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 ensure the safeguarding of heritage cultural crafts in the UK.

We take the protection and promotion of Heritage Crafts seriously. In March 2017 the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) announced that it would spend £10 million training people in heritage skills. The funding aims to train a new and more diverse generation of heritage workers in areas from traditional crafts to digital specialists to address critical shortages in the sector.

In addition, HLF has already invested £47 million into the Skills for the Future programme, which helps organisations deliver paid training placements to meet skills shortages in the heritage sector and to help diversify the workforce, since it launched in 2009.