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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what criteria they will use to decide whether to withdraw public funds from the Football Association if it fails to meet equality and diversity obligations and standards of governance.

Sport England has awarded the Football Association £14.6 million over the next 4 years up to 2021. This funding will support a number of FA grassroots programmes, including its disability programme and women and girls talent projects. The funding will also improve the experiences of the 1.6 million people that play football regularly, as well as help encourage new players, coaches and officials, from all backgrounds and abilities.

In addition, Sport England is investing £2 million per year into the FA to support their work to enhance the quality and diversity of the coaching workforce in football, including providing bursaries to support women and Black and Minority Ethnic coaches develop their coaching abilities from the grassroots to the elite levels of the game.

The FA, like all sports bodies in receipt of public funding, is required to comply with the highest standards of sports governance as set out in Sport England and UK Sport's A Code for Sports Governance. This includes having at least 30 per cent gender diversity on boards, acting in an open and transparent way and making progress on BAME representation in sports administration.

All funded bodies, including the FA, have been working closely with Sport England and/or UK Sport over the past few months to agree what they need to do to meet the Governance Code. They had until 31 October to provide evidence of progress towards meeting the requirements in the Code. Sport England and UK Sport will be reviewing this evidence, and will continue to be rigorous in their monitoring of on-going compliance.

Any organisation found to be non-compliant would be at risk of having their public funding removed. In this scenario, Sport England would divert money to other sport projects, so that grassroots sport overall would not suffer.