Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, for what reasons his Department decided not to allocate funding from the free holiday activities and meals for disadvantaged families scheme to (a) Easington constituency and (b) County Durham.
In December 2018, we announced £9 million for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme 2019 and invited organisations to bid to coordinate free holiday provision for disadvantaged children in a local authority area during the 2019 summer holidays.
92 bids were received and each bid was assessed against the criteria published in our “Invitation to Bid”, which has been attached.
Each bid was then ranked according to their score and we selected the highest scoring bid from each of the nine English regions for funding, along with two further high scoring bids. The level of funding allocated to each successful bid was in line with the scale and nature of their proposed programme, as detailed in their respective bids.
For the North East region, the StreetGames programme in Newcastle was selected as the highest scoring bid, with an allocation of £1,028,000. Our allocations to the other successful areas were as follows:
We received a bid from Durham County Council which included coverage of the Easington and County Durham constituencies but the bid was unsuccessful as it scored lower than a number of other bids in the North East region, including those in Newcastle and Gateshead. Officials provided feedback to Durham County Council in May 2019.