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 encourage people in Morley and Outwood constituency to increase their average level of exercise in summer 2021.

Sports and physical activity are incredibly important for our physical and mental health and all generations and communities should be able to enjoy the health, wellbeing, social and other benefits of being active. Because of this, we made sure that people could exercise at least once a day even during the height of the first period of enhanced national restrictions and we opened up grassroots sport and leisure facilities as soon as it was safe to do so.

From April 2020 to June 2021, we invested over £2,985,721 of Exchequer and Lottery funding in the Morley and Outwood area through Sport England. The majority of this were investments made to the local Active Partnership (Yorkshire Sport Foundation), totalling £2,866,572.

This includes awards of £615,827 to support the Active Partnership in helping schools to open their facilities outside of the school day and during school holidays and £168,000 investment as part of our Covid response, to help reduce the negative the impact of COVID-19 and the widening of inequalities, particularly targeting lower socio-economic groups, Black, Asian Minority Ethnic communities, disabled people and people with long-term health conditions.

Sport England also invested £80,000 via their Community Asset Fund in February 2021 to support the construction of a new multi-use games area to be sited on the Queen Elizabeth playing field jointly owned by Leeds City Council.