Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
DAME
SUE STREET
DCB, LIZ NICHOLL
MBE, MR PETER
KEEN OBE,
MONDAY
6 FEBRUARY 2006
Q100 Greg Clark: When will the individual
sports be given their funding allocations?
Dame Sue Street: My Secretary
of State said last Monday to the House that we are in active negotiation
with the Treasury.
Q101 Greg Clark: When is your best
guess of when they will get to know this?
Dame Sue Street: I cannot guess
that. That is a matter for ministers and it is in everybody's
interest that we present the best possible case. It is very live
at the moment.
Q102 Greg Clark: It is live, but
we have a situation concerning the long-term development of elite
athletes. We are six years away from the Olympics. Medal targets
seem to be the way it is driven, yet you are unable to give them.
Dame Sue Street: The position
is that there is certainty for Beijing and this is building the
success in sports. You might want to ask Peter how this works
on the ground. From the point of view of having certain money
and a goal for 2008, that is very clear and at that point, we
shall have to look at the chances for 2012 and make final decisions
both on the medal target and the money.
Q103 Chairman: I cannot believe that
you are being entirely open with us, because you may not have
set targets as a term of art, but this is supposed to be the most
prestigious event that has happened in years in this country.
I cannot believe there have not been discussions at the highest
level of what progress we are intending to make up to 2012, what
your plans are. There must have been. Surely you can share it
with us now. We are a Parliamentary Committee; we are supposed
to have some accountability for £90 million of public money.
Why can you not tell us about it? If there has not been any discussion
about it, I am amazed.
Dame Sue Street: It is an absolutely
proper concern of the Committee; it is a concern of mine as well
and I am certainly keeping nothing from you. It was only last
Monday, and I read you from the record, that my Secretary of State
said "We are negotiating with the Treasury about the proper
and appropriate amount of funding but we are determined to invest
for the long-term future performance of athletes—in 2008,
2012 and 2016".
Q104 Mr Khan: Read the next sentence.
Dame Sue Street: I do not actually
have it all with me.
Mr Khan: For the record it says "We
shall not return to the Tory boom and bust—a bit of money
now and none in the long term". Just for the sake of completeness.
Q105 Chairman: What is the answer
then? Is that the answer?
Dame Sue Street: The answer is
that it is extremely live, extremely active and it would not be
sensible to put firm figures when we do not know what we can invest
or indeed what our performance will be at Beijing.
Q106 Chairman: Speak in the round
then. This is Your Life, so speak in the round.
Do not talk about figures, but give us an idea of your plans,
your thoughts.
Ms Nicholl: There is a direct
relationship between the amount of resource which is available
and our potential finishing position in 2012. That is the issue
that we have and that is why we cannot actually set a target clearly
until we know the resources available. Our aspiration for a home
Games is what everybody would hope from London 2012: not only
that we put on the very best Games ever, but that we have the
most successful team ever.
Chairman: That is a very general aspiration.
Q107 Mr Mitchell: I guess I finish
last in this race, so my salary will probably be docked. Just
speaking as a fat slob, the whole business seems ridiculous. It
is insane to set medal targets. You do not know who is going to
come thumping out of the bush as an Australian sheep shearer's
world star of this, that and the other. You do not know what is
going to happen in other countries. You cannot possibly fix medals.
You cannot prove any correlation between the amount of money pumped
in and success or failure. They used to pump steroids in Eastern
Europe and now we pump money into athletes. There is no correlation
and I doubt whether you would even attempt to prove it. Government
is always telling us on every other issue that you do not solve
problems by throwing money at them. That does not work in this
particular thing, so why are we doing it? Are we doing it just
because everybody else is doing it?
Ms Nicholl: May I ask Peter to
answer your point about targeting and how difficult it is and
how unpredictable it is, because actually on the Olympic side
it is fairly predictable? It is very unpredictable on the Paralympic
side. On the Olympic side, the positions in world championships
leading up to Olympics are a very, very good indicator of likely
performances at the Olympic Games; a very, very good indicator.
Q108 Mr Mitchell: But a lot of money
is spent and you do not know the form of other athletes in other
countries until they actually hit you. These targets must be calculated
on British calculations largely.
Ms Nicholl: No, they are international
calculations.
Mr Keen: The best way I can answer
this for the Committee is to try to take us to the real-life situations
we are talking about. As a former coach of a gold medallist and
a performance director, to me the answers lie in the realities
of how one develops and qualifies and ultimately wins medals at
the Olympic Games. You certainly do know what your opponents are
doing because you have to compete against them often over many
years in the development pathway which leads you to the Games
themselves. Simply to be at the Olympic Games requires you to
qualify through world-class tournaments, usually world championships
or world cups, so you have almost complete insight into what your
opponents are, how they are developing and you have a lot of confidence
therefore in setting individual goals for either individual athletes
or indeed squads. Setting those goals is the absolute key to winning
in sport. If you do not have that vision and that clarity about
what you are trying to achieve, you cannot see the challenges
in front of you. On an individual level goal setting is critical.
Q109 Mr Mitchell: All that is "rah-rah"
stuff. We always say we are going to win—Onward Christian
Soldiers and all the rest of it—but you cannot prove
that putting in another few million quid will produce more medals.
There is no correlation.
Mr Keen: What you can do is evidenced
quite clearly; the actual bottom line cost of doing this thing.
Travelling the world, the amount of training necessary, the amount
of competitions you have to attend, those have, to be blunt, fixed
costs which we either choose to engage in and then pay or not.
Sport does not happen in a vacuum in that sense and in the way
we have approached the investment we have made now and what it
would take to improve our performance, when you look at those
fundamental costs of the people to coach, which is paramount,
the travel, the diet, the lifestyle necessary to be competitive
in world sport, that has a cost and it has to be met if you are
going to compete and win.
Q110 Mr Mitchell: The Chariots
of Fire days are done and gone.
Mr Keen: They are over.
Q111 Mr Mitchell: Is every advanced
country pumping in money like this?
Mr Keen: Absolutely.
Q112 Mr Mitchell: Okay, but none
of them can say what value they get for it in terms of a return
on medals.
Mr Keen: Value in terms of economics
or emotions?
Q113 Mr Mitchell: In terms of winning.
We cannot, they cannot, nobody can say it.
Dame Sue Street: It is not like
putting your money in a building society with a fixed rate. In
a sense that is the excitement of sport. It is very, very difficult
to calculate exactly what the competition will be. That figure
about people winning races by 100th of a second or five gold medals
by half a second, you are right, there is no certainty, but there
is certainly a certainty that without investment in the basics
we should not have a hope of winning. Given that people do, in
their millions in Britain, support elite sport, then there is
a certain suggestion that citizens are very, very excited and
keen on us winning medals.
Q114 Mr Mitchell: We had better start
saying that it matters not who won or lost but how we paid the
coach. If you are going to concentrate at this level on elite
athletes, we are neglecting a major problem in British sport that
we are a nation of fat, under-exercised slobs, we are flogging
off our sports fields, local authorities are closing down their
swimming pools and all the facilities which should be building
up a national body of strength and competitiveness in various
sports are being cut off at the base.
Dame Sue Street: This whole thing
has to be seen together. There are three blocks of policy: elite
sport at the top; community sport and facilities; and school sport.
There has understandably been huge concern about playing fields
but the regulations are now much tighter. We create more playing
fields than we lose and we have, at the last count, 44,000 playing
fields. This may be small comfort, but in 2003-04 we lost 52 playing
fields, but we gained 72. We have to make more gains than that.
People are rightly outraged if they cannot find a place to swim,
but swimming has been one of the biggest winners in lottery funding.
Since 2004, not long ago, 131 pools have opened and 27 have closed.
We do have big, big challenges to meet the school and community
sports policy challenges. We want more facilities for more people,
but having elite sport to excite people and inspire them at one
end, which takes a very small proportion of the total spend, is
at least one way of engaging people in sport.
Q115 Mr Mitchell: It could be left
to private sponsorship, like celebrity culture. People are going
to find excitement and support it. Yes, you are right. I see that
70% of the funding awarded on the programme goes to the national
governing bodies and only 28% is spent on personal awards to athletes.
Are you not just subsidising a bureaucracy there?
Ms Nicholl: No. Of the funding
which goes to the governing body the value to the athlete is about
£45,000 per head and we break that down by looking at what
it goes towards. It funds the performance directorate, it funds
the world-class coaches, it funds the sports scientists and sports
medics, it funds the international competition costs, the international
training costs, the national training costs, the national competition
costs, it funds equipment for the athlete. Everything is targeted
towards supporting the athlete.
Dame Sue Street: There is quite
a lot in table seven in the Report which brings it to life.
Q116 Mr Mitchell: The athletes are
not taking up the support facilities provided by the national
governing bodies as fully as they might.
Ms Nicholl: They are. In fact
a survey by UK Sport indicated that 70% of athletes value the
services they are receiving from the World Class Programmes. It
is much more difficult in some sports for athletes to be locked
into the system of service provision, sports like athletics, where
individual athletes are not part of a centralised system. Then
access really depends on whether their personal coach is engaged
with the programme and the personal coach values the support in
order to influence the athlete in accessing it. What we are finding
on an annual basis is that the education of coaches in the system
is improving, their understanding of the benefits of sport science
and sport medicine provision and the athlete's understanding is
increasing incredibly over time and we are expecting to see more
and more take-up of services. Those services are now being monitored
very carefully through the English Institute of Sport network
in particular.
Q117 Mr Mitchell: But just talking
about the awards to individual athletes, do you really know how
they spend it?
Ms Nicholl: The awards to athletes
are a contribution towards their living and sporting costs; a
contribution. The contribution towards their living costs is used
for living.
Q118 Mr Mitchell: Living at what
standard?
Ms Nicholl: The awards we have
just reviewed are personal awards because previous indicators
were that they had not kept up with inflation. The highest level
of award an athlete can now receive from 1 April will be £23,000
for an athlete who is a medallist at world or Olympic level. Then
athletes who are in the top eight in the world receive 75% of
that and athletes who are on the world-class programme within
the limit available to their sport will receive 50% of the £23,000.
It is a contribution towards their living costs. It enables them
to train full time, if they need to do so for their sport.
Q119 Mr Mitchell: It is clear that
coaching is the most valuable and most important element of support
and I can see the importance of that. Why is so little weight
accorded to sport science? I went round the New Zealand academy
and they seemed to me to be doing some marvellous stuff on sport
science. Unfortunately it had no relevance to this, but I should
have thought that science had a major contribution to make both
to individual performance and to methods of coaching.
Ms Nicholl: A tremendous contribution.
In fact only this weekend I was at a conference for sport science
and medicine providers for the Paralympic athletes, where the
community of providers was actually getting together to learn
from each other, to learn how they could actually provide a better
service to support the Paralympic athletes. I should like Peter
to answer this because he is a sport scientist.
Mr Keen: To be honest, I do not
recognise the tone of the Report in terms of the lack of take-up.
In some of our most successful sports, particularly rowing, cycling
and sailing, science and medical support are at the core of everything
they do. Where the Report is helpful, and our changes are taking
us, is to make certain that investment is in the systems and programmes
which can deliver these processes to athletes rather than trying
to support individual athletes on an individual basis. That does
not enable the kind of scientific and medical support necessary
to make the difference. There are some disparities, but they are
being corrected. In many cases the level of scientific inquiry
and application is of a very high standard and there is more to
come.
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