Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will place in the Library the (a) current round of bid submissions for possible sites for Freeports, (b) criteria used to assess each of the free text fields in the submitted bids and (c) weightings used for each of those criteria in respect of every text field.

We are committed to following a robust and transparent process for assessing Freeport bids, as published in the Freeports Bidding Prospectus. Those bids will be assessed using the criteria, weightings, and mark scheme outlined in that Prospectus. We will not publish Freeport bids whilst they are being assessed as part of a live competition; we need to have regard to any commercially sensitive information within them.