The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport (Nigel Huddleston):...Support for sports facilities
in north-west Durham has been taken up with Sport England directly.
It is the arm’s length body with responsibility for activity levels
and sport for DCMS, and I know that it would welcome further
discussions with the council and my hon. Friend to develop a more
robust assessment of the area’s strategic leisure needs. This will
not be a standing start: since...Request free trial
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport ():...Support for sports facilities in
north-west Durham has been taken up with Sport England directly. It is the arm’s
length body with responsibility for activity levels and sport for
DCMS, and I know that it would welcome further discussions with the
council and my hon. Friend to develop a more robust assessment of
the area’s strategic leisure needs. This will not be a standing
start: since 2016, Sport England has invested over
£425,000 of lottery and Exchequer funding in the North West Durham
constituency, and since 1995, over £4 million. This includes
£313,000 to Consett YMCA and over £80,000 to the Crook community
leisure centre to support multi-sports facilities and to increase
participation.
On the arts and culture side, which my hon. Friend also mentioned,
through the £1.57 billion culture recovery fund there have been
several awards to date in North West Durham—he mentioned some of
them—totalling over £1 million in funding and including such
entities as the Durham and Darlington music education hub, the
Association for Cultural Enterprises, and the St Cuthbert’s
Society. That funding goes directly, as he requested, rather than
via the local authorities.
More broadly, to support the return of grassroots sports, including
swimming pools, once restrictions can be reduced, the Government
have provided unprecedented support for businesses through tax
reliefs, cash grants, employee wage support and a whole variety of
other measures. We developed a £100 million support fund for local
authority leisure centres. This national leisure recovery fund
seeks to support eligible public sector leisure centres to reopen
to the public, giving the sport and physical activity sector the
best chance of recovery to a position of sustainable operations
over the medium term. A total of £100 million is available as a
biddable fund to eligible local authorities in England, and it will
be allocated in a single funding round. My officials are currently
in the process of assessing bids for the fund, and funding
decisions will be communicated shortly.
This is all on top of the funding that Sport England has provided, which has
comprised over £220 million to directly support the sport and
physical activity sector, with £35 million set aside as a community
emergency fund for our very important sports clubs and exercise
centres. On 26 January, Sport England published its 10-year
strategy, “Uniting the Movement”, and it also committed an extra
£50 million to help grassroots sports clubs and organisations
affected by the coronavirus pandemic...
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