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Sport

My Lords, I shall be brief because, until an hour or two ago, at this time I was due to meet none other than Richard Caborn, the Minister for Sport. Therefore, I did not expect to be here but I got a message at about 12 o’clock saying that there was no meeting. I cannot quite work out why, but things are changing around this place. I take this opportunity to thank my very good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for initiating this debate. He and I have debated sport together for as long as we have been in your Lordships’ House, and I have always enjoyed it. He has done a great deal of work, both long before I came here when I worked at the Sports Council for Northern Ireland, among other things, and when he was the Minister for Sport. His life has been tied up with the subject and he has promoted all sorts of things, and, for that, we thank him. I have tried to follow him in some ways. I do not necessarily go along totally with his eulogy of what the Labour Government have done for sport over the past 10 years, as I think that there is still a great deal to do. Certainly, we were successful in bidding for the Olympic Games, but that was a joint party effort. We were delighted to support the Government in that and it was, indeed, a wonderful achievement, but we now have to see that achievement turn into something very special. Although I shall not talk about the Olympic Games today, I have considerable concerns about certain things that are—or, rather, are not—happening. When we debated the Bill, we warned of the dangers of too much bureaucracy and too much oversight and of taking too long to make the commercial decisions that need to be taken sharply and quickly on the ground. There has been too much interference from government and I hope that, under the new regime, we can look forward to some streamlining and speeding up. Today, I want to talk about the younger section of our communities—children and young people. That came to my mind when I was in the City at a charity do for the Voices Foundation, which is run by a very forceful and competent star called Lady Eatwell. The charity goes into schools and gets all the schoolchildren singing. It teaches the teachers and head teachers how to get involved with the children and it gets everyone to sing together. We were greeted by a large group of young coloured children from a north London school and it was all very impressive. Lady Eatwell said that she had been in something like 25,000 schools. The charity’s objective is to stop what I suggest is one of the greatest social ills in this country—indiscipline in schools. I refer to children who do not turn up for school and to the fighting, stabbing and other horrible things that go on in too many schools. No doubt like the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, I was fortunate in that, when I was at school during the war, there was plenty of space. In the summer, we had an old tennis ball, a stick and a bit of wood that acted as a cricket stump and space to hit the ball, run after it, catch and throw it. In the winter, we had space to kick footballs around in the open. Having spoken in the past to people such as Freddie Truman, I know that in the inner cities and urban areas, the streets were empty. They were not full of cars or people and there was less chance of breaking glass. Children hit cricket balls in the streets outside their homes and they kicked footballs. They had freedom to express themselves and space to play. I believe it is time that the Department of Education, in particular, got its act together. I have spoken in a different vein in different debates about trying to get cross-governmental initiatives going, linking the environment, schools and parts of the Home Office. That has not happened, and I have not read a single thing to suggest that it is even being thought about. We could even take sport into prisons. Now that prisons are overcrowded, I suspect that the inmates are having difficulty in finding a lavatory, let alone kicking a ball, and that is not good. On the other side of the coin, I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, said about having more play areas than we had 10 years ago, but those are formalised play areas and they do not provide the same freedom. They are tightly controlled because of health and safety laws and because people are frightened of taking chances and letting children climb on apparatus when there is a risk of them falling. The same applies to taking children out into the mountains. I spent several years teaching young people to climb and live in the mountains. I taught them to rock-climb, cave, abseil and so on. In the event, it did not happen but, if one of my chaps had slipped and broken his leg, I would not have expected to have a court case brought against me for ignoring rule this, that or the other. In fact, I wrote the rules on safety in canoeing for the services, and, to some extent, with Chris Bonington and others, I did the same in relation to climbing. People were free then to go and have adventures. That time has now gone but I submit that it must come back, and it is part of sport and games. I move on to the subject of political correctness and the management of young people. Noble Lords will remember the teachers’ strike that occurred years ago, when all after-school games stopped. Suddenly sport was cut off from all schoolchildren. We still do not have serious commitment on a large enough scale from the Government. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, say that under this Government 80 per cent of children now have two hours of PE a week, but what good is that? I agree that the situation is a lot better than it was. When we debated this a year ago, I think that the figure was around 50 per cent, but it is still at nothing like the level that we would like to see. Kids should be playing games and sport every day. They should be having five or six hours of PE a week, with opportunities on Saturdays for club games at a junior level. That does not happen in this country, although it does in others, and there is a great need for it. We also have sport for disabled people, which is going well. It has a huge impact on the disabled society and, hence, on their carers. I declare an interest as chairman of the Paralympic World Cup, which takes place once a year at the Commonwealth Games facilities in Manchester. This year, more than 400 athletes will be competing from 44 countries. It is fantastic to see these disabled people playing wheelchair basketball, riding bicycles in a velodrome—racing at over 60 miles an hour on tandems with a visually handicapped person on the back—swimming or running in athletics with one leg and a stick. We need much more of this and we need more input from government. At the meeting that I was due to have with Richard Caborn today, I intended to get him to push the BBC to underwrite more coverage for us, but the BBC is pulling back and reducing what it does for disabled sport. Where are we going on this? I am sure that Richard would have helped me if he had been able to attend the meeting. I do not have time to go on to my last point, so I shall sit down.