Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans he has to increase funding for hockey at grassroots level across the UK.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
DCMS arm’s length body, Sport England’s core market investment into England Hockey for 2017/21 is £9.83 million. £7m is targeted on interventions including developing a more flexible format, protecting key facilities and improving governance and the use of data in driving up participation. £2.83 m is for developing talent at grassroots level.
Additionally, in the last 10 years, Sport England have invested £4.8m in Hockey facilities, clubs and projects (3.8m Lottery, £1m Exchequer)
Future funding will depend on the strength of incoming bids and to what extent they meet the aims of the Government sport strategy, Sporting Future.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much funding his Department has allocated from the public purse to wheelchair rugby in each of the last five years.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
At the grassroots level, Sport England has invested a total of £3,387,319 Lottery and Exchequer funding to support Wheelchair Rugby since 2014/15.
For the 2013-17 Rio Paralympic cycle, UK Sport invested £3,037,607 into Wheelchair Rugby, and £57,000 into the 2015 BT World Wheelchair Rugby Challenge. In the current 2017-21 Tokyo cycle, UK Sport awarded £50,000 for the GB Wheelchair Rugby team to compete at the 2018 World Championships in Australia, £500,000 from UK Sport's Aspiration Fund, and £50,000 to support their International Relations strategy.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
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 encourage more people to visit (a) museums and (b) art galleries in the East Midlands.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
We want to ensure that East Midlands museums and galleries continue to thrive and engage with diverse audiences. To that end, museums and galleries in the region receive public funding from a variety of sources, including Arts Council England, National Heritage Lottery Fund, local authorities and others, as well as benefiting from a range of tax reliefs and grants. For instance, three regional museums and galleries in Derby and Nottingham were awarded funding from the £4 million DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund this year, and we look forward to seeing their projects take shape. East Midlands museums and galleries have continued to find innovative ways to use their buildings and objects to best effect and improve their audiences’ engagement and experience.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much Big Lottery funding was allocated to Mansfield constituency in each of the last two years for which data are available.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Applicants for funding from The National Lottery Community Fund (formerly the Big Lottery Fund) often name their main office as their project delivery location. A high proportion of charities are based in cities and towns, in this instance Nottingham or Sheffield, or have their main office in London, but deliver activity and services to a much wider area. This means figures often don’t reflect the spread of activity and the overall offer of services and projects funded by The National Lottery Community Fund within a particular area.
We have included figures for the last five years as this better reflects the investment in the area over this time frame.
Mansfield Constituency
Financial Year | Total funding allocated |
2014-15 | £447,825 |
2015-16 | £2,332,098 |
2016-17 | £4,794,236* |
2017-18 | £160,237 |
2018-19 | £446,709 |
*2016-17 also includes £4,524,800 from Building Better Opportunities which is a matched fund between the National Lottery Community Fund and the European Social Fund.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport how much funding from the public purse was allocated to support tourism in the East Midlands in 2016-17.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
In 2016 there were 363,064 international visits to Nottinghamshire, up 29% on the previous year. These visitors spent £128 million in Nottinghamshire, up 23% on the previous year.
VisitBritain and VisitEngland are responsible for promoting the UK as a tourist destination, through a range of different initiatives and campaigns. VisitBritain receive annual grant-in-aid totalling £19.4m from DCMS and VisitEngland receive £7m.
The Discover England Fund, administered by VisitEngland, has invested in the development of tourism product across the East Midlands area. Projects such as The Explorer’s Road, the US Connections project and the England’s Literary Greats have all received funding.
Information from the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government indicate that Local Authorities spent £5.2m on tourism in 2016-17.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of indoor sports provision in the East Midlands in each year since 2015.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Sporting Future, Government’s sport and physical activity strategy highlighted how important it is that people are able to access sports provision in the way that best suits them whether this is indoors or outdoors.
In the East Midlands region Sport England has provided £42,652,294 Exchequer and £118,453,712 lottery funding since the 2014/15 funding year.
It is not possible for Sport England to provide a cost breakdown between indoor and outdoor sports provision as funding data is not held in this manner.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
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 support the creative industries in the East Midlands.
Answered by Margot James
Government recognises the role played by creative businesses, including media, right across the UK in local economic growth. Government supports this growth via tax credits, regional development programmes, relocation of Arms Length Bodies associated with the sector, rebasing of public sector broadcasters and putting ‘place’ at the heart of the Industrial Strategy. The department does not collect data on creative industries investment on a region-by-region basis.
DCMS funds Arms Length Bodies, which invest in arts and culture on a regional basis. These interventions support future skills and talent that go on to work in the Creative Industries. According to Arts Council England and British Film Institute data, the East Midlands have received grant-in-aid and lottery support of more than £127m since 2016. The East Midlands have also benefited from UK-wide programmes operated by these bodies.
Employing over 100,000 people, the East Midlands Creative Industries contributed £2.5bn to the UK economy in 2017. This was an increase of 9% since the previous year and represented faster growth than the wider national economy.
As part of the Audience of the Future immersive programme, a sector deal commitment, £4m was awarded to WEAVR – a virtual reality consortium which will work with leading academics and innovators across immersive technologies. This consortium is led by Leicester-based Turtle Entertainment UK.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, on what date the Government plans to publish its school sport and activity action plan.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Government has announced that the school sport and activity action plan is expected to be published in spring 2019.
The plan will consider ways to ensure that all children have access to quality, protected PE and sport sessions during the school week and opportunities to be physically active throughout the school day.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the level of access to superfast fibre broadband for (a) businesses and (b) members of the public in Mansfield; and what steps he is taking to improve such access.
Answered by Margot James
The department does not distinguish between businesses and homes. According to Thinkbroadband, 99.7% of premises in Mansfield currently have access to superfast broadband.
The government has invested heavily in Nottinghamshire, with over £7.8 million of central government funding allocated. Superfast rollout delivery is managed by Better Broadband for Nottinghamshire (https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/business-community/better-broadband-for-nottinghamshire-programme), our local delivery partner.
On top of superfast rollout, the department operates two vouchers schemes, the Gigabit Voucher Scheme and the Better Broadband Scheme, across the UK.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent steps the Government has taken to support tech start-ups in the Midlands.
Answered by Margot James
In the Autumn Budget 2017 we announced investment of £21 million to expand Tech City UK into a nationwide network – Tech Nation – aimed at accelerating the growth of the digital tech sector across the country. The funding will help Tech Nation support 40,000 entrepreneurs and up to 4,000 start-ups as they scale their businesses across the UK. This includes Birmingham, with Tech Nation highlighting that digital tech turnover for the Midlands came in at £7.7billion in 2017.
DCMS investments in the wider business environment are creating and developing the conditions for digital businesses in the Midlands to start and grow. In September 2018, the Government announced the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) as the lead partner of the Urban Connected Communities (UCC) Project. This initiative will see the development of a large-scale 5G pilot across the region, with hubs in cities such as Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton.
The UCC project will design wireless infrastructure to deliver high quality connectivity and allow new 5G applications to be trialled in a number of sectors; allow industry to test different deployment models for 5G infrastructure and help inform the development of policy and regulation to support 5G deployment. Up to £50 million is currently available for the UCC, including £25 million of DCMS funding.
DCMS are supporting the West Midlands Digital Skills Partnership which was launched in December last year. Bringing together some key regional stakeholders, supported by industry partners and Government, the West Midlands are exploring innovative ways in which to improve the talent pipeline in the region.
Government further recognises that supporting digital businesses in the Midlands requires us to encourage innovation and adoption of digital tech in other sectors. The emerging West Midlands Industrial Strategy identifies exciting opportunities around data-driven health diagnostics, which will provide opportunities to test and commercialise new technologies, among wider opportunities for industrial digitisation applicable to local economic strengths. My officials also look forward to working with partners in Leicester & Leicestershire and Nottingham & Nottinghamshire in the near future, as they open discussion with Government around their Local Industrial Strategies.