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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department has taken to ensure that the payment of the Cultural Recovery Fund for phase three is made in a timely manner.

Our Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) is worth £2 billion in total and is the largest investment in culture, art & heritage in UK history.

Our delivery bodies are working hard to ensure payments from the first two rounds reach organisations quickly, and so far over 83% of all awarded CRF funding has been paid. Payments through the Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) are typically made in multiple tranches. Final payment is typically made at the very end of the grant period, once activities and costs have been reported.

As part of the design process for the third round of the CRF, the Department has conducted various lessons learnt exercises to help us determine where to make design and delivery changes. Details on the third round of funding were published on 25 June, including a specific ‘emergency resource support’ strand that will provide funding quickly to those who are at imminent risk of failure. As with all large and complex funding packages, we will ensure that key lessons learned from the whole process are captured, and used to help improve grant delivery in the future.