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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of allowing pilot events to enable a limited number of people to watch cricket matches.

We want the British public to be able to get back to doing the things they love safely - including going to sports events. But we recognise the challenges that events face to operate in a way that ensures the risk of transmission is sufficiently low while maintaining commercial viability.

Public safety is our main priority and decisions will be made working with local Directors for Public Health for all pilot events included in the Events Research Programme. The pilots will be run across a range of settings, venues, and activities so that findings will support the full reopening of similar settings across multiple sectors. However the point of the Events Research Programme is not to enable people to watch sport, but to gather evidence.

We will ensure that interim results gathered from Events Research Programmes are fed into policy development swiftly to avoid missing reopening opportunities because of insufficient data. The ERP will align its work with other reviews, including covid status certification and social distancing, to ensure the latest research findings are taken into account.

Under the government's roadmap out of lockdown, cricket grounds will be able to admit fans from Step 3, and not before 17th May.