Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what proportion of Tech Nation's (a) grants and (b) programme support have been awarded to (i) women, (ii) ethnic minorities and (iii) people with disabilities; and for what reason the impact evaluation did not include an equalities impact assessment.

The average number of companies with at least one female founder on Tech Nation’s programmes is 25%, meaning that one quarter of the grant money received from DCMS has directly supported female founders in their scaling journey. Tech Nation does not issue any grants itself.

Tech Nation has recently commenced data capture on ethnic background and disabilities of applicants to its programmes. This is subject to a self-identification process by participants.

It is also developing a diversity data capture framework to be expanded to cohort companies and the wider industry, via an external toolkit.

The objective of the Frontier Economics study was to evaluate Tech Nation’s impact in accordance with its original grant agreement.