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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 23 April 2018 to Question 135849 on National Citizen Service Trust, whether around £9,781,587 has been written off by the Government for places that were not filled in 2016 for the National Citizen Service.

Pursuant to my previous answer, the £9,781,587 figure referred to was correctly spent by NCS providers in advance of delivery of the programme. This amount contributed to the upfront costs that are shared with providers to set up the programme for a specified number of places. Unfortunately, some of these places were not filled, and the advance payments for unfilled places cannot be recovered.

Reducing the number of unfilled places is a priority for DCMS in order to deliver better value for money. We have reflected this in the NCS Trust’s performance framework and NCS Trust are improving their commissioning model to allow participation volumes to flex throughout the year in response to demand and reduce the number of unfilled places.