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Sport in the Community

My Lords, I am glad to be the first to thank the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for initiating this debate. He brought to us his unrivalled experience of sport—mainly mainstream sport—although at the end, when he got on to the subject of canoeists, he touched on the kind of things that I want to talk about. I want to speak about those sports which principally take place in the natural environment. They are essentially non-competitive and tend to take place in wild and sometimes hazardous environments. It is that which makes them attractive. I am thinking mainly of mountaineering and rock-climbing; but also, for example, canoeing—which the noble Lord talked about—sailing and even serious hill walking. They are popular. The British Mountaineering Council, for example, had a membership of 56,000 in 2001. A 1993 survey by Mintel reckoned that 700,000 people participated in mountaineering. I must say that I find that quite difficult to believe, but that is what they said. Mountaineers and rock climbers are important to tourism, and therefore to the economies of our hill farming areas—a currently highly relevant point, given the depression in hill farming. They are not spectator sports, but they are practised by young and old. For the purposes of our debate today, I will concentrate on the forms of the sports as practised by young people. First and foremost, they are healthy activities—an important point in an age of increasing obesity. They are attractive to young people because they are adventurous. I would suggest that man is an explorer by nature, and this is particularly true of the young—pushing into the unknown, testing their limits. Young people need adventure. Some years ago, the late Lord Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine, John Hunt of Everest—the first director of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme—chaired a group which produced a report on the need for young people to have adventure. This led to the Campaign for Adventure, the subtitle of which was ““Risk and Enterprise in Society””. Its objective is to influence public attitudes to risk, fostering an attitude that chance, uncertainty, hazard and risk are inescapable dimensions of the human experience. John Hunt believed—as did others including myself—that there was no better way of creating good citizens and promoting a vigorous and enterprising society than by introducing young people to adventure, to identify and manage risk. Mountaineering and rock-climbing are a splendid way of doing this. Regretfully, we live in an increasingly feather-bedded and risk-averse society. We are increasingly litigious. If something goes wrong, them someone must be to blame. If someone can be sued, we are invited to call a lawyer. We are told that schoolteachers and others are becoming increasingly reluctant to take young people on adventurous activities. We are told that insurance arrangements are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive. We will shortly have before us the Compensation Bill. Whether it will make this particular situation better or worse I do not know; I suspect the Minister will not wish to be drawn on that at this stage, and I can quite understand why. It may be important to us, however. Against that background, I wish to draw attention to two problems which I find worrying. They are quite different, but both could be said to reflect the law of unintended consequences. The first is a draft directive from Brussels called the ““Working at Heights”” directive. It is to be fleshed out with detailed rules and best practice by the Health and Safety Commission. The directive is, of course, directed at safety rules for high buildings and that sort of thing. The commission takes the view, however, that it must also apply to activities in the natural environment; for example, rock climbing, and even hill walking in difficult country. It maintains this view in spite of a clear opinion from Treasury counsel, commissioned by the Government, which said that there was nothing to prevent these sorts of activities being excluded and treated separately. The Health and Safety Commission appears to be unwilling to listen to this professional advice from practitioners. Indeed, some of its proposed rules for best practice could, in certain circumstances, be positively dangerous. If the difference between industrial buildings and the natural environment in not recognised, I suggest two things will happen. First, many of the outdoor pursuits organisations, such as local education authorities, the Outward Bound Trust, the professional guides and, perhaps most important of all, the Mountain Leader Training boards, will have to alter, or even restrict, their activities. Secondly, as a consequence, the number of untrained young people going into the hills will perhaps increase and, inevitably, so will the number of accidents. The second point is quite different. It concerns a knock-on effect of the 2012 Olympics. It appears, so I am told, that UK Sport is shortly to withdraw funding from all non-Olympic sports. In the field of mountaineering and the related activities, I have singled out two which will be badly hit, but I think there are another four or five in the same boat. One is Mountain Leader Training UK, which is the lead body for accredited training. Apparently, if grants came not from UK Sport but from Sport England, that would be perfectly okay—I do not understand the niceties. Another is the British Mountaineering Council. The sums of money involved, when set against the astronomical costs of 2012, are tiny. It is £28,000 a year for mountain leader training. We all want, do we not, to get young people out into the hills, to adventure, and to do so safely? They need to be taught, and the teachers themselves need to be trained in mountain craft. Do we really want to play with safety training like this, by eliminating such a modest but vital grant? The British Mountaineering Council gets a grant of £40,000, and uses it to make grants to people and groups organising mountaineering expeditions to the greater ranges; the Himalayas, the Andes and so forth. The withdrawal of this funding may be devastating. It is ironic that we who invented the sport of mountaineering in the Alps 150 years ago and then explored the greater ranges, and we who made the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 and have continued to be among the world leaders in international mountaineering, should sweep all this experience and history aside. As I said, both are sad examples of the law of unintended consequences. The last thing I want to do is to end my remarks on a sour, carping note. Mountaineers are a resilient breed. They are not whingers. They are independent and highly distrustful of bureaucracy and, indeed, of the nanny state. We hate rules; we cherish independence. That is why I and others like me, such as Lord Hunt or, today, Sir Chris Bonington, regard it as so important that young people should also have the sort of experience we were lucky to have when we were young. This sounds rather pompous, but surely this is how we should train young people for citizenship.