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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of including leisure facilities run in-house by local authorities in the National Leisure Recovery Fund.

The National Leisure Recovery Fund sought to support eligible public sector leisure centres to reopen to the public, to give the sport and physical activity sector the best chance of recovery to a position of sustainable operation over the medium term.

A total of £100 million was available as a biddable fund to eligible local authorities in England, which was allocated in a single funding round covering the period 1 December 2020 to 31 March 2021. Eligible local authorities included those in England who hold responsibility for the provision of leisure services, those who have outsourced their leisure provision to an external body and those whose outsourced leisure arrangements have ended since 20 March 2020 and services are now delivered as an in-house function.

Facilities run in-house were supported through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) Income Compensation Scheme. The MHCLG’s scheme was designed to compensate for transactional income losses that are truly irrecoverable – including transactional income from customer and client receipts generated from the delivery of goods and services and which were budgeted for in 2020/21, this includes budgeted management fee income.