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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to help (a) preserve and (b) promote traditional boat building as a heritage craft.

We recognise how important our craft industry is and we are committed to supporting future growth in the sector. The creative industries have been identified as one of the governments eight growth-driving sectors, with the craft industry a contributor.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports traditional craft skills and training in a variety of ways, including funding projects that train people in traditional crafts and skills. It also runs a Heritage Crafts programme which offers bursaries to help people train in heritage crafts or develop their skills.

The importance of the crafts sector was a key driver for the Government in ratifying the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage last year. Our first step in implementing the Convention is to create inventories of living heritage in the UK which will help promote items that could include traditional boat building. We will open the public call for submissions to the inventories later this year.