Sports
Home Department

Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe, Conservative)

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many officials in her Department work on policies relating to (a) the role of sport in tackling crime and antisocial behaviour and (b) other areas of policy relating to sport; and how much of her Department's budget was allocated to supporting this activity in the latest period for which figures are available.

Jeremy Browne (Taunton Deane, Liberal Democrat)

The Home Office is providing funding in 2012-13 to a number of voluntary sector organisations that use sport-based interventions, with other approaches, to tackle crime and social disorder through the Positive Futures programme; the Communities Against Gangs, Guns and Knives (CAGGK) fund; and the Community Action Against Crime: Innovation Fund (CAACIF).

Details of the funding are shown in the table. It is not possible to quantify the proportion of this funding that is spent exclusively on sport-based activities, as many of the recipients also make use of other diversionary activities such as music and art, as well as running other programmes such as mentoring.

Responsibility for these approaches forms part of a number of officials' roles. We estimate that this equates to approximately 1.5 officials' working time. It is not possible to break this down further to estimate the proportion of time specifically spent on the role of sport in tackling crime and antisocial behaviour.