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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential effect of increases to business rates on the viability of digital start-ups in the UK.

We regularly engage with local authorities to discuss their role in growing the digital economy. This includes our investment of £200 million to fund locally-led projects across the UK to leverage local and commercial investment in full fibre. This builds on the relationship BDUK developed with the Superfast, and Connected Cities projects. We are continuing this close partnership with local authorities across the UK to develop our approach to this full fibre investment.

At Budget 2016 Government announced reductions in business rates worth almost £9 billion over the next 5 years. This included permanently doubling Small Business Rate Relief and extending the thresholds of the relief to ensure that 600,000 businesses will not pay business rates again.

Furthermore, at Spring Budget we announced an additional business rates package providing £435m of further support for businesses facing significant increases in bills in England. This includes:

· support for small businesses losing Small Business Rate Relief to limit increases in their bills to £600 each year

· providing English local authorities with £300m of funding to support to allow them to provide support to individual hard cases in their local area.

We have awarded Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield councils over £11m of grant funding in March 2016 to establish and develop new work space, business incubation and other services for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses based in the North of England whose ambitions and business models rely on digital technologies and their applications. We regularly meet to discuss progress with these projects.

We recently published the Digital strategy which set a clear vision to make the UK the best place in the world to start a digital business, building on our commitment to back our economic strengths as we leave the EU.