Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 113)
TUESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2006
MS BRIGID
SIMMONDS OBE AND
MR TIM
LAMB
Q100 Chairman: While accepting that
the CCPR are fully in support of the Olympics in London and the
boost that that is going to give, are you suggesting that because
of the decision about the way in which the Games is to be funded
there is a real danger that any benefit which is gained in terms
of inspiration of young people to participate in sport could actually
be outweighed by the damage done through the loss of funds to
grass-roots sport from the main Lottery?
Ms Simmonds: I think when you
are looking at the legacy 20 to 30 years on, yes there is a danger.
We will be inspired as a nation if we win medals at the Olympics,
and the CCPR is totally behind all the efforts and the money that
is being put aside for élite performance and to get those
performances right. I do not think necessarily, however, that
that is a rung at the bottom that somehow increases participation
with that funding. If you look at the gap that we have got, a
lot of money, as Tim has said, has gone into schools. Where we
have a gap is we still have 70% of young girls who drop out post-16.
We have not got those club links right. We have an awful lot of
people who, post school, never participate again. It is that sort
of area that I think we are concerned about.
Mr Lamb: Leaving aside the funding
issues that I referred to five minutes ago, if you look at the
delivery plan for England at least and the Olympic Programme sub-objective
4.4 which was produced last week, there are some very good initiatives
and projects which are going to be overseen by Sport England,
but Sport England is expected, as I said before, to fund all these
initiatives and programmes without any additional resources. In
fact, probably less bearing in mind the migration away to the
Olympic Lottery and other Government agents.
Q101 Chairman: If there is a cost
overrun, which certainly previous Games suggest is likely, the
Government's decision that that overrun must be met at least in
part out of the Lottery will do further damage. Do you think that
that should be met out of central government funding if the overrun
occurs?
Mr Lamb: It is perhaps not for
us to offer a solution but I was quite concerned when we had that
confirmed 20 minutes ago by Janet that indeed the Government can
exercise the right to make that payment. I think that would be
of grave concern because it would be even less money going into
the grass-roots and the development side of sport which is what
the CCPR feels most passionately about.
Q102 Mr Hall: Who actually funds
the Central Council for Physical Recreation?
Ms Simmonds: We have a budget
of about £1.9 million of which about £1.2 million comes
from Sport England.
Q103 Mr Hall: I understand your concerns
then.
Mr Lamb: It is actually £1.5
million, if I can just get that right for the record.
Ms Simmonds: To explain the history
to that, we owned all the national sports centres like Plas-y-Brenin
that existed in this country and in 1972 we exchanged them for
funding in perpetuity.
Q104 Mr Hall: A fine job that is
done in those centres. In the memorandum that you submitted to
the Committee you talked about ways of increasing participation.
I do not actually share your pessimism that the Olympics will
not inspire people to participate in sport; I am sure it will
do, and as somebody who plays tennis regularly, Nigel, you are
absolutely right about what happens in the week of Wimbledon.
Could you give the Committee some more information about the pathfinder
projects that you are planning to increase sports participation?
Mr Lamb: I think it is a question
of each locality determining their own needs. Bearing in mind
the enormous spectrum of activity that the CCPR represents, from,
as we say, football to folk dance, I do not think we mind too
much what people are engaging in. As has already been said, there
are only 26 Olympic sports; there are well over 100 other recognised
sports, plus all recreational activities which are in membership
of the CCPR. Just taking the tennis example, I think the Lawn
Tennis Association has estimated that it will cost £1.2 billion
to provide a similar number of tennis courts as in France and
the estimated cost of maintaining the existing stock of community
sport facilities in good shape is £0.5 billion. We welcome
the extra money that is being spent on élite athletes;
we welcome the money that is being spent on school sports; but
there needs to be additional investment at the community end as
well, because the danger is that we will have more kids playing
cricket at school, we will have more people wanting to enjoy the
excitement of the Olympics and being inspired to take up a sport
or a recreation. The danger is there will not be any decent facilities
for them to play in. If I go back to the example of cricket, you
have to work at putting an infrastructure in place—the infrastructure,
facilities, coaches, and development plans—in order to cope
with the inevitable increase in numbers, otherwise it will be
a two-week wonder whereas what we want to ensure is that the legacy
from the Olympic Games is sustained over many years thereafter.
Q105 Mr Hall: What about your pathfinder
project ideas, how are they going to work?
Mr Lamb: Sorry, I did not get
that?
Q106 Mr Hall: In your evidence you
submitted the concept of increasing participation by pathfinder
projects.
Ms Simmonds: I think there are
two answers to that. One is it is the community sporting networks
and how they work on the ground. In the BISL evidence we had this
document What About Sport which talks about legacy co-ordinators
on the ground. If you look at how it works on the ground, you
have the regional sports boards and you have the regional offices
of sport; you then have county sport partnerships, and below that
you have a whole network which involves voluntary sector organisations
and the CCPR has persuaded Sport England that there should be
a champion on each Regional Sports Board for the voluntary sector
and for all the sports which do not naturally fall under County
Sports Partnerships. What we are talking about is having some
pathfinder-type project sat that low level and having that co-ordination,
that moves into the regional sports boards, the regional sports
boards have a link to Nations and Regions, (which I think is a
wonderful idea) but at the moment it is looking more at tourism
than looking at the sporting legacy. Then that moves up the field
towards the Olympic Board to the DCMS.
Mr Lamb: I think we are concerned
about the emphasis of nations and regions, which again has been
mentioned a couple of times this morning because my understanding
is that, as Brigid has said, the nations and regions group seems
to be much more about economic regeneration and tourism than sport
and recreation, and in fact until very recently there has only
been one member of the entire group who has had anything to do
with sport. I think David Hemery is now going to be attending
as the vice chair of the BOA, but up to now there has been only
one representative from sport. If the nations and regions group
is part of the vehicle for driving up levels of sporting participation,
then the make-up of that group needs to be changed.
Ms Simmonds: Pathfinders will
look at what works and what does not work. At the moment we do
not know that and I go back to the point I made originally, we
could in 20 years' time find that something worked really well
in Essex but nobody had picked it up anywhere else around the
country.
Q107 Philip Davies: In the CCPR evidence
you express some concern about the extent to which the Olympics
protect their symbols and marks and all this from what I think
is known as "ambush" marketing where other people ride
in on the back of it. In your evidence you gave an example of
a primary school which chose to call their annual sports day a
"Mini Olympics" which might be caught under this overarching
effort to stop anybody else apart from the main sponsors from
benefiting. Have you taken any legal advice as to how far the
legislation does protect the Olympic symbols and to what extent
your members can or cannot use the Olympic name?
Mr Lamb: I do not want to overplay
this point. We did mention it but it is not a major point in our
submission. We totally understand that the Olympic symbols and
marks have to be protected. £750-million worth of sponsorship,
as I know from my background in professional sport, is an enormous
amount of money and those rings have to be protected in order
to attract the right level of investment. However, I think brand
enforcement must be proportionate. LOCOG deserve credit actually
for having clarified some of the rules regarding the protection
of the marketing symbols to governing bodies. I just think that
we need to keep things in perspective and ensure that we do not
turn people off, or in any way temper their excitement about the
Games by taking things a little too literally, but it is not a
major concern we have. Our major concern is to ensure that the
legacy of participation is as we would expect it to be.
Q108 Philip Davies: What have LOCOG
said to you in terms of what can and cannot be done?
Ms Simmonds: The same rules apply
to a private sector organisation as they would to voluntary organisations
if they were to sponsor us so volvo penta cannot say that
they are supporting an Olympic 2012 sailing team even though they
are sponsors of the RYA. One way of getting round this very lower
level might be that each 1%, say, of that funding that was given
by the top-tier sponsors went towards grass-roots sports. You
could have an association where some of that grass-roots sport
may benefit from an Olympic sponsor. That may be one idea that
is worth looking at.
Q109 Philip Davies: Have you made
that suggestion?
Ms Simmonds: We have made that
suggestion within the Olympic field, but I think at the moment
the key emphasis, as Tim has rightly said, is around finding those
sponsors and so maybe it is something that should be considered
as we move down that road.
Q110 Philip Davies: Will you or have
you been sending out advice to your members about what they can
do and what they cannot do?
Mr Lamb: There have been meetings
involving national governing bodies and lawyers from LOCOG and
we would like to commend LOCOG for doing their utmost to answer
any queries that national governing bodies have.
Ms Simmonds: They have produced
some advice too which we have disseminated to our members.
Q111 Mr Evans: I just want to come
back to the main thrust of what you have had to say because it
has been hugely depressing, quite frankly. Can you give us any
indicator as to how much the total spend by the state is now on
sport? I want to separate it out from the National Lottery if
we can because I was on the Committee that started up the National
Lottery and there was supposed to be a thing called "additionality",
that National Lottery money was always going to be additional
to whatever the state spending was going to be. Clearly that has
not been quite kept to the word. If the amount of money that is
now being added in from the National Lottery is going to be poached
even further, then clearly grass-roots sport is going to be completely
sacrificed. It seems to be the easy hit. I know we have spoken
about let us take a bit from the health budget. We all know the
pressures they are under so I cannot see much happening there.
The education budget, yes, something is being done there but we
are still talking about the same institutions, are we not, that
lock up school playing fields and facilities during the summer
because they cannot afford the money to pay insurance for youngsters
to use these facilities when the schools are closed. I am just
wondering where we take it from here because, as I say, this is
hugely depressing. I do not know what discussions you have had
with the DCMS to take this somewhere forward but clearly if Sport
England is being denuded of funding at the same time as they are
being asked to do more, then they simply cannot deliver.
Mr Lamb: I think the DCMS are
well aware of our views. They are certainly well aware of Sport
England's aspirations to have more Exchequer funding. There has
been a significant increase in Exchequer funding for sport but
it was starting from an extremely low base, and of course that
has been offset by, as I say, a reduction of approximately half
in real terms of Lottery funding going into sport. Spending per
capita of the population, as we mentioned in our submission, is
£21 per person per year in this country, compared with £51
in Australia and I believe £80 in a model European country,
Finland.
Ms Simmonds: We know the DCLG
has this Comprehensive Performance Assessment of local authorities,
certainly at metropolitan level, where they have to provide facilities
within 20 minutes' walking or driving time depending on which
particular authority you are. There is a need to provide more
facilities and the DCLG has a part to play there. At the end of
the day I would also say we must use the private sector more.
That has not been a strategic priority and we are out there providing
facilities and doing an awful lot without being fully integrated
into that total system.
Q112 Mr Evans: Is there a report
you have done which says, "Listen, if we do not invest the
money into exciting youngsters and people generally to do more
sport"—and you have talked about the ticking time-bomb
of obesity and diabetes and all the health costs that the country
is going to have to face if we do not wake up to it. Has there
been an opportunity cost done on that, that if we do not spend
the money this is how much it is going to cost in a few years'
time?
Ms Simmonds: I think a lot of
work is going around this area and I sit on a steering group of
a Foresight Project which is a DTI project looking at obesity
and what we must do over a period of years. I have read pages
and pages of scientific evidence but the difficulty is that a
lot of this scientific evidence says different things, but I think
at the end of the day everyone is clear that if we are going to
deal with obesity it is not just about healthy diets, it is about
people taking more physical activity, and the whole of Government
is going to have to own that agenda at the end of the day.
Mr Lamb: Yes, I mentioned that
the Healthy Living Strategy recently published by the Department
for Health does not mention sport. I am pleased to say that we
are about to sit down with the Department of Health and a group
of selected governing bodies of sport and recreation in order
to talk through these issues. I know that the cost of increasing
participation to the sort of level that was envisaged even before
July 2005 will be very, very considerable and yet Sport England,
who are the vehicle for the delivery of those objectives, are
not getting any additional funding to assist them to do so.
Q113 Chairman: You said right at
the beginning that no host country had managed yet to achieve
the objective of a lasting increase in participation in sport.
That was one of the four key strategic objectives which was set
out in Seb Coe's in the pledge in Singapore, and yet your evidence
suggests that we are not going to be any different from any previous
host country. Do you think it can be done?
Ms Simmonds: Yes, I do think it
can be done and I think with some national co-ordination and national
consultation we could pool all the very good ideas together and
make some plans about how we can actually work, as I have described,
from the ground upwards. So, yes, I think it can be done but remember
what I said right at the beginning, which is that we have a long
sunrise and a short sunset and we must start on that route to
participation now.
Mr Lamb: There has to be the political
will. It is not just about the Games but the whole sporting system
around the Games must be ready to accommodate the inevitable increase
in participation.
Chairman: I do not think we have any
more questions. Thank you.
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