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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to promote brass bands and music; and how much funding her Department has made available for those purposes in each year since 2015.

The Government supports the arts predominantly through Arts Council England (ACE) funding. ACE plays a hugely important role in developing England’s arts and culture, as the national development agency for creativity and culture.

ACE is working with Brass Bands England, the sector support organisation for brass bands, to make a significant difference in the development of the sector. In particular they are providing support to brass bands across the country to develop and diversify their membership and audiences. Brass Bands England was recently awarded a National Lottery Project Grant to support the European Brass Band Festival held in Birmingham in April earlier this year.

Between 2015 and October 2022, ACE has provided £12,372,233 to organisations and projects that were classified as brass bands. Over the same period, ACE has provided over £1.7 billion to organisations and projects whose main discipline is music. Since April 2016, brass bands have also benefited from the Orchestra tax relief, including the higher rate of 50% from October 2021 until April 2023.