Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to ensure that local authorities are adequately resourced to communicate key messages to support the roadmap out of the covid-19 lockdown.

The Government has allocated over £8 billion directly to councils since the start of the pandemic. And at the Spending Review, the Chancellor announced that local authorities will receive over £3 billion of additional support for COVID-19 in 2021-22. This takes the total support committed to councils in England to tackle the impacts of COVID-19 to over £11 billion.

We recognise that local authorities are best placed to decide how to meet the major COVID-19 service pressures in their area, and we have provided an unprecedented level of un-ringfenced funding - with over £4.6 billion in un-ringfenced funding to councils across four tranches throughout the financial year. This funding may be used for public health communications campaigns.

Additionally, the Government has provided funding to support the ongoing public health and outbreak management costs of tackling coronavirus. This funding, worth over £225 million per month during the National Lockdown, will be provided until the end of March 2021, and can be used to fund local coronavirus response public health activities including public health communications.

From 1 April 2021, a further £400 million of funding will be allocated from the Contain Outbreak Management Fund, to be allocated to all local authorities in England. This is to cover further public health activities in 2021-22.