We are currently reviewing plans for dementia in England.

The Government set out in the Levelling Up White Paper its plan to explore the introduction of Levelling Up Directors. The department is in the process of recruitment (with interviews conducted in the summer) and more details will be available in due course when the Secretary of State has considered official advice.

In terms of funding required, Levelling Up Directors would be supported by civil servants from relevant departments. The costs for the Directors themselves and their office will be part of DLUHC's settlement.

The Government is committed to delivering levelling up outcomes in the best way possible.

The department is monitoring the situation closely through formal reporting mechanisms and on the ground relationships. These are giving us an emerging picture of the impact of cost inflation on our programmes.

The Levelling Up Fund has put in place a proportionate project adjustment process. Through this, we can work with places to make sensible adjustments to the scope and phasing of projects to mitigate delivery challenges, including cost inflation, whilst also maintaining value for money.

The Government set out in the Levelling Up White Paper its plan to explore the introduction of Levelling Up Directors. The department is in the process of recruitment (with interviews conducted in the summer) and more details will be available in due course when the Secretary of State has considered official advice.

In terms of funding required, Levelling Up Directors would be supported by civil servants from relevant departments. The costs for the Directors themselves and their office will be part of DLUHC's settlement.

The Government is committed to delivering levelling up outcomes in the best way possible.

We do not hold information on the breakdown of funding between services in each local authority. Under Part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 each local authority is required to commission the right support in safe accommodation to meet local needs in line with their local strategy, working with their domestic abuse local partnership board.

So far, local authorities are in receipt of two years of new burdens funding for the delivery of their duties - £125 million in both 2021/22 and 2022/23. This has enabled local authorities to plan for and commission support services to meet the needs of victims.

Funding allocation for both 2021/22 and 2022/23 can be found in the following links below:

2021/22- https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/funding-allocation-methods-new-domestic-abuse-duty

2022/23- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-domestic-abuse-duty-2022-to-2023-funding-allocations

We do not hold information on the breakdown of funding between services in each local authority. Under Part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 each local authority is required to commission the right support in safe accommodation to meet local needs in line with their local strategy, working with their domestic abuse local partnership board.

So far, local authorities are in receipt of two years of new burdens funding for the delivery of their duties - £125 million in both 2021/22 and 2022/23. This has enabled local authorities to plan for and commission support services to meet the needs of victims.

Funding allocation for both 2021/22 and 2022/23 can be found in the following links below:

2021/22- https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/funding-allocation-methods-new-domestic-abuse-duty

2022/23- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-domestic-abuse-duty-2022-to-2023-funding-allocations

The Government recognises that local and regional news and current affairs play a vital role in bringing communities together and providing shared experiences across the UK, and the BBC has an important role to play.

The BBC’s mission and public purposes are set out in the Royal Charter. The Charter requires the BBC to provide impartial news and information to help build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. The BBC should offer a range and depth of analysis so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues.

This is alongside broader legislative and regulatory obligations for all public service broadcasters, including the BBC, which are required to provide high quality, impartial news and current affairs programmes. The BBC, ITV and STV are also required to provide regional news. The Government has no plans to relax these requirements.

The BBC was given a fair licence fee settlement that aims to support households at a time when they need that support the most. It sends an important message about keeping costs down while also giving the BBC what it needs to deliver on its remit. With this settlement, the BBC will continue to receive around £3.8 billion in annual public funding, allowing it to deliver its mission and public purposes and to continue doing what it does best.

As the BBC is operationally and editorially independent from the Government, and decisions over its spending and how it meets its obligations and delivers its services are a matter for the BBC.

We remain committed to publishing the RNEP update, which has been delayed by the need to take account of the impacts of the pandemic and the Spending Review. We want to provide as much clarity and certainty as possible on rail enhancements and will set out our plans shortly.

Competitive funding has its place, and we think that it has been an effective tool for protecting value for taxpayers’ money. The hon. Gentleman knows that, as I said in answer to his colleague the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), that is not the only funding that we are providing. We have increased funding for local government by £3.7 billion.

I completely reject the hon. Member’s assertion. It is not true that the shared prosperity fund is less; it is more. The Opposition are looking at different sources of funding to arrive at their inaccurate figures. If he would like us to explain how it works, I would be very happy to provide him with a letter.

Councils are responsible for the design and oversight of their Assets of Community Value scheme. The existing 5-year listing period is considered proportionate to ensure that the scheme balances the interests of the community with the rights of property owners.

Departmental officials regularly engage with Asthma + Lung UK on a range of issues. My Rt hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care also met with representatives of Asthma + Lung UK at COP26 in November 2021.

The Department invests £1.3 billion a year in health research through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The NIHR supports a range of research to improve outcomes in respiratory health. This includes funding for two dedicated NIHR Health Protection Research Units, specialising in respiratory infections and the health impacts of environmental exposures, such as air pollution.

The bursaries we offer are designed to incentivise more applications to initial teacher training (ITT) courses. As such, they are provided for the phases and subjects which have previously struggled to attract sufficient applicants. Being able to change bursary amounts gives us the flexibility to respond to the need to attract new teachers, and means we are spending money where it is needed most.

In the academic year 2020/21, we exceeded the geography postgraduate ITT target (achieving 129% of the target). The bursaries we offered for academic year 2021/22 took account of this and the continuing boost to ITT recruitment caused by the economic impact of COVID-19.

We announced the bursaries available for academic year 2021/22 on 12 October 2020, the same day that applications opened for ITT courses starting in 2021/22. This information was published on GOV.UK and promoted to applicants through our Get Into Teaching service, to ensure applicants were made aware of the financial offer before applying. As bursaries are designed to incentivise applications it would not be appropriate, or a judicious use of public money, to retrospectively award them to trainees who were not eligible when they applied.

For initial teacher training (ITT) courses starting in the 2022/23 academic year, the department is continuing to offer a £24,000 tax-free bursary or prestigious scholarships worth £26,000 tax-free in chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics.

In addition, the department has reinstated £15,000 tax-free bursaries for geography and design and technology that we last offered in 2020/21. We have also increased the bursary for languages from £10,000 to £15,000, and the biology bursary from £7,000 to £10,000, compared to those offered in 2021/22.

The department reviews bursaries each year to take account of a number of factors including historic recruitment, forecast economic conditions, and teacher supply need in each subject. Being able to change bursary amounts gives us the flexibility to respond to the need to attract new teachers, and means we are spending money where it is needed most.

Therefore, the department will review the need for bursaries across all subjects again, including the value of current bursaries, before announcing the offer for academic year 2023/24 this autumn.

We expect this funding will identify and test a range of new and existing interventions to support unpaid carers, which could include respite and breaks, peer group and wellbeing support and new ways to combine these to maximise their impact. We will continue to work with stakeholders, including organisations working with young carers and people with lived experience of caring as we develop our proposals.

I cannot see how it would be in the narrow self-interest of the Government, if operating on partisan lines, to have given the hon. Gentleman’s constituency £18 million for transport improvements from the levelling-up fund. These are not jokes; these are serious matters. We work with people across this House, including and especially in the Labour party, to ensure that funding goes where it is required. Lying behind the allegations made by him and others is a suggestion that somehow civil servants would conspire with Ministers deliberately to favour constituencies on the basis of political colouration.

My new opposite number, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy)—I offer her my congratulations on her elevation—recently wrote to me to ask whether we would make transparent the basis on which we allocate that funding. We have: it is published on a website called gov.uk. Google can sometimes be helpful to all of us.

Each integrated care board (ICB) will be required to establish an integrated care partnership, which will be responsible for developing a plan to address identified health, social care and public health needs. Many of the duties which previously applied for clinical commissioning groups will apply to ICBs, which may include issues relating to health inequalities such as malnutrition. Each ICB will be allocated funding and will decide how to allocate its resources appropriately.

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.

As I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows, we have stepped in to support sport to the tune of £1 billion during the pandemic, with £100 million specifically to support leisure centres, to enable them to survive during covid and then remain open. We are always willing to work together with local councils, which also have skin in the game and responsibilities for the delivery of local leisure facilities, to ensure that everybody can swim.