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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to embed physical activity over the course of people's lives.

Sports and physical activity are crucial for our mental and physical health. The Chief Medical Officer is clear that being physically active is important to long-term health and crucial for keeping people healthy. That is why we made sure that people could exercise throughout the national restrictions and provided an unprecedented £1 billion of financial support to sport and leisure organisations during the pandemic.

The government launched its sports strategy, Sporting Future in 2015 and we’ve achieved a huge amount since then. Sport England has allocated over £1.5 billion to nearly 5,000 organisations across the UK. Sport England has also published its new ten year strategy which focuses on driving up activity levels and helping to improve physical and mental health. We want to see physical activity embedded in people’s lives, with children doing at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day, and adults 2.5 hours a week.

At the recent Spending Review, £205 million was announced to build or transform up to 8,000 state-of-the-art community football pitches and multi-use sports facilities across the UK. Earlier this month, we announced £30 million for PE teacher training and to open up school facilities to provide access to the wider community. This was in addition to, £30 million package to renovate 4,500 park tennis courts across the country.

The government believes these steps will help ensure that everyone can keep active throughout their lives.