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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what funding her Department is providing to grassroots music venues in Stockport constituency.

The Government is committed to supporting our grassroots music venues, which are the lifeblood and research and development centres of our world-leading music sector.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is in regular discussions with all parts of the music industry, including live venues at every level. We work with industry and across Government to improve the sector's economic resilience to future economic shocks, as we did through the pandemic, and the recent Energy Bills Support Scheme.

On Stockport specifically, across all artforms and disciplines, Arts Council England have invested £4.45 million since 2018/19 in 56 projects. This includes 13 successful music specific applications, with examples for grassroots music venues as:

• Several Stockport-based DJs and music producers have received support via the Develop Your Creative Practice fund, most recently (in 2022) including producer and label owner Jamie Manion who received £8,000 to develop their music productions skills.

• In 2021, OmniMusic, a Stockport-based charity using assistive music technology to enable disabled and non-disabled musicians to make and play music received £14,600 for their ‘Reaching Out’ project.

• Three Stockport based projects received funding from the Culture Recovery Fund; two were individual DJ/producers and one was music based ‘Rising Stars North West Community Interest Companies’ - one of the few ethnic minority led arts, music, and creative media organisations in Stockport - received £71,000.