Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what estimate he has made of the number of staff hours of staff from each Government department spent working on the Counter Disinformation Unit; and what assessment the Government has made of the effect on existing departmental projects of the redeployment of staff to work on that Unit.

The Counter Disinformation Unit was stood up to tackle disinformation and misinformation relating to COVID-19 in March 2020. This is a whole of Government effort and the unit rightly draws on resources from a number of existing cross-government teams, giving it the flexibility to respond to a range of different issues as needed. We keep under regular review the prioritisation of resources across projects to ensure effective delivery of the Government's priorities.