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Sport and Physical Education

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for introducing this subject again. Indeed, one feels that without him doing this no one else would, so we owe him an extra vote of thanks. On that little exchange at the end, I liked what the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, said about nurturing people and bringing them on. There is always a great danger with certain sports that you rely on the lucky and the brilliant. There will always be a few of those and they can cover up enormous faults in any sporting structure, so we must look at the overall number of people. I would be rather more impressed by tennis if it got five people into the top 100 than if it produced one person who won a Grand Slam. That is just an aside. Two things come across that show why we should pay attention to sport and physical recreation. One is that it is good for us. As numerous noble Lords have said, having fit and healthy people will save us quite a lot of money in terms of the National Health Service. The other is that it is fun. If you bring those two facts together, you ask, ““Why don’t we put more into it?””. I do not know the answer, but I have a theory that the people who run political parties, the backroom boys, do not really appreciate sport. Indeed, when the Conservative Government introduced some well meant educational changes, they demolished the school sports structure unintentionally, because, when teachers counted their hours, the old structure broke down of, ““Oh, you play for the fourth team in whatever sport it is; you’re on the school’s second team””, although often without proper training. It was, let’s face it, not brilliantly organised and probably failed many present-day health and safety standards. It should have gone away, but not with the crash and bang with which it went. The disappearance of school playing fields is probably another part of the same process. The Government can take credit for stopping the sale of school playing fields. I would be rather more impressed if they had brought the process to a grinding halt as opposed to slowing it down over several years and only just having stopped it. If they are boasting about it, I would listen more intently if there had been a grinding halt and then a rapid reversal. However, we are where we are. Sporting structures are now having attention paid to them, possibly because of the fact that there was a small crisis in that area. Particularly in school-age sport, we have made great strides forward. The real question about the dozens of schemes that the Government brought out—I probably will not get an answer today—is which ones did not work best and which ones worked well. It would be interesting to get that answer. They cannot all have been great successes, although they are easy to market. You get a bunch of children and you say, ““Right, run around in front of a camera with the politician or the sports star and look terribly enthusiastic, and we’ll get a lovely launch””. Then you have increased participation figures. But how many carry on? Where does it go? What happens? As has been mentioned, it is quite easy, if you shout at enough people in schools, especially the more pliant or enthusiastic ones, to produce a fitter, healthier bunch of, say, 14 year-olds. The problem is around the age of 19 or 20 and with adults from there on in. That is the group that we are failing. It is about the interface between the organisation of school and adult life. Perhaps we should not feel too bad about that. My own sport of Rugby Union, for example, is probably the worst in terms of a school’s prestige among prestige schools. You would have a rugger team. You took a small bunch of people and drilled them like automatons to be good at a sport. After they achieved a degree of success, you paraded them around like trophies, more or less put them in the cabinet on the wall and said, ““Aren’t we good?””. I have met at least half a dozen Rugby Union schoolboy internationals who refused to play the game again after leaving school as a result of that attitude. It is a real danger. Why? If it is not made fun, it is not taken on. Modern training structures have been developed and, for most games, there are now shorter, easier, less technical versions—Rugby Union started to develop them before most, but tennis and cricket have followed. They aim to get people involved earlier and build up their participation levels so that they enjoy the sport, the process of being involved and the competition, and find out what they want to do. That is a vital part of building the success of the strategy. If the Government can tell us which schemes are working on that level of success, they will have taken a major step forward. A few years ago, I produced my party’s sport policy development paper. It came just after that of the Government and just before that of the Conservative Party. The pages of those three documents were not interchangeable, but they were not far off. We all spoke to the same people and came up with the same findings: that the school model had some capacity, albeit that it was concentrated on those of school age, that we should get clubs involved so that people continued afterwards and that we should make sure that the coaching capacity existed. How that is delivered is the big question. Let us not forget that sport can be used to divert people from other activities. Late-night soccer centres in places such as Cardiff have taken young men off street corners and allowed them to play sport at non-traditional times under floodlights. It has cut down street violence and crime. Sport can be used to that end. However, one wants people playing sport primarily because they are enjoying it, getting a buzz and forming teams. What are we doing about sport for disabled people and how does it fit into the structure of what is going on? The Olympics have provided a huge impetus to sport by pushing it right up the agenda and making it a more serious matter. It receives more attention. Perhaps it is just my imagination, but I think that more money, attention and political kudos now surround sport in this country. How are we cashing in on that? A huge part of the Olympics—indeed, half of it—is the Paralympic Games. I have received a briefing from Action for Blind People, which asks, first, how we are making sure that people with sight impairment can take part in sport and, secondly, whether we have looked at how we can integrate them more successfully into certain types of sport. For example, brighter-coloured balls could be used for those who are partially sighted. Certain levels of integration can be achieved. What is being done? What model are we using to bring those people together? What is the emphasis? Do the Government have an overall strategy, or is it just growing piecemeal in various sports and to various unofficial lengths? Having been rather rude about my own sport of rugby, I draw the Government’s attention to a good scheme that the Rugby Football Union has brought forward called Go Play Rugby. It was marketed to 16 to 24 year-olds. I was not aware of it. It started at around the time of the World Cup and was probably helped by England’s surprising progress to the semi-finals—I usually cheer more loudly for Scotland, but there we are. The scheme aimed to get 6,000 people playing rugby again—people who had received training before but had dropped out. It managed to get over 9,000 people, of whom I think 840 were women. There was another scheme called, I think, Carry on Playing—it cannot be that, but I cannot remember its exact name—to monitor retention of players. The scheme marketed to an exact group, and then there were people at the clubs to receive people and look after them when they turned up asking to play. Everybody who has played a sport knows what it is like going into a new sporting club. If you happen to meet the right person, you feel welcomed; if you do not, you feel like a social leper, with the idea that you will never get out of that fifth team no matter what you do. Let’s face it, it happens. If Rugby Union can run such a scheme and have a series of pathfinder groups and support for coaches and others to get people into the game, why cannot other sports do it? They should look at and learn from that scheme. Have the Government been briefed about the project? I did not get a chance to speak to the Minister before the debate. Are they aware of the scheme and have they looked to see whether it can be used as a model to reach that group with which we traditionally have the worst links and to say to it, ““Yes, it’s okay to come out and play sport””? Part of the marketing was to say, ““Find rugby, find some dates””. It is a social network that could relate to any sporting activity, or certainly to team games. You have to be able to relate socially at a certain level to be able to do a sport; you have a group of people whom you have met already and you go out with them. That social network has been part of most people’s participation in sport in the past. Also, the more people you get playing those sports, the wealthier the sports become, because they draw their income at grass-roots level from their participants. It is that simple. If you get people involved, you get more money. Ultimately, the Government might even have to spend slightly less money if they pump-prime these projects. I hope that the Minister can give us a positive answer. If he is not aware of the scheme, he might like to go with me to talk to the RFU about it. Other members of the Government are, of course, aware of it. Perhaps we could take on this model and go further with it. We could see how relevant it is and how it should be developed in future. A great deal of effort has gone into various schemes, but we do not always report back on those that do not work. Here is one that seems to have started well and whose progress is being monitored. Can we find out what it is doing? If it is a successful model for that difficult-to-hit group—the one with the biggest wastage—it should be developed, and developed for other sports. The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, is always entertaining, but his description of the sports bureaucracy is one with which I am afraid nobody can disagree. Indeed, I think that he slightly underplayed it, to be honest. But this scheme seems to be comparatively simple and is organised within one sport. I hope that all those groups involved, such as CCPR and Sport England, will be able to come behind it and develop it. Will the Minister give a positive response to this suggestion and encourage his colleagues in government to look at it and at the models around it? Unless we establish finally what does and does not work, we can carry on with our scattergun approach—okay, a lot of effort has been made—but we will not maximise our return unless we really concentrate.