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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to increase access to the arts for people over the age of 60 in (a) Newcastle-under-Lyme and (b) Staffordshire.

Arts Council England is the DCMS arms-length body with responsibility for distributing arts funding. Arts Council England provides both Grant-in-Aid and lottery funding which supports a number of creative programmes and activities for older people across Newcastle-under-Lyme and Staffordshire. This includes project grants to music organisation Madula, who host weekly drum circles for older residents in the area to learn from international artists in a social environment. Castle Hill Creatives, a group of artists which provide events and exhibitions in Torrington have also worked with older and isolated people to create sculptural lanterns for the Stoke Lanterns event that took place in March 2025.

Beyond project grants, Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places projects are designed to work on intergenerational projects with people across the area. In Stoke-on-Trent, this is run by Appetite and in Staffordshire Moorlands, projects are run by Outside.