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Sport

My Lords, as always, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, who regularly brings the subject of sport to the attention of Parliament. Politicians are probably the last people who should debate sport because they are only the group I know who would rather discuss their poll returns than the score of their local football team. Politicians do not often get involved for the simple reason that when everyone else is watching or taking part in sport, they are attending branch and ward meetings and going out delivering leaflets. It is one of the reasons why we often do not connect with them so, by bringing the subject of sport to the attention of the House, the noble Lord does us a service. Those of us who here today are probably in a minority among our colleagues. People cannot ignore the idea of sport as a function of society. Even if they are not that interested, they must be aware of it. While scanning through a paper for articles which other people will not read, they will find a great chunk of the back pages given over to sporting activity. Sport must be brought into other fields of interest, such as health. Obesity is one of the great watchwords of our health agenda at the moment, and how the two correlate must be obvious to everyone involved. I am not exactly sure who the Minister is today. Today is a bad day to be the duty Whip and speak in a debate to find out exactly who will be dealing with the answer. However, any Minister—and I believe that we now have a Minister for Fitness—will have to see the correlation between physical activity and health and the problem of obesity. We now live in a society where it is possible not to walk or cycle anywhere. I will not talk too much about rugby, but the parliamentary rugby team will have the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, back any time he wants. The parliamentary rugby team is rather like a methadone programme for players who are too old. If we take the obesity issue and the idea of physical activity together, we get an idea of what can be brought together and what we can achieve. We must get people taking part in recreational or health activities. It is a lot easier to do if they have a tradition—I believe the technical term is muscle memory—of physical activity in the first place. If you get people who have been actively involved in sporting and physical recreation early in their lives, they will find it easier to carry on with less intensive activities later on. They will have a better idea about what to eat and what not to eat because they will know what it does to them. Also, we must try to get more rationality about what happens when we consume food. I have heard some very odd things in this Chamber about the consumption of food by the body, such as the idea that you can burn up fat and protein only when you are actually taking part in exercise and not when your body is rebuilding the muscle that you have broken down over the course of exercise. The fact that some of our colleagues do not actually understand that is rather worrying. A hamburger is apparently poison and not a pound of ground up meat held together with some egg. That is what I have heard in the Chamber. A degree of awareness is required by those around us and outside. Physical activity can develop that awareness. What can we do to achieve that? We must try to get people actively involved earlier. I have flogged to death the analogy of bad coaching from the film ““Kes””. There is a famous football match in that film where people stand around freezing while the games teacher goes off on an ego trip fantasising about being his favourite sports star. I took that a stage further when the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, was sitting where the noble Lord, Lord Davies, is now. After a couple of looks from him, being a non-sporting person, as he put it himself, I extended the analogy to describe a person who played on the wing at rugby, freezing cold and not involved, but this time terrified that the ball would come anywhere near him. Bad coaching is probably the greatest enemy of an effective sporting culture. If you do it badly initially, you will stop people altogether. So what do we look for from our schools and our teachers? We must make them be involved. The sad fact of the matter is that early years teaching is dominated by women, who have the highest drop-out and non-participation rates in sport. No matter what you do with teacher training, you cannot make up for the lack of 13,000 years’ experience, or whatever it was, as Pat Duffy pointed out to us in one of the most recent meetings of the All-Party Parliamentary Sport Group. A group that does not have the experience of exercise, training and coaching is probably the worst group to give that experience to somebody else. They do not know what they are doing and do not have the enthusiasm; you are effectively asking somebody who is bilingual in English and French to speak Spanish. You are asking them to do too much. We must bring in special coaching and support, which means getting coaching and support into an area where it has not traditionally gone—the early years of education. The Government have undertaken a great deal of activity to correct the hole left in the sporting structure as the unintended result of education reforms under the previous Conservative Government. However, let us not kid ourselves that what they got rid of was that great; indeed, they may have done us a long-term favour, because the natural fourth team touch judge being put in charge of the lower third second XI may not have been the best scenario for avoiding that ““Kes””-like football match. But it was what was there and when it went there was nothing. Then we undervalued the sporting structure that went with it, such as the playing fields. The current Government may have stopped and even slightly reversed that process now, but they took their time. Fair’s fair—and now we are taking the situation seriously. But are we going to invest in coaching at the early years, by bringing in specialists? Are we going to ensure that participation coaching is available in the club-school link? That is very well established; it has to be there and everyone is agreed that it has to be there. What are we asking for here? As I have said before in this Chamber, what are we doing to ensure that training is easily available in participation coaching, junior level coaching, and coaching for adult teams? We forget that if you invest in school sports education, you should ensure that people carry on playing into adult life. We often forget that having 13 year-olds running around looking enthusiastic on an afternoon does not really matter much if by the age of 17 they have stopped. It may be easy for them to pick it up again later on but, if they do not, you have still lost your health investment and the long-term costs to the NHS are still going to be there. Why are we not making sure that colleges are getting a benefit from the Department of Health or somebody else to ensure that courses are available for coaching for which people do not have to pay? These have been cut back because the priority is on qualifications to get people into jobs. There has been a great deal of pressure in this area over time, so why are we not addressing the matter more keenly now? Will the Minister give us an idea of how this is developing? That pressure has been recognised, so can we make sure that we have development in coaching going the whole way through education? Education about the health benefits of sporting activity is vital. Parents should be reminded again that their children getting a cut knee is not fatal and that healing is pretty universal. Children will develop and go on, so parents should not be frightened of them getting the odd bump and bang. If serious injury can be avoided or the risk of serious injury can be cut down to an acceptable minimum—and we should remember the words of the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, on this matter—they will be healthy, stronger and fitter for the rest of their lives. They will have a chance to benefit from the social inclusion of sporting activity later in life and a chance to mix with adults. If we can do this and support them, we will go on, but we have lost a degree of infrastructure and have to reinvent another. The state will have to pump-prime this—and I would hope that when the Minister responds to this debate he will give us a vision of how we are going to guarantee that the activities of his Government and the voluntary sectors are carried on to the next stage. The emergency repair work may have been done, but we must take it on to the next level.