The Sports Minister has announced that £680,000 in grant funding will be provided to six women’s football clubs, in the latest tranche of funding from the Government’s Sport Winter Survival Package.

Birmingham City Women, Blackburn Rovers Ladies, Bristol City Women, Lewes FC Women, London Bees and London City Lionesses will receive a total of £680,000 in grant funding, bringing the total support provided to women’s football to £2.9 million.

The funding will cover essential survival costs due to the lack of spectators, and will allow these clubs to complete their seasons. It will also help to support the continued visibility of women’s football, as England prepares to host UEFA Women’s Euro 2022.

It follows the Women’s Super League and FA Women’s Championship receiving a combined £2.25 million of grant support for essential league costs in February, backed up by women’s sport being prioritised for 250,000 free Covid-19 testing kits being made available to elite sports, worth £1.5 million.

Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston said:

Women’s football continues to go from strength to strength. The last World Cup captured the hearts and minds of the nation.

With more terrestrial broadcast coverage and Euro 2022 on the horizon, we must do all we can to give it the visibility it deserves. This funding will provide vital support to allow these six clubs to continue, to inspire our stars of the future.

Kelly Simmons, FA Director of the Women’s Professional Game, said:

This new grant funding will provide vital financial support to six more clubs, helping to cover losses as a result of COVID-19 and giving them the best possible opportunity to complete their campaigns.

We welcome this funding, along with the previous grant from the Sport Winter Survival Package which has been crucial in keeping the game going with weekly COVID-19 testing across the top two divisions, ensuring players can continue to play safely.

Lewes FC Women is a not-for-profit club which is wholly owned by supporters and the local community. In 2017 it became the first professional or semi-professional football club to pay its women’s team the same as its men’s team as part of their Equality FC initiative. It currently plays in the FA Women’s Championship.

Charlie Dobres, Lewes FC Women director, said:

Lewes FC Women has made great strides in boosting attendances and matchday revenues in recent years, and so the absence of crowds has hit us harder than most.

Lewes FC is a 100% community-owned non-profit, and this funding is vitally important in enabling us to continue through this difficult period and not lose the substantial progress that we’ve made on many fronts. This is exactly the kind of intervention that the current situation requires and is essential for clubs to survive.

This is the latest tranche of funding to be announced from the Government’s £300 million Sport Winter Survival Package that is focused on helping those major spectator sports severely impacted by coronavirus restrictions survive the winter.

On Friday the Government announced £2.7 million for elite, national and regional ice hockey, which will cover essential costs necessary for the sport’s survival and to get back playing, including the launch of the 2021 Elite Series. In February the Government announced a major boost for women’s sport, with the aforementioned support for women’s football coming alongside support for netball and women’s basketball, totalling more than £7 million.

Submissions for support have been made from individual sports to an independent decision-making Board, supported by Sport England.

The Sport Winter Survival Package is the most generous of any Government for its domestic sport sector in the world. It comes as part of the sector benefiting from more than £1.5 billion worth of business support that has been made available by the Government, including the furlough scheme, business rates relief and business interruption loan scheme that has helped many sports clubs and leisure businesses to survive.

Earlier this month the Chancellor announced a further £300 million of support that is expected to benefit major summer spectator sports such as cricket, tennis and horse racing, as the path out of lockdown continues and sports stadia initially open at reduced capacities. The Budget also included £1.2 million to mitigate the financial effects of COVID-19 on the UEFA Women’s Euro football competition and deliver a successful tournament in England in 2022, supporting the sport to grow and thrive. This money will go towards extending contracts of the delivery teams, host city resource costs and the opening ceremony.

Further confirmations of funding from the Sports Winter Survival Package, and details on how the additional £300 million will be distributed, will be announced in due course.

ENDS

Notes to editors:

• A detailed factsheet on how the Sport Winter Survival Package works and the criteria when assessing applicants has been published by Sport England.
• In a press conference at 10 Downing Street in May 2020, the Culture Secretary said: “given the deserved momentum that had built up behind women’s sport after the football, cricket and netball world cups, I will be working hard with the Sports Minister to make sure we don’t lose any of that progress. Visibility matters. Our daughters deserve to see female athletes on the main stage.”
• Grassroots sports and the physical activity sector are also benefiting from £220 million in emergency funding delivered by Sport England, and the recipients of a £100 million National Leisure Recovery Fund to support publicly owned leisure facilities in England during the pandemic have also been announced today.
• At the Budget on 3 March, the Chancellor also announced that the Government will provide an initial £25 million to support the growth of grassroots football, which will be enough to build around 700 new pitches across the UK.

An ambitious new scheme which aims to develop a net zero industrial zone in South Wales by 2040 will benefit from nearly £20 million UK government funding and could create 5,000 new jobs, the UK Business and Energy Secretary announced this week (Wednesday 17 March).

The scheme is one of nine green tech projects across the UK benefiting from a pot of £171 million UK government funding to cut emissions from industry and part of a wider package of measures including an ambitious blueprint to deliver the world’s first low-carbon industrial sector.

The £20 million funding will support the development of a South Wales Industrial Cluster, stretching from Pembrokeshire to the Welsh-English border. This project aims to create a sustainable plan for the region through the production and distribution of hydrogen power, cleaner electricity production that uses carbon capture technologies, hydrogen-rich natural gas and large industry decarbonisation through fuel switching and the production of cleaner transportation fuels.

Industry in the South Wales cluster currently produces almost nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – around 12% of UK industry’s total. The South Wales Industrial Cluster will therefore help to significantly reduce emissions, improving air quality and opening-up opportunities for South Wales to become a leader in decarbonised industrial and economic growth.

Secretary of State for Wales Simon Hart said:

Developing South Wales into a net zero industrial zone by 2040 will create thousands of jobs at the same time as delivering improvements in the local environment.

Reaching the UK Government’s climate targets will require significant change across our economy, but in South Wales and elsewhere we will achieve our goals in a way that protects jobs, creates new industries and encourages economic growth.

UK Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said:

South Wales has a proud history of industrial enterprise and this investment from the UK Government will create new opportunities for the region to become a leader in the low carbon sector, protecting local jobs and creating a new green economy.

By using new technology to prevent the release of emissions this project will create a more sustainable plan for the region going forward, and lead to a better environment for the people of South Wales.

Building on the Prime Minister’s 10 Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution published last year, the new Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy sets out the UK Government’s vision for building a competitive, greener future for the manufacturing and construction sector. Part of the UK Government’s path to net zero by 2050, the measures will create and support 80,000 UK jobs over the next 30 years whilst cutting emissions by two-thirds in just 15 years.

The new strategy will be underpinned by supporting existing industry to decarbonise and encouraging the growth of new, low carbon industries in the UK to protect and create skilled jobs and businesses in the UK. It will give businesses long-term certainty to invest in home-grown decarbonisation technology, such as that which can capture and store carbon emissions from industrial plants – rather than outsourcing industrial activity to high-emission countries around the world.

The UK government will also introduce new rules on measuring the energy and carbon performance of the largest commercial and industrial buildings, including office blocks and factories, in England and Wales. The move could provide potential savings to businesses of around £2 billion per year in energy costs in 2030 and aim to reduce annual carbon emissions by over two million tonnes – approximately 10% of the current emissions from commercial and industrial buildings.

Two regions will soon benefit from an extra half a million pounds to expand the delivery of the successful construction skills bootcamps, helping more people to gain vital skills in demand from employers.

The funding boost – which comes from the £43m announced last November to establish pioneering new skills bootcamps – will focus on developing test models that can be scaled to other areas.

Skills bootcamps offer free, flexible courses lasting up to 16 weeks covering areas including construction, digital and technical. The courses are open to adults aged 19 and over and provide a chance to learn sector-specific skills and offer a fast-track to an interview with a local employer at the end.

The West Midlands Combined Authority will receive £475,000 to train people for green jobs in the construction industry. While Devon County Council will receive £40,645 to expand their successful brickwork bootcamps to help deliver the talent pipeline needed by employers in the Heart of the South West. Both areas have also been running successful digital skills bootcamps including in software development, cyber security, data analytics and digital healthcare.

Skills bootcamps are currently running in six areas across England, with over 2,700 learners participating so far.

Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills Gillian Keegan said:

“It is fantastic that we are expanding our construction skills bootcamps to help even more people gain the vital skills the sector is crying out for.

“Skills bootcamps are unique, giving people the chance to upskill or retrain for free over a short period of time, with a clear line of sight to a job at the end.

“I’d encourage anyone in the West Midlands or the South West who is looking for new opportunities in construction to find out more”.

The skills bootcamp programme is being expanded into other areas of the country this year. The £43 million investment from the National Skills Fund, will enable greater availability across the country and a wider range of course subjects on offer to meet the skills needs of local areas.