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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much Big Lottery Fund spending was distributed per capita in each local authority region in the last year for which data are available.

The table in the attached document shows the Big Lottery Fund spending per capita in each local authority area in 2017-18. However, this data does not present an accurate comparison of the benefits from Big Lottery Fund spending for several reasons:

a) Funding is often provided over several years, but the data shows this in the year that the grant is awarded. For example an award of £600,000 for a five year long project, would be reported as £600,000 of funding in year one, and no funding in years two to five.

b) the data reflects the geographical location of the funding recipient, but many projects reach far beyond the local authority where the funding recipient is located. An extreme example of this is the City of London, which has a small population but which was the location of funding recipients running two large nationwide projects. Conversely, areas that show no funding in 2017-18 have benefited from Big Lottery funded projects which have a primary location elsewhere.

c) Island communities can also be outliers. Delivering a project usually involves a minimum fixed cost, so local authorities with very small populations will generally show a larger spend per capita than local authorities with higher populations.