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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to support (a) grassroots football and (b) other sports in (i) Jarrow constituency, (ii) South Tyneside, (iii) the North East and (iv) the UK.

Sport England, government's arms length body, is spending over a billion pounds over the next four years to support grassroots sport. The Football Foundation is an organisation investing £60m each year into improving the country's grassroots football and sports infrastructure with money provided by its funding partners: the Premier League, The FA and the Government (via Sport England)

Total grassroots football investment (Sport England and Football Foundation) for the North East is over £22m since 2010 and a full breakdown of figures for other grassroots sports funded by Sport England are available on their website, www.sportengland.org.

Responsibility for grassroots sport is devolved and each country has a Home Nation Sports Council, sportscotland, Sport Wales and Sport Northern Ireland in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively.

UK Sport, ​which receives funding from the UK government and the National Lottery, prepares athletes for Olympic and Paralympic Games across the UK, and is investing up to £345m to fund at least 38 sports across the current 4-year Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic funding cycle. UK Sport has also invested over £32m into Winter Olympic and Paralympic sports in the current PyeongChang 2018 funding cycle.