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1 Mar 2007 : Column 366WH—continued
Mr. Reed: My hon. Friend wants me to go further. I sort of agree with him. This week, I supported the introduction of a Bill to reduce speeds around schools. I would also like there to be exclusion zones around schools, where cars are not allowed. We have managed to get the vast majority of little closes around our school designated exclusion zones, albeit only informally—it cannot be enforced—but it is a start. People have to park their car further away, instead of trying to get as close to the school as possible.
As the Minister knows, I chair the National Strategic Partnership for Volunteering in Sport. I want to put on record the vast contribution that is made not only by volunteers in general, but by young volunteers in particular. This debate is about young people and sport, and that is probably one of the most unsung areas. I know that the Minister referred to it in his opening remarks. He quite rightly wanted to give people thanks, and the reality is that there is a greater proportion of young people volunteering than is the case among the older population. That is very much to be welcomed. There is not only a greater participation rate in schools, there is a greater level of volunteering among that age group, and they are volunteering not only among their peer groups but among older adults. That gives them a great start in life.
I heard yesterday about an idea from Australia. As part of the volunteering that individuals do, they are taught not only coaching and peer group mentoring, but officiating, so older children are officiating at games for younger children. I am on the rugby football union fellowship as part of the sports fellowship in the House and I have never admired referees as much as I have since spending some time with them. People who give up their weekends to officiate at games are probably making one of the greatest sacrifices that people can make. Increasingly, younger and younger people are coming through who do that.
I wonder whether we could build into such a programme the chance for everyone to learn how to officiate. That would also teach young people the rules of the game and some of the discipline. In addition, those who are the worst offenders, imitating some of the antics of footballers that we see on television, would understand how difficult officiating is. It involves trying to keep an eye on 30 blokes running around a rugby pitch, in my case, or 22 football players. Perhaps the worst offenders—the Wayne Rooneys of junior football—should be forced to officiate to see how difficult it is when individuals mouth things back at them.
There are many other things that I would like to say. However, most of them have been said and I appreciate that the Minister wants time to respond to some of them. 2012 gives us the brand, the enthusiasm and the focus to ensure that we turn this nation into a sporting nation. The Minister knows about that because we had an Adjournment debate on the issue recently. It has been shown already that that focus has delivered at the elite level, and the recognition that we needed to do more for school sport has changed things at that level. The weakness remains the link between school sport and people going into the grass roots and the community. I do not believe that the Government have all the answers in that area. It is down to all of us who
are involved in different national governing bodies and it involves organisations and charities, such as StreetGames, which can come along and drive up participation levels.
We need to ensure that there is competition in schools and that that is carried through throughout the rest of life. It is crucial that the four hours of sport are of quality. In that way, we can start to tackle obesity levels. The school-club link is vastly important. We also need to deliver on the idea of a sporting nation on the back of what 2012 can offer. There are great sporting models out there. Individuals such as Dame Kelly Holmes demonstrate the level of enthusiasm that we need, but she cannot go to every school and meet every school child. We need sporting champions locally who can do that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey and I have been involved in the community rugby awards, for example. The healthy eating message is got across much more effectively by sporting champions. I have seen demonstrations of that. A Saracens ruby player went into a school to teach children to eat their five pieces of fruit a day. That is more effective than an MP in a suit or even someone from the local primary care trust saying the same thing. The kids really take the message on board when their sporting hero is standing in front of them, saying, “I have got where I have because I eat healthily.” I have seen that working. I have seen schools with long-term partnerships involving sports clubs and PCTs, and it is making an enormous difference.
There are many challenges, but I conclude by congratulating the Minister again on what he has managed to achieve in his time in post. Those of us who have slight misgivings to carp about here and there and highlight areas where we would like more to be done, should just think back to where we were when the Minister came into his post five or six years ago and compare that with where we are now. I think that every one of us would say that we prefer where we are at this stage. I just hope that the Minister can deliver even more and can deliver on the wish list that we have given him today, so that in 2012 we are fourth in the medal table and we have participation levels of which we can be proud.
4.59 pm
Mr. Caborn: I shall try to respond to some of the points that have been made. First, I thank everybody for the contributions that they have made. That shows clearly that this is an area in which consensus has emerged between both sides of the House and which is taken very seriously. It is not just sport for sport’s sake, because sport can deliver on many other agendas. It is absolutely right to say that much more needs to be done. We still need to convince people in authority that we should continue to invest in sport and physical activity, probably in a way that we never have before.
If we want to get the cultural shift that many hon. Members have talked about, we need to look at health and obesity and consider how much is spent on the health service compared with physical activity and sport. If we want to move to prevention rather than cure, we need there to be a shift in how resources are
allocated and a cultural shift in society and in many professions. For example, the last town that was built, Milton Keynes, was built with the motor car in mind, and many buildings have escalators and lifts instead of stairways. Putting stairways back in would be a move towards a more proper way of life. Some 25 per cent. of the traffic in our major cities and towns every morning is due to children being taken to school. Consider the carbon footprint of that alone, never mind what it teaches our young people. A cultural shift is needed.
At a lecture that I recently attended, some Americans made the powerful point that what we treasure most is life itself. Given that life expectancy is going down in the USA, the richest nation on earth, because of lifestyle, we must question what we are doing to our population. There are some big issues to address. It will not be easy to shift public perception, and it will not be easy for decision makers then to take the quantum leap of investing in different areas.
I want to clear up some of the points raised by hon. Members. The spokesman for the official Opposition, the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson), made several points. He is absolutely right to say that we have been successful in the schools sector and the elite sectors. There is a chunk of people in the middle whom we need to get active. We have our target of 1 per cent. per annum moving towards doing three and a half hours of moderate physical activity a week. Broadly speaking, we are trying to move one third of the population into doing that, and we think that a third of people, in the middle, want to do it. There is probably a third at one end who will never do it, but we have to help that third in the middle.
Working in schools is relatively easy, because we have some control over what happens from day to day. In the elite sector, people want to do it and will do it because they are driven and motivated—they want to achieve. All the signs are there that the middle chunk wants to take that exercise. That is why we have charged Sport England with driving through the regional boards and county partnerships a 1 per cent. year-on-year output of increased physical activity in their regions.
We have tried to bring together, on those sports boards, all those who have a vested interest in making sure that that happens—the public and private sectors, academia and civil society. We have brought those cultures together to drive forward a programme to increase that 1 per cent. That approach is very focused. I know that the hon. Gentleman has had some doubts about the chairman of Sport England and about the new chief executive, but I urge him not to criticise the chairman for the past and to look to the future.
Hugh Robertson: I am meeting the chairman of Sport England in three weeks’ time.
Mr. Caborn: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman is going to meet the chairman, because one meeting has been cancelled, probably by political design. I ask him to go and see what is happening on the ground. I know that Derek Mapp is very receptive to ideas.
Ian Stewart:
I am not one for congratulating Ministers in a mealy-mouthed way when they do not
deserve it, but the Minister deserves congratulation. In his time as the Minister of Sport, he has encouraged—that is the polite way of putting it—major structural change in some of the sports in which I take an interest. However, the main sport in which my constituents are interested at primary level and above is football. The Minister has described the structural approach at county level, which I welcome, but does he understand and accept that there are problems with organisation, particularly in football? One club in Irlam, in my constituency, has 23 teams of under-11s—that is 23 teams of 11 players. Structurally, they need to organise themselves on a locality basis and conduct a needs-analysis of what they have and what they would like to have, so that they can feed into the county structure and organisations such as the Football Foundation for funding.
Mr. Caborn: That is right. We promised in our last manifesto to move towards the population having multi-sports clubs within 20 minutes’ travel. That is the aspiration, and we are driving matters in that direction. The key is in getting sports to come together and deliver multi-sports facilities.
We can look to the past and to the continent. Why is the fall-off rate of young people doing exercise when they leave school considerably lower on the continent than here? It is because they organise sport differently. Our sport is unique in that it is organised very much on the governing body structure. We have rugby, cricket, football and so on, and there is competition between the various sports. They do not do that on the continent, where there are multi-sports clubs that are run inside the community. Hon. Members who are as old as me might remember that major companies used to do that. Certainly in Sheffield, where I am from, every major company had a multi-sports club. When I was an apprentice at Firth Brown, I could play every single sport, and the company provided some fantastic sports facilities. As industry changed, so did sports provision. We need to consider how we can recreate that situation in a modern setting.
There are 40,000 football clubs in England. Rugby probably has 3,500—4,000 tops—and cricket is broadly the same. However, the major sports are starting to come together and say, “Can we work together? Can we, as we develop our strategies, identify economies of scale?” Someone who wants to play rugby on a Saturday might want to play tennis, hockey or another sport as well. We need to build up that interaction. If we do so, we can bring in the expertise of coaching and development staff, who are necessary for a comprehensive approach to those sports. This is where we start addressing some of the issues to do with getting the nation active and with the 1 per cent. target.
I have had some interesting meetings with Slimming World, the Fitness Industry Association and WeightWatchers, which has recently gone from looking only at calories in to also looking at calories out. Most of its schemes are now 50 per cent. based on physical activity, but with a very user-friendly approach. I do not think that it even uses the word “sport”—if it did, everyone would probably be turned off. It is horses for courses.
The Fitness Industry Association has done a huge survey of its facilities, the results of which were released towards the end of last year. The survey showed that the use of single sports or physical activity facilities has levelled out, but that the use of multi-sports facilities is growing. There has been a cultural shift, which might have occurred because of what we are doing with the school sports partnerships or because of organisations such as WeightWatchers. Whatever the reason, there is a movement towards involving the family in physical activity and sport. The question now is how we cater for that and how we develop facilities.
I return to the point that the hon. Gentleman made about elite sport. Let me make it clear that we have reorganised elite sport. We have converted TASS into UK Sport, and involved the English Institute for Sport in that. UK Sport now has the responsibility of delivering on very clear targets regarding elite athletes, into whom we are investing huge amounts of money. I have already discussed how many of them we have on those schemes.
The hon. Gentleman is right that the Chancellor gave £200 million of Exchequer money to the elite programme, but with the challenge that we matched that with £100 million. We are now discussing with UK Sport how we raise that money between now and 2012. The key is the whole sport plans, which are proper contracts between the funding bodies—UK Sport and Sport England—and the governing bodies. Over the next period they will start to develop. The situation is being watched by the Australians and others.
The Australians probably have the best elite sport structure in the world—the Australian Institute of Sport—but even they accept that it has become a little tired and needs refreshing. The way in which the UK is developing sports science and sports medicine and the creation of links to the regions will be the envy of the world in the not-too-distant future. UK Sport now has responsibility for that, and it is under exceptionally good leadership.
I shall not get into the World Anti-Doping Agency issue, because it involves a whole debate of its own. All that I shall say, very genuinely, to my colleagues on the Select Committee is that we will be responding robustly to some of the recommendations that they have made. As an ex-board member of WADA, and as someone who is firmly committed to taking drugs out of sport, I say that WADA’s core business is to get cheats out of sport; it is not to run social policy. Since 1999, its job has been to take cheating out of sport, and it is so important that it does so.
Why is that important? Because millions of young people look up to sports people on podiums, and if those sports people have not got there cleanly, they bring their sport into disrepute. The damage that such people do is immense. WADA was set up to drive cheats who take illegal substances out of sport. We must consider how we ought to support our athletes. We have strict liability on this issue, because people are responsible for what they put into their bodies, but it is our job to give our athletes education, information and everything else that can get them to make the right decisions. The matter involves a much bigger debate. I feel passionately about it, and I have rightly put a lot of my time into it during my tenure of this job.
On the question of the legal protection for volunteers, I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. We have to get to the bottom of this issue. We have been trying, in many areas, to examine how we can assist volunteers, particularly in schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) also raised that question. There is a big issue to address on volunteering and insurance for what are termed extreme sports—we could put rugby into that category. Many people who play sport in this country are not insured, which is not good for sport. We have to get to the bottom of that question.
The hon. Gentleman gave figures of £397 million and £264 million in respect of lottery money that has been invested. Since 1997, £3 billion of lottery money has been invested not only from the sports lottery but from other pockets—the New Opportunities Fund, as was, the Big Lottery Fund, and the other lottery funding streams. We are investing £1 billion of Exchequer and lottery money in grass roots sport in this one year as well. We will debate that matter later.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North, I hit a lot of golf balls, and mine tend to go into the lakes, rather than down the fairways, too. I shall have to go to Scotland to get in a bit of practice. We will have a debate about the points that he made, but I should address the question of disability sport. We can do a lot more in that area, but I am proud of what we have done.
On the Olympic bid, we said, “This is the Paralympics coming home”. In 1948, we held the first Paralympics in Stoke Mandeville. We are leading the world through the inclusive fitness initiative, in which we have invested millions of pounds. It has adapted the facilities in the various gyms and fitness suites up and down the country, and is now being taken on to the continent. It has been a great innovation, and one that we have put a lot of effort behind.
On the talented athlete scholarship scheme and world-class sport, there is no discrimination. If there were, it would be in favour of disability sport. The TASS is accessed by 11 to 25-year-old able-bodied people and by 11 to 35-year-olds as far as disability sport is concerned. Every governing body has to sign up to the equity programme, of which disability sport is a part. In terms of world-class performers, there is no discrimination. That is why we always do so well in the Paralympics, where we have come second, and on the world stage, where we play a significant role and will continue to do so.
The Commonwealth games in Manchester was the first occasion in which medals were competed for jointly by able-bodied and disabled people. That happened in the bowls and in other disciplines. Unfortunately, that was not carried forward. I hope that all governing bodies, including the Olympic movement, will examine how they can start to bring disability sport and able-bodied sport together. I say that genuinely, because a lot more can be done. Those bodies—the leaders of sport both internationally and nationally—can send out a much stronger message than is being sent out now. We will do our bit as the Government, but others must do their bit as well. That is an area for discussion.
I could refer to the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) as my hon. Friend in view of what he said
in the opening part of his speech. I was unaware of the list that he mentioned, and I shall take it up with the Prime Minister. Anyway, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the activity targets and county sport. County sport partnerships are an important part of our approach, and I shall be meeting representatives of many of those partnerships in a few weeks’ time. The partnerships are crucial if we are to achieve delivery at the local level. The regional and county structure is important and we will be discussing how we can strengthen the partnerships and facilitate much of the work that they are doing.
Mr. Don Foster: May I suggest one thing that the Minister might discuss at that meeting, which could facilitate the partnerships’ activity? They will able to go forward on a number of projects that they wish to undertake only if they get funding from Sport England. The vast majority of the projects require them to find either matching funding or some funding themselves, but they end up swimming in the same pot as everybody else. It might be worth persuading Sport England that it should not necessarily require a funding element to come directly from the partnerships.
Mr. Caborn: I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying. I know that the question of funding at regional level is being reviewed. The question is whether we should put the resource at regional level and then at county level, or maintain it at national level. That debate is now going on, and I hope that over the next period we will roll out a much more focused and less complicated form of funding as far as Sport England is concerned, of which the county partnerships will be part.
Make no mistake that there will be a backlash to that process. Those whom we have traditionally funded at national level will raise the issue of why we are moving from the national to the regional level. Hon. Members should watch this space, because more parliamentary questions will probably be tabled in the near future.
My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) touched on an area of real concern that we must consider concerning facilities and what people want at the beginning of the 21st century. I had a discussion with my dear wife about that point. She goes to a Virgin gym, but I do not, because I do not particularly like gyms. I prefer to run, and I do so a lot, a bit like some other hon. Members. I asked her why she goes to the Virgin gym rather than to the local authority’s gym, which is good. The answer is that people get a fluffy towel and a cup of coffee and that there is quite a nice atmosphere. Such things are as important as the facility for the physical activity itself in attracting people into places.
As has rightly been said, we must think a lot more about such issues, particularly the provision for women, including hairdryers and so on. I visited Wembley stadium the other day. Its changing rooms have iPods and hairdryers—they look like a five-star hotel. We have to replicate a bit of that, and we must consider the matter seriously.
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