Hospices, as independent organisations, are free to develop and adapt their own terms and conditions of employment and, therefore, it is for them to determine what is affordable within the financial model they operate and how to recoup any additional costs they face, including what contractual arrangements are reached with their commissioners.

NHS England uprates national allocations in line with the pay rises for integrated care boards (ICBs). It is down to the local contractual arrangements, and whether this includes the increases for pay rises or not, as to what the hospice can afford. There is, therefore, no single model which is consistent across England.

We are supporting the hospice sector with a £100 million capital funding boost for eligible adult and children’s hospices in England to ensure they have the best physical environment for care. We are also providing £80 million for children’s and young people’s hospices over the next three financial years, giving them stability to plan ahead and focus on what matters most, caring for their patients.

A number of MPs wrote to me in relation to Hospice UK’s four-point plan for hospice funding. I have responded to this letter.

The Government is developing a Palliative Care and End of Life Care Modern Service Framework (MSF) for England. The MSF will drive improvements in the services that patients and their families receive at the end of life and enable ICBs to address challenges in access, quality, and sustainability through the delivery of high-quality, personalised care. I refer the hon. Member to the Written Ministerial Statement HCWS1087 I gave to the House on 24 November 2025.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning palliative care services to meet the reasonable needs of their population, which can include hospice services available within the ICB catchment. To support ICBs in this duty, NHS England has published statutory guidance and a service specification.

The Government is developing a Palliative Care and End of Life Care Modern Service Framework for England. I refer the Hon. Member to the Written Ministerial Statement HCWS1087, which I gave to the House on 24 November 2025.

The Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme is investing over £325 million between 2021 and 2025 to level up facilities across the whole of the UK. In England, this is delivered through the Football Foundation which is an independent charity and is best placed to discuss any previous or prospective applications. DCMS does not receive or assess any applications, and projects are awarded through the Foundation's independent grant panel.

The Football Foundation plans their investment pipeline based on Local Football Facility Plans, which have been developed in partnership with local authorities and sector leaders. These will shortly be revised to take into account the current landscape and multi-sport usage. Potential applicants can still discuss an application with the Foundation at any time using the email address stated below. Their website also sets out the different grants available. For more information on this process, the Football Foundation can be contacted on enquiries@footballfoundation.org.uk

We want to mainstream the use of Natural Flood Management (NFM) and expect the £25 million NFM programme will help inform how we do that. While we do not currently have plans for further rounds, we would encourage applicants to apply for NFM funding as part of our wider £5.6 billion investment in flood and coastal defences.

​The department has invested over £1 billion in the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), which runs from the 2020/21 academic year to the 2023/24 academic year. The NTP is a time limited, four-year programme to support pupils to catch up following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The department remains committed to the objective that tutoring should be embedded across schools in England, following the end of the NTP.

Schools are best placed to decide how to spend their funding, depending on their unique circumstances and priorities, which may include spend on tutoring.

Tutoring is included in the menu of approaches in the pupil premium guidance for school leaders.

In July 2022 the Government announced the £100 million Frequently Flooded Allowance to support communities that have experienced repeated flooding. The Allowance improves access to public funding for frequently flooded communities that have not been able to secure all of the funding necessary to progress their flood resilience scheme. The first 53 projects to receive £48 million from the Allowance were announced in April 2023. The next round of projects will be announced in due course.

The Government recognises the importance of ensuring public access to swimming pools, as swimming is a great way for people of all ages to stay fit and healthy. The responsibility of providing access to leisure facilities lies at Local Authority level, and the Government continues to encourage Local Authorities to support swimming facilities.

In 2023/24, the Government provided over £60 million in additional funding to support operating costs and help improve energy efficiency of facilities through the Swimming Pool Support Fund, delivered via Sport England. In total, the Swimming Pool Support Fund (£60 million exchequer, £20 million of Sport England National Lottery funding) will fund 442 individual facilities and 788 individual pools across 269 Local Authorities by March 2025.

Further details of local authorities and swimming pools/leisure centres awarded funding from Phase I and Phase II of the Swimming Pool Support Fund are available on Sport England’s website at:

https://www.sportengland.org/news/swimming-pool-support-fund-keeps-leisure-centres-afloat

https://www.sportengland.org/news-and-inspiration/swimming-pool-support-fund-helps-facilities-prepare-future

The Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme is investing over £325 million between 2021 and 2025 to level up facilities across the whole of the UK. The programme provides funding to make essential facility improvements, so that communities have a high-quality pitch to play on, and is a clear demonstration of the government’s commitment to levelling up all corners of the United Kingdom.

Since 2021, over £200 million has been invested in over 2,400 sites across the UK, improving the natural and artificial grass pitches on offer to communities and upgrading floodlights, goalposts, changing rooms and toilet facilities. All funded projects are listed on gov.uk at this link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/multi-sport-grassroots-facilities-programme-projects-2021-to-2025

As part of the Park Tennis Court Programme, the UK Government and Lawn Tennis Association are investing £30 million pounds between 2022-2024 to deliver improvements to up to 3,000 park tennis courts across Great Britain. The renovation works include the installation of digital access gates, re-surfacing, and re-painting - all of which aim to improve access and increase participation in tennis, whilst prioritising the courts in the most deprived communities.

Since the start of the programme, over £70k has been invested in Cheshire, with 14 tennis courts across five parks renovated directly as a result of investment from the Programme.

Further details of the completed projects for the Park Tennis Court Programme can be found at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/park-tennis-court-programme-completed-projects. We will confirm details of further sites receiving funding later in the year.

The Government is committed to delivering top class sports facilities across the country, so that everyone can take part in sport and physical activity. As part of this commitment, the Government is delivering an historic level of direct investment to build or upgrade thousands of grassroots sport facilities across the UK.

The Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme is investing over £325 million between 2021 and 2025 to level up facilities across the whole of the UK. It is a rolling programme and potential applicants can discuss an application with the Foundation at any time. Their website sets out the different grants available.

In regards to Ellesmere Port and Neston, £1,440 has been invested into the constituency since 2021 (£0.02p per capita based on the constituency total population data on House of Commons Library). £1,440 was awarded to Groves F.C for new goal posts in 2022-2023.

Constituencies across the UK have received a share of the funding delivered so far, delivering real change in communities UK-wide. Sites that have already benefited from the funding, including Groves FC, are listed on gov.uk at the link below, and can be used to calculate the investment per capita for all other UK constituencies, with further projects due to be announced later this year.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/multi-sport-grassroots-facilities-programme-projects-2021-to-2025

All our overseas expenditure, whether it is through official development assistance or through contractual relationships, such as the ones with Rwanda, is always robustly policed to ensure that it is spent exclusively on the issues that it is designed to address. We have a strong, good working relationship with the Government of Rwanda, who are absolutely committed to being the exporter of solutions to global problems, rather than the exporter of problems.

The AI in Health and Care Award was created to help accelerate the testing of artificial intelligence technologies most likely to meet the aims set out in the NHS Long Term Plan, and to develop an evidence base to support the commissioning of technologies that are clinically and cost effective. A total of £123 million has been allocated to 86 artificial intelligence technologies and of these, 48 awards have been completed, 13 are scheduled to conclude by March 2024, 17 by March 2025, five by March 2026, and three by September 2026.

All awarded technologies, aside from phase one and phase two projects, are expected to submit an evaluation one month after their completion. Evaluations are not publicly released, but will inform policy and commissioning decisions. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/artificial-intelligence-in-health-and-care-award-guidance-for-competition-2-all-phases-stage-1/26004#assessment-criteria

As of January 2024, ThinkBroadband reports that over 80% of premises in the UK can now access a gigabit capable connection. To date, most of this rollout has been achieved by the commercial market.

Government acknowledges that there are premises that remain outside of the scope of the commercial build plans despite the commercial market going further than originally expected. These premises are some of the hardest and most expensive to reach in the UK and therefore require government subsidy if we are to achieve our ambition of nationwide gigabit coverage by 2030.

Project Gigabit is the government’s £5 billion investment in ensuring the premises which would otherwise be left out of commercial plans, get access to a gigabit capable connection. As of December 2023, we have 16 Project Gigabit contracts in place worth approximately £667 million of government subsidy. This, combined with the ongoing procurements equals more than £2 billion of investment to support the deployment of gigabit-capable broadband. We expect more procurements to go live and further contracts to be awarded and signed within the coming months.

For further updates on progress, including information on Project Gigabit procurements, Building Digital UK (BDUK) releases a quarterly update on progress towards our mission of nationwide coverage by 2030 with the latest being published in December 2023.

No specific assessment has been made of the adequacy of funding for Admiral Nurses, who are developed and supported by Dementia UK as an independent charitable organisation. Provision of dementia health services is the responsibility of local integrated care boards (ICBs). NHS England would expect ICBs to commission services, which may include Admiral Nurses, based on local population needs.

Colleges and other Further Education (FE) providers are responsible for setting the pay of their teaching and support staff. The government plays no role in this process. Colleges and other providers can make their own decisions about teacher pay in light of their own recruitment and retention needs and local skills priorities.

The department is investing an additional £185 million in the 2023/24 financial year and £285 million in the 2024/25 financial year to drive forward skills delivery within the sector. This funding is to help colleges and other providers to address their key priorities, including tackling recruitment and retention issues in high-value subject areas critical to our economy.

For academic year 2023/24 there is an 8.3% increase in the average 16-19 programme funding per student compared to academic year 2022/23. This funding supports colleges and other providers with staffing and other delivery costs.

The 2021 Spending Review set out an investment of £3.8 billion in skills across this Parliament to enable learners to access the skills and training they need to transform their lives.

The department is also delivering a programme to directly support the sector to recruit excellent staff, which includes a national recruitment campaign; strengthening and incentivising the uptake of initial teacher education, including through teacher training bursaries in priority subjects worth up to £29,000 each (tax free for 2023/24); and Taking Teaching Further, a programme that supports FE providers to recruit and provide early career support to those with relevant knowledge and industry experience to retrain as FE teachers.

To boost the recruitment and retention of teachers, we will also give eligible early career teachers in key science, technology, english and mathematics and technical shortage subjects, working in disadvantaged schools and colleges, up to £6,000 after tax annually on top of their pay. This will double the existing Levelling Up Premium paid to school teachers and extend it to all FE colleges for the first time.

This Government is acting to drive down flood risk from every angle.

The Government announced in March 2020 a record £5.2 billion investment over six years in flood and coastal erosion schemes to better protect communities across England. Since 2021, £1.5 billion has so far been invested in flood defence projects across the country. The Investment Plan for the six-year floods programme, published in 2021, provided indicative information about regional allocation of investment. The range of projects in the programme is refreshed annually to take account of changes in local projects, and now also the impacts of inflation and COVID-19 on the programme.

Our previous floods investment programme ran from 2015 to 2021. The number of projects and homes better protected by region is provided in the table below.

Colleges and other further education (FE) providers are responsible for setting the pay of their teaching and support staff. The government plays no role in this process.

The department is investing an additional £185 million in the 2023/2024 financial year and £285 million in the 2024/25 financial year to drive forward skills delivery in the further education sector.

This funding is to help colleges and other providers to address their key priorities, particularly tackling recruitment and retention issues in high-value subject areas critical to the economy.

This investment is being delivered via core 16 to 19 funding, including through boosting programme cost weightings for higher-cost subject areas, as well as increasing the per-student funding rate.

This investment is additional to the £125 million of funding the department has made available in the 2023/24 financial year to boost the national 16 to 19 funding rate and subject-specific funding. This means 16 to 19 providers are seeing a larger than expected increase to funding rates.

For the 2023/24 academic year, there is a 8.3% increase in the average 16 to 19 programme funding per student funding compared to the 2022/23 academic year.

The department is also delivering a programme to directly support the sector to recruit excellent staff, which includes a national recruitment campaign. The department is also strengthening and incentivising the uptake of initial teacher education, for example through teacher training bursaries in priority subjects worth up to £29,000 each, tax free for 2023/24.

To boost recruitment and retention of teachers, the department will give early career teachers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and technical shortage subjects, working in disadvantaged schools and colleges, up to £6,000 after tax annually on top of their pay. This will double the existing Levelling Up Premium paid to school teachers, and extend it to all FE colleges for the first time.

The Spending Review 2021 set out an investment of £3.8 billion in skills across this Parliament to enable learners to access the skills and training they need to transform their lives.

Each year, the department holds annual strategic conversations (ASCs) with each college in England where we meet the colleges senior leadership team. ASCs build upon the government’s response to the recommendations made in Dame Mary Ney’s Review of Financial Oversight of FE Colleges and the FE White Paper. Through the regular dialogue of ASCs and termly delivery conversations (TDCs), the department has established effective relationships with each of its statutory FE providers. This has enabled the department to develop a holistic view of each institution. With a clear focus on the priorities for development of skills provision, the ASCs and TDCs are informing both the department’s deployment of advice and practical support to colleges, and its wider policy and decision making.

Investment is also continuing in leadership and management development, which supports retention of staff. The Further Education Commissioner and her team are supporting the sharing of effective practice to enable delivery to be as efficient as possible whilst remaining high quality.