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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she took to ensure the Unboxed festival delivered value for money.

The UNBOXED programme is still running. The live events programme will conclude at the end of October. A departmental Accounting Officer Assessment for the UNBOXED programme was published on 12 August. It stated that our pre-delivery assessment of the costs and benefits for UNBOXED showed the programme would be value for money, even where some expected benefits are not monetisable. DCMS has kept the programme under review to ensure that it remains value for money.

There is also an independent evaluation of the programme underway. This will consider areas such as job creation; training, development and volunteering opportunities offered; the number of people who experience UNBOXED in person and online; and the number of participants in the learning and engagement programmes delivered by the creative teams across the country. It will be published in early 2023.