Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how his Department plans to allocate the £455m from the soft drinks industry levy to fund children’s (a) health and (b) access to healthy food.

As indicted on page 175 in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March 2019 Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the government is forecast to receive around £340 million from the soft drinks industry levy in 2020-21. The March 2019 report on Economic and Fiscal Outlook can be found here:

https://obr.uk/efo/economic-fiscal-outlook-march-2019/.

The department will provide details of how our share of funding will be allocated to specific programmes in due course. Previously we have used funding from the levy to fund programmes that improve children’s health such as the PE and Sport Premium for primary schools and the national breakfast clubs programme.