local authority is taking to address those issues and where needed support the local authority with any specific requirements through its childcare sufficiency support contract. Suffolk has not reported any sufficiency challenges.

The department will continue to work closely with the sector on the implementation of these reforms as it delivers this substantial expansion.

There is one school selected for the School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) in the Suffolk Coastal constituency. This is Farlingaye High School.

The SRP is a centrally delivered programme. Therefore, no funding is allocated or distributed directly to schools. Once contracts are awarded for building works, they are published on the Contracts Finder within 30 calendar days. The Contracts Finder can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/contracts-finder.

The department is investing over £36 million this Parliament to deliver a fostering recruitment and retention programme, so that foster care is available for more children who need it. This will boost approvals of foster carers, as well as taking steps to retain the foster carers we have.

Suffolk County Council is participating in this programme and is working in a regional cluster group, ‘Foster East’, which is led by Norfolk.

Greater financial support for foster carers will help improve the experiences of all children in care. For the second year running, the department is uplifting the National Minimum Allowance (NMA) above the rate of inflation. For 2024/25, the NMA will increase by 6.88%. This is on top of a 12.43% NMA increase in 2023/24.

In addition, the department estimates that changes to tax and benefit allowances will give the average foster carer an additional £450 per year, as well as simplifying the process for self-assessment returns for most foster carers.

The department will also build on its investment since 2014 of over £8 million to help embed the Mockingbird programme, which is an innovative model of peer support for foster parents and the children in their care where children benefit from an extended family environment.

We do not hold details of Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) funding by constituency. Details of FiPL funding for projects in the Suffolk & Essex Coast & Heaths National Landscape, which partly overlaps with the Suffolk Coastal constituency, can be found here.

The Rural Payment Agency (RPA) has supported the farming and rural sector through payments under a range of schemes.

Since 1 April 2022, the RPA has released through schemes and grants approximately £20,740,643 in the Suffolk Coastal constituency.

A breakdown of these figures provided below relates to payments released within the specified financial years 2022 to 13 May 2024, irrespective of the scheme year to which individual payments are related, and only covers payments that are provided to farmer businesses by the RPA.

To meet data protection obligations, it is not possible to break this down further by recipient.

Pursuant to the Answer of 26 April to Question 22727, Darwin Plus projects awarded funding since 2019 for each Territory can be found in the attached table. The table includes grants from all Darwin Plus schemes: Main, Fellowships (recently rebranded as People & Skills), Covid 19 Rapid Response (A time-limited scheme for 2021), and two new schemes introduced in 2023, Local and Strategic.

Further information about active and completed Darwin Plus projects can be found on the Darwin Plus website, which will soon be updated to include the latest projects awarded in 2024.

Pursuant to the Answer of 18 April to Question 21017, a summary of Darwin Plus projects funded since 2019, broken down by Territory, can be found below. These figures include the latest awards from Rounds 12 of Darwin Plus Main and Fellowships, Round 1 of Darwin Plus Strategic, and Round 3 of Darwin Plus Local.

In December 2018, the UK Government published its Resources and Waste Strategy. This sets out how we will achieve a circular economy for plastic and achieve our ambition to eliminate all avoidable plastic waste by 2042. Our goal is to maximise resource efficiency and minimise waste (including plastic) - by following the principles of the waste hierarchy: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – to keep plastic in circulation for longer. We will do this by making producers more responsible for the plastic they make with our incoming Collection and Packaging Reforms.

Simpler Recycling will make recycling clearer and more consistent across England. Local authorities will be required to collect the same materials from households in the following core groups: metal; glass; plastic: paper and card; food waste; garden waste by March 2026 (with plastic film collections being introduced by March 2027). This will reduce confusion with recycling to improve recycling rates, ensuring there is more recycled material in the products we buy, and the UK recycling industry will grow. As well as Simpler Recycling, we are introducing Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging and a Deposit Return Scheme.

To tackle the use of virgin plastics, the Government brought in the Plastic Packaging Tax in April 2022, a tax of over £200 per tonne on plastic packaging manufactured in, or imported into the UK, that does not contain at least 30% recycled plastic. We have since increased the tax to £217.85 per tonne and will continue to monitor the situation and adjust accordingly.

There is a growing global demand for recycled plastics, including recycled rigid plastics. For example, IMARC estimates the size of the global plastic recycling market in 2023 to be $42bn and projects it to grow to $62bn by 2032.

With 35% plastic content, the Government earlier this year consulted on measures to reduce the 155,000 tonnes of small electricals that are thrown in the bin annually. The government response will be published in due course.