My right honourable friend the Minister for the Olympics (Tessa Jowell) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

The Legacy Trust will be formally launched today.

The Legacy Trust has been established to help to ensure a celebration of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games across the United Kingdom and to help to create a lasting legacy.

The trust will use £40 million funding endowed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (£6 million), Arts Council England (£5 million), the Big Lottery Fund (£5 million), and the Millennium Commission (£24 million, since been transferred to the Big Lottery Fund) to deliver a programme of cultural and sporting activities at local, regional and national level. The trust will form partnerships with organisations that will deliver the supported programmes.

Following an open competition, the Legacy Trust proposal submitted by a consortium of five organisations was selected as the preferred candidate. The consortium created an independent charitable trust (known as Legacy Trust UK) and a corporate trustee (known as Legacy Trust UK Limited). The corporate trustee is a company limited by guarantee. It worked up a full business case, which the funding bodies were content with. The funding has recently been transferred. It will start operating immediately and distributing the bulk of the funds from 2008 onwards.

The trust plans to support a small number of national programmes, including the UK School Games, the Big Arts Week (working title) and the World Festival of Youth Culture (working title). The remainder of the endowment will be distributed throughout the three nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and the nine English regions. In doing so, it will work closely with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).