Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-51)
MR FRANCIS
BARON, MR
BRIAN BARWICK,
MR DAVID
COLLIER AND
MR JOHN
CROWTHER
5 APRIL 2005
Q40 Alan Keen: There seems to be little
organisation in this country of veteran sports. Have you any thoughts
on that? My theory is that you should be able to encourage people
to play sports for longer—and you will not lose administrators
and coaches—and they have usually got a surplus of cash
rather than a shortage of cash that people have in their twenties
and maybe their thirties when they have got young families. I
still play football and cricket. When I lose my pace and agility,
should I play tennis?
Mr Barwick: What position do you
play?
Q41 Alan Keen: I am a full back.
Mr Collier: There are a growing
number of veteran sides in all sports. I think one of the issues
we have found is that, as veteran sides agree, those people who
are normally the very same people who will be coaching, umpiring,
and supporting youth sides, can do both? I think one of the great
developments that have happened is what we call "badger"
sides in different sports, which is a mix of youngsters and veterans.
That is where the people who can put back into the game at veteran
level are working with the youngsters as well and I think that
is a tremendous initiative that needs to be encouraged.
Mr Barwick: One of the messages
coming over loud and clear is just the volume of people who are
participating in sport, be it playing or actually watching or
administrating it. It is an opportunity not to be lost by the
other side of this table. Sport is a real passion in this country.
I was in Sydney on the evening England won the Rugby World Cup
and it was a fantastic moment. Whether you like or love sport,
it was truly a wonderful nation embracing moment. That is what
sport can give you.
Q42 Mr Hawkins: I was very worried to
hear about the dropping to zero in 2008 of the community cricket
grant funding. What justification was offered when you challenged
this on behalf of cricket, David?
Mr Collier: As has been said earlier,
we have got a meeting with Lord Carter on April 14 and clearly
that will be one of the topics that we will be exploring. I think
one of the things that we were surprised about was some of the
announcements of funding prior to us all launching our strategic
plans. For instance, in cricket we are launching our strategic
plan, which is all embracing, on April 19 and that will be a plan
where we are talking about building partnerships from the playground
to test arenas, so it is right from the league programmes through
to all of the grass-roots programmes. Clearly things like the
Community Development Programme are absolutely critical for us
and so is the Safer Sports Grounds Programme, so it is a continuum
between the Active Sports Programme and whatever replaces it.
Those are the sorts of initiatives that we need to explore, but
we do need a total step change in the funding. For instance, if
we are talking about £7 million a year, that is £150,000
a county. That is not going to make a step change in our funding.
If we talk about £20 million, for each of us that is one
County Development Officer per county. We need to make a real
step change if we are going to address the obesity agenda and
if we are going to address the social agendas that I think is
in our mutual interests to do so.
Q43 Mr Hawkins: I completely agree with
you about that. There is one other issue that I would be grateful
if any or all of you would comment on, which is the worry I have
had over all my years in Parliament that it is quite often easier
to get money, particularly since the introduction of the National
Lottery, for new capital facilities, bright new buildings that
everybody can happily pose in front of when they are launched,
but the revenue funding is often a problem. What I have noticed
in constituencies both in the north and in the south is that after
a while, if the burden then falls on hard pressed small local
authorities, it is very difficult for those facilities to be kept
up. Would you agree with me that what you need is not only the
continuity of funding in the long-term planning over at least
four years for the sports nationally, but you also need the opportunity
for revenue funding of facilities to be seen as just as important,
if not more important, than the provision of the new capital costs?
Mr Barwick: In football, for example,
75% of it is played on public pitches, that is actually a total
of 45,000 pitches. In 2003 the Football Foundation and the FA
did a Domesday Book survey and worked out that it would cost something
in the region of £2 billion to bring those pitches and the
changing rooms and the accommodation that goes with them up to
scratch to keep them level and useable. That is how far the step
change needs to go in my sport.
Mr Baron: I think the point you
make is a very good one. You cannot have capital without revenue
expenditure but, equally, there is no point in allocating revenue
expenditure if you have not got the right facilities to attract
people, so the two go together. Following on from what Brian said,
in our written evidence to this Committee we have, as far as Rugby
Union is concerned, estimated that we need, in investment in facilities
terms, something like £400 million over the next eight to
10 years. That is a scale of investment that we know we need to
make a difference in terms of participation and all the other
things. In our sport women's rugby is growing very strongly, but
as more and more clubs start up women's sections clearly you need
to invest in the facilities because you need separate facilities
for the obvious reason. We cannot extend the programme of inclusiveness
or widen the base of our sport unless we do have this commitment
to significant long-term investment in the sport. Going back to
the frustration point, when you are asked to produce a four year
whole sport plan inevitably you are talking about long-term programmes
to deliver your objectives and when the response is "We will
give you one year's money" it just makes a joke of the system.
You cannot have a long-term plan with no long-term funding commitment.
We are all wasting our time in producing the documents.
Mr Crowther: From a tennis point
of view, just to get parity with France on the number of indoor
courts we need £1.2 billion and at the current rate of funding
it is going to take us 133 years. I know a lot of people just
think of Wimbledon for two weeks of the year but tennis is a 12
month sport and we do need indoor courts. The importance of revenue
funding that you make is a very good one. We have built, in partnership
with 53 local authorities, indoor tennis centres around the country
since 1986 and in each particular indoor tennis centre we have
a tennis development officer. Revenue has to go hand in hand with
capital.
Mr Barwick: I think there has
to be, as we have properly illustrated across the table, a huge
step change in investment.
Q44 Chris Bryant: It is great to have
the William Webb Ellis trophy sitting there, although I see it
as something of a provocation. I do not draw the same conclusion
as Mr Baron. The words that spring to mind are more "How
the mighty have fallen". There seems to me to be two things
that you have in common. One is that you are all big businesses.
You talked about the £5 billion that you contribute to the
Exchequer and so on. Some people watching this might feel that
it has been a bit of a whinge from you. As big business should
you not be putting more into community sport because it is very
well to say if we were to catch up with France in terms of indoor
provision we would have to pay £1.2 billion, but the French
taxpayer pays 47% in taxes and you are arguing that you should
be exempt from corporation tax? I just wonder quite what your
real contribution to community sport is.
Mr Crowther: One hundred per cent
of the profits that we get from the Wimbledon championships are
re-invested back into British tennis, of which approximately 50%,
£15 million, was invested in community sport. We can show
justification as to why we think the LTA is doing the sort of
job it should be doing with community sport. Let me just add a
point on taxation. I think one of the arguments that we would
say is that in health at the moment my understanding is that the
under-spend in the health department was greater than the whole
budget in DCMS last year. At the moment the Department of Health
spend £1 on prevention and £80 on cure. If they were
to spend £4 on prevention, that is where we say sport and
physical recreation comes in, they would only have to spend £65
per head on cure. It is that type of message that we wish to get
across.
Mr Barwick: Football is often
looked upon as a wealthy sport. I think it is important to point
out that English football does more than any other nation in Europe
to re-distribute its money around the game. If you look at our
competitors in Italy and Spain, for example, we are way ahead
in terms of re-distribution. The contribution that football itself
makes to grass-roots and community sports is very significant.
The FA and the Premier League have both given £20 million
per year to the Football Foundation since 2001. The FA Cup prize
and TV funds distributed £22 million to clubs last year,
both grass-roots and professional.
Q45 Chris Bryant: Can you give the percentage
figures that that represents?
Mr Barwick: Of the industry?
Q46 Chris Bryant: Yes.
Mr Collier: I can give you the
percentage figures for cricket. We were set a target in 1999 of
5% of our funding going directly back into grass-roots and community
cricket. That compares with the 8% invested by Cricket Australia,
for example. As of last year, 2004, ECB and cricket invested 16.1%
of our total income into grass-roots and community programmes.
So we have more than trebled the target we were set and we have
more than doubled the amount that Cricket Australia puts in. We
are trying to self-help. You are absolutely right, we want to
help. The plan that we are launching on April 19 will further
show what we are doing for community sport and what we are doing
at the top end for successful England teams because those two
also go together. Without a successful England team we do not
encourage the next generation.
Q47 Chris Bryant: That is my concern.
I look at all the community clubs in my constituency and some
of them are not represented because the most successful one is
the Rhondda Rebels who have won all the women's basketball competitions
for years now. The struggles that they all have are often not
only with the local authority, they are with you, they are with
the governing bodies, and they find you overly bureaucratic, overly
interested in commercial success rather than anything else.
Mr Baron: As far as the RFU is
concerned and rugby in England, I think, firstly, financially
we are a small organisation, not a big organisation and if you
look at the balance sheets of the RFU, LTA, FA and ECB, you would
be surprised to see how small we are financially. We do not have
large financial resources and reserves of the scale needed to
make the step change we are talking about in terms of investment
into sport going forward. In terms of our sport, we allocate every
penny, other than small reserves that we keep in our balance sheet,
to investment in the development of community sport and community
gain. We ring-fence that amount of commercial revenues that goes
to the professional end of our game, the Zurich Premiership, and
they only get access to the television money that the league generates
itself and a small proportion of central revenues which is related
to England internationals and sponsorship. Last year our turnover
was £70 million. Of that £70 million, only about £8
million goes into "elite" sport and the rest is targeted
at the investment programme and expenditure to support the community
game.
Q48 Chris Bryant: You may recall in my
grammar earlier on I said there were two things that united you
and the other is that you are four of the big sports that are
predominantly played by men. Tennis is getting closer but it is
still a higher percentage is men than women. There is only one
sport in Britain which is equally participated in by women and
men and that is swimming, and we did a separate inquiry on swimming
some time ago. I just wonder whether you would like to say something
about the fact that 37% of men in Britain participate in sport
of some kind to an active degree and only 24% of women participate.
It is equally important we get women engaged. I wonder what you
do to increase participation by women because my women's rugby
clubs locally have had terrible difficulties in gaining acceptance
by the WRU. Would you consider inviting a couple of the other
sports that have wider participation amongst women into your big
four group, as you called it earlier?
Mr Barwick: Certainly the Football
Association and football in general is incredibly proud of the
growth in the number of women and girls playing football. I went
to see the senior team play Italy at Milton Keynes three weeks
ago, a game England won 4-1 and great preparation for Euro 2005.
I spoke to the coach after the game, Hope Powell, and she was
enthusing at the growth in the level of interest in the game,
the level of growth in participation, quality, skill, talent,
and girls coming to the game and staying with the game and we
are incredibly proud of this. We do think that being able to host
Euro 2005, an eight-team tournament, which we hope England will
do very well in, will be a further landmark for the game. This
is a game that is open to both genders and the women and the girls
who play in it are playing in big numbers.
Mr Collier: We are incredibly
proud that when ECB was structured we fully integrated the women's
game into ECB. As we speak the England women's side is playing
Australia in the World Cup semi-final in Potchefstroom in South
Africa and I understand the Minister is there at that match. In
terms of growth of the game, we have grown from 367 women's teams
to 431 in the last year, that is nearly 20% growth. There is a
further growth anticipated of that number going forward this year.
So clearly it is the fastest growing area of our game.
Mr Barwick: There are over 7,000
female football teams.
Mr Crowther: We have about 4.6
million playing the game every year of which 42% are women. The
problem with girls/women is the fact that they do drop out of
sport earlier than boys and they drop out faster. We think one
of the reasons is that we do not have enough women professional
coaches. We have 2,500 professional coaches of which 33% are women
and that is an area of opportunity for us to encourage more women
to come into professional coaching as a career.
Mr Baron: Rugby is slightly different.
We have a separate governing body for women's sports at the moment,
although we are talking about merging women's Rugby Union with
the RFU, but it is again, from a very low base, a rapidly growing
sport. The problem that many community clubs have is that they
need additional investment in facilities to be able to cater for
the requirements of the women's section. Worldwide female rugby
is growing very rapidly, particularly in North America and it
is now very much on the agenda of the International Rugby Board
to encourage and assist the development of women's rugby globally
and we are playing an active part in that.
Q49 Chris Bryant: The other bit I asked
is that you are the big four of four sports which are predominantly
participated in by men. I just wonder whether you would think
of bringing in swimming and athletics in as two sports which are
equally participated in by men and women.
Mr Barwick: This is an open number.
It could be, four, five, six or even 11. It happens to be four
today.
Mr Crowther: We started this because
we felt that the voice of the sports lobby was poor.
Q50 Chris Bryant: A point we have made
before as a Committee.
Mr Crowther: When you look at
the funding that arts had had traditionally over the years, we
felt sport had to get its act together. We decided that saying
"4 sport" to begin with was a way of making sure we
could get together, because we are reasonably busy individuals
travelling here and there and the larger the group the more difficult
the meetings and it is more difficult to come out with a consensus
and a single voice. We are not ruling out other people joining
what we like to call the four sports. We speak on behalf of sport.
This is not just a group that is just thinking about themselves.
Q51 Chris Bryant: One of the most heart
warming groups I have been to visit recently is called the Rhondda
Polar Bears which is a swimming group for people with disabilities;
in fact, it is the largest in Wales. Sometimes sport can seem
very distant for people with disabilities because it seems to
be about something that is inaccessible. I just wonder whether
there is more room for work in that environment because disabilities
range in lots of different ways and sport can be a great equaliser
in many ways.
Mr Barwick: The FA has six international
squads for disability football: blind, partially sighted, deaf
and hearing impaired, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities and
amputees. There has been a 40% growth in participation since 2002.
I am due to go to a game in a fortnight's time. It is fantastic
to see the level of enthusiasm that these people bring to it and
they are very proud to wear the shirt with the three lions on.
Mr Collier: I think that is mirrored
in cricket. One of the most rewarding days I had was the tabletop
disabilities programme which was held at one of our test grounds.
I think that was a tremendously rewarding day. We operate all
the different sides through all different levels. We have a specific
responsibility in that area that we deliver and discharge and
again it is an area that we are very proud of.
Mr Crowther: Likewise, wheelchair
tennis. It is a game that is totally integrated into the game
of tennis and the able bodied can play the disabled. The wheelchair
tennis player has two bounces. The numbers are still small. Certainly
from my perspective it is an area that we should look to concentrate
on more.
Chris Bryant: Can you do the two bounces
rule for those who cannot co-ordinate hand to eye as well!
Chairman: Since Chris Bryant has mentioned
our swimming inquiry and pointed out that swimming is the most
popular sport among girls and the second most popular sport among
boys, I am going totally to step outside my position in this chair
to ask a rhetorical question which I do not expect any of you
four gentlemen to answer and that is: "When is the Heritage
Lottery Fund going to hand over to Victoria Baths in Manchester
the £2¼ million it won on the Restoration programme
on BBC2?" It has not yet seen one penny! Jim Wright in my
constituency wants to know! Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed.
It has been a real treat to have you in. Thank you for letting
us see the cup.
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