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Sport in the Community

My Lords, I suggest to the officials of this august institution that they should think of having meals-on-wheels for those of us who are dedicated enough to speak in two sequential debates lasting over lunchtime. A portaloo might also come in handy, and maybe some of those socks that you get on aeroplanes to stop thrombosis, as I have been wiggling my feet for the past two-and-a-half to three hours. I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Pendry on initiating the debate, and more generally on all the work that he has done, in your Lordships’ House and throughout the country, on the promotion of sport. I declare an interest that overlaps with his, as I am a member of the board of trustees of the Football Foundation. I am a strong believer in the redemptive power of sport to intervene effectively in social communities; it is linked to the traditional position of its importance in the moral education of younger people; and it can help with the health and general well-being of the nation. I shall start with a series of cautionary remarks. Although I appreciate the programmes that the Government have instituted to try to use sport for social ends, there are some cautionary tales that should be borne in mind otherwise some of the policies could easily misfire. First, sport can unite communities, but it can also split them. It can foster solidarity but can lead to something close to hatred between communities or different sections of a community. I am a Tottenham Hotspur supporter—perhaps I should have declared that as a special interest, as that is certainly what it is. I was going to a match against—well, let me say a neighbouring team of some importance. The biggest conflicts are always between close neighbours, as we know. A group of Tottenham supporters, who were on the train, were not only violent looking, but one of them was smashing his fist repeatedly against the window. There was blood all over the window, and the burden of what he was saying was not exactly favourable to the other team. It was a horrible demonstration of what sport can do in dividing communities and creating as many problems as it might resolve. Secondly, sport can help us to overcome class and ethnic divisions, but it can also enshrine and deepen them. I once wrote a dissertation on sport and society in contemporary England. One of the striking things is how accurately sport reflected class divisions. That still continues to some degree today. Some of us are mature enough to remember a time when the descriptions of the cricket players were different. Those who were professionals were not allowed to put their first name or initial on the list, but were known simply by their surnames, and amateurs sometimes had an asterisk by their name and were allowed to include their initial. Sport is riven with social divisions. Since it is a social phenomenon it often directly reflects those divisions. We should think of the division between rugby league and rugby union as a good example of that. Tennis has developed as a middle-class sport. When asking why there have not been many Tim Henmans, the class system of our society is one of the reasons. Question: ““How many players do you have in your tennis club?””. Answer: ““We have 750 tennis players. Well, actually we have 50 because the other 700 are all waiting for courts””. That more or less is the position of tennis, which does not have the facilities that are necessary to generate the kind of world-class performance that we want. Thirdly, sport can reduce gender inequalities. I echo what my noble friend Lord Grantchester said on the importance of this. However, at the same time, it can also embed them. We know that this has been true historically. There are sports that have been considered girls’ sports, and these are often separate from boys’ sports. We know that sport is an emblem of masculinity, an emblem sometimes of aggressiveness, of the differences between the sexes, rather than a phenomenon that unites them. Finally, we all know that competitive sport in particular—and here we must watch the culture of the Olympics—can breed an obsession with success, which can have a very ugly side to it, in terms of players’ behaviour and what athletes are called upon to do. We all know that this has happened when, for example, sport has been too closely controlled by the state. Think of those child gymnasts in eastern Europe and how they were bluntly exploited; they were exploited sexually as well as being harnessed to sport. There are some countries, which I shall not name, where one aspect of such practices seems to continue. When we look at government policy on sport—and this Government have, I think, encouraged sport—we have to bear these considerations in mind, in order to see how far these policies, and those organisations linked to them, are effective. Since 1997 this Government has introduced a plethora of initiatives on sport, including White Papers, taskforces, and so forth; it adds up to quite a lot, I think. My feeling is, and I would like the Minister to comment on this, that it still does not add up to enough. Sport has this immense motivational power, which has barely been tapped. There are so many deserving schemes one could mention that seek to harness this motivational power. I would like to mention just one of them, of which I have been an interested observer: the Charlton Athletic Community Trust. Charlton Athletic FC has been one of the most community conscious of the Premiership clubs and it deserves a pat on the back for that. The project is based in Eltham, where 44 per cent of offenders under the age of 16 say that they lack things to do, and that that is the main reason for their criminal activity. Fifteen per cent of children in Eltham are classified as obese and general health indicators for the area are awful. The kinds of scheme that Charlton Athletic and the Football Foundation have been involved in are massively impressive in trying to enter these areas by means that could not be used otherwise. It is the power of sport that allows them to do this. However, and this applies to a large range of this country’s sport agencies, I feel that we need to gather far more evidence than we presently have as to what is effective. We have a large range of schemes; they look good on paper. They may be good in practice, but often we do not know. It is not enough to have good intentions or to repeat empty propaganda about how good sport is for us. For the reasons I mentioned earlier, a project initiated with very good intentions can rebound and produce the opposite of what was intended. I looked for evidence on the use of sport around the world to further such community objectives as reducing social exclusion, and the evidence is very ambiguous. Some schemes work and some do not. Disturbingly, research from the United States shows that some very well motivated schemes actually increased ethnic tensions. Sometimes the sports involved were seen to be simply for whites and sometimes simply for blacks. Sometimes they re-established a gang culture in the area, being taken over and monopolised by local gangs. We have to be on our guard against this. Generally, I do not think that there is enough evidence about which of those groups set up in this country work and which do not. It is not enough simply to say that we have good intentions. The old bugbear of all government programmes also appears in sport. So many programmes are devoted to social improvement that even those who spend their lives working on them, as I do to some degree, do not know what they all mean or how they relate to each other. In the case of social exclusion, for example, you have sport action zones, health action zones, Sure Start, New Deal for Communities, neighbourhood management, Pathfinders—I could probably go on to name around 70 such organisations. A study of a small town in Cornwall found, I believe, around 70 government initiatives in that one town to help deal with social exclusion, but hardly anybody knew the overall picture. Maybe someone in Government knew, but the people in the local community did not. The Government should integrate its social exclusion policies more effectively. What I said earlier implies, to me, that you cannot just use sport at a local level. It is all very well to have local schemes. The national structure of sport and local sport are intimately connected. If the national structure is corrupt, or even if it reflects the class divisions mentioned earlier, then these things are intimately part of the local community and attempts to change them will be far more difficult if there are not also attempts to change them at a national level. In the case of tennis, for example, many poorer people do not see tennis as a sport for themselves. We need more effective governance in sport. I was pleased to see the report on the FA recently and we need to push ahead with such governance. I give as an example national anti-racist programmes; it is important to support them as they have a very big impact on the local community, not just at a national level. So they should; that is what we want. Finally, I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Grantchester, who talked about the importance of women’s participation in sport. There are now extraordinary differences between this country and the United States. Women’s football is one of the fastest-growing sports in this country, and rightly so, but in the US it is absolutely massive. A recent report from the monitoring organisation that regulates women’s sport in the United States says that for the first time, if you include fitness activities as well as sport, there are more women participating in sport and fitness activities than men—the first society in which this has ever been known. I am not suggesting that this country should aim for a situation where women are more active than men, but we should aim for one where they are as active as men. Because of the stereotypes I mentioned earlier, I think it is necessary to include fitness activity alongside sport; not everyone wants to play competitive sport. Just as important is how far people undertake fitness regimes. I would like to conclude by asking the Minister a few questions. First, how far do we support programmes for which there is no real evidence that they work? Secondly, how far does the Minister agree that there is an over-proliferation of programmes? Thirdly, what are you going to do about women’s sport, especially increasing access to women’s sport among poorer people? It is especially difficult to do this among poorer women.