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Sport in the Community

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for securing this debate on sport in the community in what, after all, has been a very dramatic 12 months for sport in this country. I should start by declaring an interest. I am chairman of Sport England, which was previously known as the English Sports Council, and am involved in a number of other sporting organisations such as UK Sport, the London Marathon Trust and the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. Our success in winning the right to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games was founded on our record of achievement at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester and our demonstrable ability to deliver in a confident way major infrastructure projects such as Terminal 5 at Heathrow and, of course, the new national stadium at Wembley. We have discovered how to do these things. Our national confidence has been further enhanced by successes on the pitch such as that in the Ashes, at rugby and, I hope, in the World Cup next year. There is no doubt that, for these reasons, sport is on the national agenda in a way that it has never been previously. It receives more column inches; it is talked about; and it is seen as central to government policy. The achievements of our sportsmen and women are an inspiration to the whole nation. They are looked up to—mostly—and admired for what they do. They sit at the top of the sporting pyramid and comprise a relatively small cohort probably of between 1,000 and 2,000 people—no more than that. They are truly the elite. However, to maintain success, we have to continue to develop sport at the community level and think about how we serve the other 40 million of us who are not elite athletes. Without the foundations, we cannot produce the winning streak, as it were. We have to build the foundations to build up that elite body. Much has changed in recent years. Of course, sport begins in schools. In the past five years, an enormous effort has been made and great steps taken to redress the decline in participation in primary and secondary schools. We now need to ensure, as our children pass from secondary into further and higher education or directly into work, that pathways exist to sustain the level of participation in which we have invested so much time and effort. Community sport and the continued involvement of young people are based on creating this endowment at school level. It is an endowment on which they can draw for the 60-plus years of the rest of their lives. Regrettably, however, we have the worst drop-off rate in Europe when people leave compulsory education. This is a grave problem which we need to reverse by continuing to provide better information, better facilities, better coaching and stronger clubs. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, was right when he observed that we have had a plethora of initiatives. We have had ““intitiativitis””. We need and are working to bring about systemic change to meet our objectives. I think it is widely agreed that we need to do this because sport is clearly good for a number of reasons, the first of which is health. There is clear evidence now that an active person’s lifetime healthcare costs are 35 per cent lower than those of an active person. We spend several billion pounds a year in this country on Avastatin and Lipitor to control cholesterol. If a little bit of that money were spent on sport, it may have some of the same benefits. We would benefit in education; we would benefit from reduced crime; and it would build cohesion in our communities. However, it must be made clear that we cannot over-promise. A series of initiatives, while they are attractive, is not yet delivering systemic change. But significant steps are being taken to find out how we can bring about this change. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, referred to the most important of them. He made it clear that we have not measured the results of our investment. This is now being rectified. We are putting systems in place across the country to measure the impact of what we do, to determine best practice and to determine what works. To support that objective, various systems have already been developed. The first to which I refer is a website called Active Places. This lists all the sports facilities in England. If noble Lords go to www.activeplaces.com, they will a find a sports centre near them, and all its attributes and activities will be described. As momentum has picked up in recent times, we have started to see more investment going into sport. Significantly, we have seen a large investment from the private sector, which is meeting market need. We have seen continued investment by some local authorities—but only some. Since sport is not part of the CPA, local authorities have often relegated sport to a very low point on their list of priorities. One London borough told me last week, that it had 154 KPIs, of which sport was the 133rd. It is not yet in the right place. But we are continuing to invest. The Government, through the National Lottery and Exchequer funding, have invested more than £2 billion in recent years, and we have seen a renewal and expansion of our infrastructure. That is gradually becoming evident up and down the country. More needs to be done—of course, it always does—but the direction of travel is now right and the investment is going in. In a mixed economy, the diversity of provision is very important at the community level. We have some wonderfully imaginative local authorities, such as Hampshire, which have brought some very innovative products in. In the north of England, if anyone has the time to go to the Bolton Lads and Girls Club, it is a spectacular example of what voluntary work in this country can do. Of course, the independent sector—the David Lloyds and the Esportas—and companies growing out of local authority provision, such as Greenwich Leisure, are all making a tremendous contribution. On top of that are the governing bodies themselves, and I pay a particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for his work in the Football Foundation, which has been a shining example of a sport taking seriously its responsibility to the community. It is interesting to note the work of the Cricket Foundation, which will follow on from that. Collectively we have seen an investment of several billion pounds in recent years. The infrastructure is being put in place—and no doubt the Olympic pull factor will see more of that. On the next critical issue, which is that of coaching, having good buildings is worth nothing if you cannot transform people’s performance within them. I acknowledge the work of my predecessor, Sir Trevor Brooking, who observed that the best way in which to keep people engaged in sport was to give them a good experience based on improving their skills. Therefore, access to high quality coaching is crucial. It is no good just letting people kick a ball around; we have to find a way in which to improve skills in every sport. In the past 12 months, 600 more coaches have gone into the system; by 2006–07, there will be a further 3,000 coaches, and we shall continue to build on that. There are a lot of key players in delivering community sport. I have mentioned local authorities, the private sector, the leisure providers and so on. What is interesting and striking in recent times is the increasing professionalism that has come into sport. Even in my short time in sport I can remember the spectre of men in blazers. Someone said to me last night that when you thought back to the image of rugby, you thought of fat blokes fighting in a field. People’s concept of competition was of men and women running fast. Professionalism has come into the organisations. Management has been brought in to deal with the wall of money that has come through sponsorship, which has been dealt with very responsibly; and those management skills are being used not only to get money into the sport but to deploy it down to the community level, as organisations such as the Football Foundation are able to do. All our activity for sport after school comes together in the heartland of sport, which is the club system. Our nation’s capacity to deliver winners is based on the unceasing and tireless activities of volunteers. Everything would collapse unless we had those volunteers—and last year we welcomed it particularly when the Chancellor incepted the Russell Commission, which looked into volunteering. It emerges that sport is the major volunteering activity, and moves are afoot to strengthen and build on that and to get some cohesion back into some communities through the efforts of people in those communities. Volunteering is the single greatest force in delivering community cohesion and inclusion. As other noble Lords have noted, the key is how we get it into the most deprived communities, which do not necessarily have the ability to self-organise—but showing the way can do that. We are seeing a fundamental change, based on management, directed investment and something systemic going on. But to move from the general to the specific, I want to share what happened to me yesterday evening, when I crossed the river to Lambeth—always rather a dangerous journey for a north Londoner. I was able to see and participate in one of the most exciting schemes that I have seen in many years. The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, referred to it—it is called the Positive Future scheme, and it has been funded in the best way of good schemes, by a number of committed partners, including the Home Office, the Football Foundation and, to a lesser degree, Sport England. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, is not here to hear this—but it is a programme that is proved to work. Some 80,000 young people have been through these schemes, and I wish that noble Lords could have been with me last night to watch the confidence with which those young people performed. They were not professional; they were young people being shown the way to do things, whether it was to be coached to play football better or to street-dance. There were no divisions along the lines of gender or race, and I could see none along the lines of class. It was truly a melting pot that worked and which, above all, gave people that confidence. As I left, I thought that if I was thinking of developing yet another career, I would be privileged to go over there and be a talent manager for some of them, because it was absolutely fantastic. So what I wanted to report from the front line is that community sport is systematically being reformed. It started in schools, where much more investment is going. Rebuilding the community, as many people have said today, is going on apace. That does not mean we are doing enough—we certainly need to get a lot more done—but people’s lives are being improved, and that is what this is all about. It is the power of sport reaching out to show people they can do things. It underpins our claims to be a great sporting nation and to be able to run the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics well—and, hopefully, subsequently to get the right to run the World Cup. This is an exciting time to be in sport. It is on the move at the community level, and will continue to deliver for this country.