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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much his Department (a) has spent to date and (b) plans to spend in total on tackling covid-19 disinformation online.

Addressing the challenges of COVID-19 disinformation is a whole of Government effort. That is why we stood up the Counter Disinformation Unit in March 2020, drawing on resources from a number of existing cross-government teams, giving it the flexibility to respond to a range of different issues as needed.

We have reallocated staff from within the Department to boost the size of the team at DCMS. We continually review the requirement and work flexibly across government to ensure the unit is sufficiently resourced, allowing us to surge capacity where it's needed.