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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if he will extend the six-month deadline for the Coronavirus Community Support Fund where lockdown measures introduced in November 2020 and from January 2021 have delayed recipients from making use of these funds as intended.

The Coronavirus Community Support Fund (CCSF) is a £200million grant scheme which helped organisations to meet service costs where they were experiencing increased demand and/or short-term income disruption. Funding is distributed and administered by The National Lottery Community Support Fund (TNLCF).

Under the terms of the scheme, all funding had to be distributed and spent by recipients in the 2020/21 financial year. TNLCF began awarding grants in early July 2020 and, as of 15 March 2021, 99.9% of the funding had been disbursed to over 8,000 organisations.

Grant agreements are between TNLCF and grantees, and grants were initially intended to cover a six month period. However, successive lockdowns put additional pressure on charities to deliver, and not all projects were able to go ahead as envisaged. Where this was the case, TNLCF encouraged flexibility within terms of the grant agreement to help grantees adapt and continue to deliver their ambitions. This included some extensions to grants where appropriate.