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 local authorities fund public libraries.

Public libraries are funded by local authorities and each local authority is responsible for assessing the needs of their local communities and designing a library service to meet those needs within available resources.

I will work with my colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to get local government back on its feet after fourteen years of savage and drastic underfunding. We will do the basics right, providing councils with more stability through multi-year funding settlements and ending unnecessarily expensive competitive bidding for tiny pots of money.