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 help arts and culture venues ensure their premises are covid-19 secure; and whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of providing grant funding to those sectors.

DCMS has produced and regularly updates the Performing Arts Guidance to help performing arts organisations, venue operators and participants understand how to make their workplace COVID-Secure so that they can work and take part in the performing arts safely when and where permitted. The guidance applies to both professional and non-professional activity. This includes general guidance for rehearsals, training and pre-production. It also includes advice for managing audience and performances including staging and capacity, social distancing and the Rule of 6, ticketing and payments, cloakrooms, managing people flow, staging arrival times and seating arrangements, ventilation, wearing of face masks and carrying out risk assessments.

DCMS has also convened a Venues Steering Group which includes representatives from leading sector organisations as well as Public Health England and other experts to develop an action plan for maximizing activity under Stage 4 and for how we safely proceed to stage 5 with fuller audiences.

The Government’s unprecedented £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund has now surpassed the £1 billion milestone. Over £500million in recovery grants have been made to almost 3000 arts and heritage organisations in England helping to support 75,000 jobs and over £100million in capital grants.Organisations receiving grants from the CRF include Shakespeare’s Globe, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, The Old Vic, Manchester Royal Exchange and Opera North.

Additionally, a second round of funding was announced on 11 December, which utilises the remaining Culture Recovery Fund funding. There will be over £300m available in grants delivered by DCMS’ delivery partners, and £100m of repayable finance delivered by Arts Council England specifically.