Sport and Recreation

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for initiating this debate. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience at all levels of sport, which makes him an ideal sponsor for this debate, and he has raised some important questions.

I approach this debate not as a sports expert—indeed, I can still vividly remember a number of rather painful experiences on the sports field of Whitchurch High School, which I will not regale noble Lords with now—but as someone who is rightly proud of my party’s achievements in investing in sport and encouraging all young people to find a sport that they can enjoy. So I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that Governments meddle inefficiently in sport.

When we were elected in 1997, competitive school sports had virtually disappeared from the curriculum. Since that time, school sport has been transformed, with 84 per cent of pupils now doing two hours of PE per week and 78 per cent involved in competitive sport in school. In addition, strong partnerships with primary care trusts, local authorities, transport, police authorities and the voluntary sector have maximised the overall health, skills and confidence-building benefits that give young people a greater start in life.

Had we been re-elected, our manifesto aimed even higher: to extend participation in school sport further; to open up school facilities to the community; to create 10,000 new volunteer coaches; and to invest in new sports facilities. We were truly aiming for a golden decade of sport which, from the grass roots to the elites, would have allowed Britain’s sporting talent to be supported and celebrated. But now, instead of that hope and ambition, one of the first acts of Michael Gove at the Department for Education was to wind up the Youth Sport Trust, which had done so much to develop a nationwide programme of school sport, and instead redirect the money to general school funding. On this I very much share the view of my noble friend Lady Billingham, who, as we have heard, cannot be here today. She argued persuasively in the CSR debate last week that the outcome of this move will be inevitable; school heads, desperate to do well in Ofsted inspections and league tables, will be bound to transfer the money from PE into more academic subjects. The result will be a loss of all that expertise and commitment that have been nurtured over time. Therefore, I should like to ask the noble Baroness how much sport per week she envisages pupils taking under this Government’s proposals. What local partnerships does she envisage overseeing the sporting activities that will remain? What will be the impact on governance of sport at a local level?

As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, this is a crucial time for UK sport in the run-up to the Olympics, and we are in the global spotlight as never before. We will be judged on our delivery of a successful Games and an increase in our cache of medals, but most importantly we will be judged on our legacy of embedding sport as a universal activity at grass-roots level, so is this not a rather strange time to start merging some of our key national sports organisations such as UK Sport, the Youth Sport Trust and Sport England? This will inevitably result in them taking their eye off the ball, so to speak. If we care about succeeding in delivering the Olympic legacy, surely the better route would be to leave the current bodies in place and build up their governance and accountability structures. I should be grateful if the noble Baroness could comment on this point.

At the heart of this debate is a very real concern about standards of governance in grass-roots and national sports. It is fair to say that sporting bodies have been slow to take up the challenge that business and the voluntary sector have been grappling with for years. Again, I slightly disagree with both previous speakers on this issue because it seems to me that the voluntary sector does understand the need for good governance in a way that some local and voluntary sporting organisations may not. It is obviously dangerous to generalise, but there have been some high-profile cases that have shone a painful light on some of our much loved institutions. In football, the recent cases of the disputed ownership of clubs such as Liverpool and Manchester United have raised the question of supporters’ rights to a say in the ownership. In cricket, issues of match fixing, betting and corruption haunt the international sport. In track events, the continuing shadow of performance-enhancing drugs and the lack of effective controls regularly hit the headlines. Even the Lawn Tennis Association is accused of a lack of transparency in its funding and a failure to deliver promises to roll out a grass-roots programme.

Some of these examples underline the fact that many sports are big business and there are obviously limits on how far government can intervene. But even in professional sport government can, and should, play a supporting role in order to get fans a fair deal from the sports they love. For example, government can intervene to combat cheating and ban the use of illegal substances. It can also prosecute those involved in match fixing, improve the regulation of betting and work with sporting bodies to make sure that they are accountable to their stakeholders, are transparently run and have the power to scrutinise the takeovers of professional clubs. Of course, where government money is used to help fund specific activities of these organisations, our powers to intervene are that much greater.

It seems to me that there are some key principles of governance that we could require sports organisations to adopt. It is no longer good enough to make excuses for the poor performance of some amateur organisations. The participants and supporters have certain rights. Sport England has already taken a first step by producing a self-assessment tool for governance, but more could, and should, be done. A recent report by Birkbeck College entitled, Good Governance in Sport, researched what national sports bodies were doing and set out a set of standards for the future. Its blueprint is a great starting point for governing bodies struggling to raise their game. It includes advice on the size of boards, the need for independent non-executive directors, annual board performance evaluation, appointments procedures and risk management policies. It also proposes that boards understand their stakeholders better and implement engagement and participation strategies, including representation on the board. For those of us who have been involved with governance in other sectors this might all sound rather obvious, but it seems that what is needed now are some core principles and measures of good governance that can underpin every sports body and reassure everyone involved.

This is a welcome debate that raises some fundamental issues about how our sports bodies are run. There is an opportunity here for the Government to follow on from the good work already carried out by their predecessor, and I look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness how she intends to take this crucial work forward.