Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much Government funding has been made available for improving digital connectivity in North Wales each of the last eight years.
Answered by Margot James
The total spend on improving digital connectivity as a result of the Welsh government’s Superfast programme (Superfast Cymru) in North Wales equates to £62.78 million. This is made up of contributions from the UK government, the Welsh government and the European Union.
On 4 December 2018, Building Digital UK (BDUK) here at DCMS approved £8 million of funding for North Wales through Wave 3 of the Local Full Fibre Networks programme. This project has started to deploy fibre upgrades to 335 public buildings across six local authorities in North Wales (Gwynedd, Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighsire, Flintshire and Wrexham).
The number of Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) vouchers requested for North Wales to date are low because of the coexistence with the previous Welsh scheme. BDUK recently launched a joint new scheme, hosted by DCMS but co-branded with the Welsh government, with the voucher values topped up by the Welsh government. The numbers for the GBVS are as follows:
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how many civil servants in his Department have been seconded to (a) the Department for Exiting the European Union and (b) the Department for International Trade in each of the last three years.
Answered by Margot James
In the Civil Service, a ‘secondment’ is a transfer to an external organisation, whereas the movement of staff to another Government department is usually referred to as a loan. We do not hold information centrally on the host departments of all secondees/loans from our department. However, we do hold a record of some employees on loan for whom we had to retrieve salary costs over the last 3 years:
Year | Department for Exiting the European Union | Department for International Trade |
2017 | 2 | 0 |
2018 | 0 | 2 |
2019 (to present) | 0 | 3 |
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what the planned publication date is of the internet regulator White Paper.
Answered by Margot James
The Government's White Paper on internet safety will be published in the coming weeks.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 19 March 2019 to Question 232532 on Broadband: North Wales, what steps his Department is taking to monitor the progress of Local Full Fibre Networks Wave three projects in each quarter until March 2021.
Answered by Margot James
As is the case with all of our Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) projects, DCMS has assigned a Project Director to work with the Local Body project teams. The project will firstly be assured through the formal BDUK assurance process via a series of gateway review points. As the project progresses into delivery, this will be reviewed through weekly updates into the LFFN Programme Office on delivery progress, finances/grant claims, change management, and risks/issues - in line with the North Wales project consortia project plan. We use an online Portfolio Management system called Cora PPM to facilitate this. All of this is in line with our overall DCMS Governance model and includes reporting up from the LFFN Programme Board to the DCMS portfolio board which is chaired by our Permanent Secretary. Additionally LFFN is categorised as a Government Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP) Programme and is therefore monitored by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA).
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Spring Statement of 13 March 2019, HCWS1407, what the delivery timescale is for Wave 3 allocations for Local Full Fibre Networks in north Wales.
Answered by Margot James
All projects allocated funding as part of the Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) Wave 3 must have completed the portion of their build funded by DCMS by March 2021. This is the end of our LFFN funding window from HM Treasury. These projects contain varying degrees of additional funding from Local Bodies themselves - who of course may choose to self fund these projects beyond this date.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
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 number of local authorities in England and Wales that have been unable to meet their statutory duty to provide user-led recreational leisure activities for young people in each of the last eight years.
Answered by Mims Davies - Shadow Minister (Women)
My department is responsible for Section 507b of the 1996 Education Act that states that: “every local authority in England must, so far as reasonably practicable, secure for qualifying young persons in the authority’s area access to sufficient educational and recreational activities.”
During the last eight years no one has sought to make the case to me or my Department that any local authority is in formal breach of this duty. The guidance, which sets out how this this statutory duty could be discharged, has not been revised since 2012 and in the Civil Society Strategy published last August we committed to review it. We will make a further announcement about our plans to do that in due course.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if he will make an estimate of the proportion of artefacts in national museums which have never been on public display.
Answered by Michael Ellis
It is estimated that together the fifteen DCMS-sponsored museums care for over 100 million objects. These institutions are engaged in an active programme of object loans, touring exhibitions and research programmes and in 2017/18 lent to over 1,300 venues in the UK. This allows millions of people throughout the UK to access the world class collections held by the national museums.
The department does not hold information on what proportion of objects in the national museums’ collections have never been on display and it is not possible to estimate.
The national museums provide further public access to their stored collections through their websites, publishing images, catalogue entries and interpretation and direct access.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
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 potential merits of a dedicated UK-based memorial to mark the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War.
Answered by Michael Ellis
It is important to remember that the fighting and loss of life continued in Mesopotamia beyond the Armistice of 1918. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Basra Memorial in Iraq commemorates the more than 40,500 members of Commonwealth forces who died during the Campaign and whose graves are not known. While the current instability in the region makes the work of the Commission challenging, the Government’s centenary programme did not include the development of new memorials. Traditionally, new memorials are funded by public subscription and the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire provides a highly fitting and appropriate location for new memorials of many kinds.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
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 potential merits of the Information Commissioner's proposed code of practice to protect democratic institutions in the United Kingdom.
Answered by Margot James
We take the protection of personal data and the right to privacy extremely seriously. It is essential that people are confident their personal data will be protected and used in an appropriate way. Political parties and other organisations involved in political campaigning must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. We have been considering the Information Commissioner's recommendations for a statutory code of practice in relation to such activities and will respond formally in due course.