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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what funding is available to support the (a) creative and (b) cultural sectors in (i) Chippenham constituency and (ii) other rural market towns.

Arts Council England has invested £539,520 in Chippenham since April 2022 through a combination of regular funding and project funding for individuals and organisations such as Folio, a dynamic, female-led new writing theatre company, which received £122,329 over 2 project grants.

In addition, Arts Council England’s open-access funds are available across England, including in market towns such as Chippenham. This includes:

• National Lottery Project Grants – open to applications between £1000 and £100,000. Arts Council England is currently focused on three time-limited priorities: Supporting Grassroots Music, Museum Unlocking Collections and Universal Library Offers projects.
• Develop Your Creative Practice – awards from £2000 to £12,000 that support individual creative and cultural practitioners to focus on their development and take them to the next stage of their practice.
• Capital – financial assistance to museums, libraries and arts organisations to invest in buildings, equipment, digital infrastructure and technology with a view to securing their longer term viability and sustainability. For the financial year 2025/2026 the Libraries Improvement Fund (LIF) will provide funding for public libraries of up to £500,000 (total available £5.5m).
• Museum Estate and Development Fund (MEND) – Funding for urgent repairs to accredited non national museums up to £5m (total available £25m).
• Creative Foundations Fund (CFF) – Funding for equipment and buildings for arts organisations – Strand 1 up to £1m and Strand 2 Over £1m and up to £10m (total available £85m).

The Creative Industries Sector Plan will be published shortly, announcing new measures to grow the creative industries across the whole of the UK.