Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
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 has taken to improve broadband connections in (a) Morley and Outwood constituency and (b) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Julia Lopez - Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
According to the independent website www.thinkbroadband.com gigabit broadband coverage in Morley and Outwood is 84.8%, which is above the national average of 71.5%. Over 98.7% of premises in Morley and Outwood have access to Superfast broadband with speeds of at least 30 Mbps, which is also above the national average of 97.3%.
We are investing £5 billion through Project Gigabit so homes and businesses in hard-to-reach areas that would not otherwise be reached through suppliers’ commercial plans can access gigabit broadband. Morley and Outwood is included in Project Gigabit’s regional procurement for West Yorkshire and parts of North Yorkshire.
We are making good progress with this procurement, which will launch early next year. We have recently conducted market engagement to assess interest in the area from various suppliers, and identify where government subsidy is required.
Eligible homes and businesses may also be able to benefit from the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, which provides a subsidy of up to £1,500 for residents and up to £3,500 for businesses towards the cost of installing gigabit-capable broadband. Constituents in Morley and Outwood have made good use of the scheme to date, with 60 vouchers, worth over £140,000, used to connect premises to date.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to help preserve sites of historic significance in (a) Morley and Outwood and (b) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Nigel Huddleston - Financial Secretary (HM Treasury)
Though there have been no Listed Buildings or Scheduled Monuments designated in Morley and Outwood in the last two years, I can confirm that five Listed Buildings have been designated in West Yorkshire in this period - Clough House (Birstall); York Gate Gardens (Leeds); Grave of Charles Waterton (Wakefield); Gawthorpe Water Tower (Wakefield); and Manningham War Memorial (Bradford).
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent steps his Department has taken to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation online.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The government takes the issue of disinformation very seriously. The Cross-Whitehall Counter Disinformation Unit located in DCMS was stood up on 5 March 2020, bringing together cross-Government monitoring and analysis capabilities to tackle disinformation and misinformation, including relating to COVID-19.
The government is committed to ensuring that the information people access about COVID-19 and the vaccine is accurate, so that everyone is able to make informed decisions about their health. We are working with social media platforms to ensure promotion of authoritative sources of information, and to help them identify and remove incorrect claims about COVID-19 and the vaccine in line with their terms and conditions. We have also developed the SHARE checklist, which aims to increase audience resilience by educating and empowering those who see, inadvertently share and are affected by false and misleading information. The SHARE checklist provides five easy steps to help identify false content, encouraging users to stop and think before they share content online.
The Online Safety Bill will give companies clear legal responsibilities to understand the risk of harm to users and put in place systems and processes to improve user safety. The new laws will have robust and proportionate measures to deal with misinformation and disinformation that could cause significant physical or psychological harm to an individual, such as anti-vaccination content and falsehoods about COVID-19.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to increase the average internet speed for properties in Morley and Outwood constituency.
Answered by Matt Warman
It is the Government's view that the best way to achieve nationwide gigabit coverage is to create a competition-friendly environment in areas where deployment is commercially viable while focussing government funds on the 20% of the country where commercial deployment is unlikely. As a result of this approach, there is now a thriving market of over 80 providers rolling out gigabit broadband all over the UK.
Our strategy is working and this is no more evident than in the Morley and Outwood constituency with total Gigabit coverage now standing at 68.6% (significantly higher than the national average of 45%) according to figures from ThinkBroadband. Indeed, since January 2020, Gigabit coverage across the constituency has almost doubled which is testament to the competitive market we have facilitated.
This has a significant impact on average internet speed for properties in your constituency. In Q1 of 2019, average download speed in Morley and Outwood stood at 34Mbps, and today it stands at 58Mbps. Across the country today, over two in five premises can access gigabit-capable networks, up from just one in ten in November 2019. By the end of the year, 60% will have access, and by 2025 the Government is targeting a minimum of 85% gigabit-capable coverage. The Government is also investing £5bn as part of Project Gigabit to ensure the hardest-to-reach areas in the UK receive coverage.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to encourage people in Morley and Outwood constituency to increase their average level of exercise in summer 2021.
Answered by Nigel Huddleston - Financial Secretary (HM Treasury)
Sports and physical activity are incredibly important for our physical and mental health and all generations and communities should be able to enjoy the health, wellbeing, social and other benefits of being active. Because of this, we made sure that people could exercise at least once a day even during the height of the first period of enhanced national restrictions and we opened up grassroots sport and leisure facilities as soon as it was safe to do so.
From April 2020 to June 2021, we invested over £2,985,721 of Exchequer and Lottery funding in the Morley and Outwood area through Sport England. The majority of this were investments made to the local Active Partnership (Yorkshire Sport Foundation), totalling £2,866,572.
This includes awards of £615,827 to support the Active Partnership in helping schools to open their facilities outside of the school day and during school holidays and £168,000 investment as part of our Covid response, to help reduce the negative the impact of COVID-19 and the widening of inequalities, particularly targeting lower socio-economic groups, Black, Asian Minority Ethnic communities, disabled people and people with long-term health conditions.
Sport England also invested £80,000 via their Community Asset Fund in February 2021 to support the construction of a new multi-use games area to be sited on the Queen Elizabeth playing field jointly owned by Leeds City Council.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of properties in Morley and Outwood that are capable of receiving services that deliver internet speeds of over 1 gigabit per second.
Answered by Matt Warman
The government is committed to delivering lightning-fast, reliable broadband to everyone in the country. Our plan - to stimulate investment, bust barriers and drive competition - is working. This is the biggest build in UK history with 60% of all households to have access to gigabit-capable speeds by the end of the year - a huge leap forward from 2019, when it was 9%. By 2025 the government is targeting a minimum of 85% gigabit-capable coverage.
In March this year we launched the first phase of the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit to ensure that hard to reach communities are not left out of the revolution in connectivity. In August, we announced more details about our procurement pipeline and specifically, for the 2.2 million hard to reach premises in England in Phases 1 and 2 of the delivery plan. Further detail is at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/project-gigabit-delivery-plan-summer-update.
West Yorkshire is in Phase 2 of the delivery plan. Formal procurement is planned to start in the region in November 2022. Based on current data, around 133,000 uncommercial premises will be targeted across the West Yorkshire (and parts of North Yorkshire) procurement lot.
As these large subsidised contracts progress, Project Gigabit also continues to help communities with up to £210m available in Project Gigabit vouchers to help with costs of installing gigabit to people’s doorsteps.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to help increase the number of children attaining the Government's recommended amount of exercise per week.
Answered by Nigel Huddleston - Financial Secretary (HM Treasury)
The Government is committed to ensuring that all children and young people have the best opportunities to engage in sport and physical activity. Our Sporting Future strategy sets out how important it is for all children to have a good experience of sport and physical activity while they are young.
The Government’s arm’s-length body, Sport England, has invested over £190 million into physical activity for children and young people over 2016-2021, including programmes such as the £40 million Families Fund, which encourages low-income families with children to do sport and physical activity together. Initiatives such as the Studio You video platform, funded by Sport England and powered by This Girl Can, are also encouraging more teenage girls to be active.
A key driver of the Government’s School Sport and Activity Action Plan (jointly published by the Department for Education, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and Department for Health and Social Care in July 2019) is to ensure that all children and young people have access to at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. This is supported by £320 million per year through the PE and sport premium. More recently, the Government has hosted roundtables on how to take support for young people even further, and has committed to updating the Government sport strategy, with children and young people central to this.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the potential economic benefits of the Shared Rural Network for (a) Morley and Outwood constituency and (b) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Matt Warman
The focus of the world leading Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme is on improving connectivity in the more rural areas of the UK and not urban towns and cities. The SRN will see coverage in the region of Yorkshire and The Humber improve to 90% from 81% from all four mobile network operators, with coverage from at least one operator improving to 99% from 95%. This will allow rural businesses to improve operations and exploit the full potential of the internet across a range of sectors, levelling up the digital divide between urban and rural areas.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department plans to take to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Adwalton Moor.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The Battle of Adwalton Moor occurred on 30 June 1643 at Adwalton. It marked an important moment in the First English Civil War in the North of England, where the royalists, led by Earl of Newcastle defeated the Parliamentarians under Lord Fairfax.
The present site is included on Historic England’s Battlefields Register
This country has a long and well-established tradition of commemorating historical events of national and local importance through memorials and celebratory events. It is not common practice however, for the Central Government to fund new memorials or events to mark significant events, instead we would urge the local community, both public sector and private individuals, to propose, fundraise, and develop commemorative events and monuments which best reflect the needs of their local community.
In terms of funding opportunities, I would urge the Hon Member to contact the National Lottery Heritage Fund. As the largest funder of heritage in the UK, The National Lottery Heritage Fund regularly supports projects focused on past people and events, and these are often timed to coincide with anniversaries.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the Culture Recovery Fund in supporting (a) businesses and (b) freelancers in (i) the Morley and Outwood constituency and (ii) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) to date, has seen over £1.2 billion awarded to over 5,000 organisations and sites, with 70% of grant funding going outside of London.
While freelancers have been supported through the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, which has so far helped 2.8m self employed people, it is also the case that the CRF had significant indirect benefits for freelancers. In Round 2, organisations were asked to estimate how many FTEs and freelancers were protected by the fund until the end of June. Collectively, applicants reported that 52,000 full time staff and almost 100,000 freelancers would be supported until the end of June.
The Morley and Outwood constituency has currently received £55,000 of awards from the fund, while West Yorkshire as a whole has seen over £49m of support through the CRF. The organisations in West Yorkshire supported through CRF2 have self-reported that these grants will help them to support over 2,500 freelancers until the end of June.