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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of allocating additional funding to the Public Lending Right fund to assist authors with falling incomes during the covid-19 outbreak.

There are no current plans to increase the overall amount of the PLR central fund in response to the COVID -19 outbreak or more generally. The British Library administers the PLR Scheme on behalf of the Government and the funding level of the PLR would form part of the consideration of British Library’s overall funding at a future spending review.