Sport, Health and Well-being National Plan (NPSRC Report)

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, in thanking our chair, the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for leading us so well and making being on the committee so enjoyable. The quality of our discussions has led to a very good report. I join the noble Lord in sending the noble Lord, Lord Willis, our very best wishes for a speedy recovery. I also thank him for the way in which he has presented the report. Those of us who served on the committee know that it was originally his idea that we should have a special inquiry into this and he was a guiding spirit pushing us to radical thinking throughout the whole time we met. I am sure that I speak on behalf of many of us in thanking him for what has been achieved.

Sport, health and well-being is one of those strange topics in politics that no one is against. I have never heard anyone make a speech saying that they do not think it is important, a good idea or a crucial part of a healthy society. Sometimes, in my experience, when no one is against something, no one is so much in favour of it that it goes to the top of everyone’s agenda. It is a weird weakness of our political system. When I was a Minister, I was told by a politician whom I greatly admired that to achieve change you need an argument. If you do not, there will be no energy, heat or momentum for change. I hate creating rows—it is not my style—but I have concluded that we have to go a bit further in this area than we have done previously to create a discussion out of which some ideas might come that someone will be brave enough to take forward. I see that mood in this report. Its main recommendations are radical; some people are against them, which gives us something to grab hold of and take further.

I will concentrate on one or two general things and take a couple of examples. Sport, health and well-being is a tale of two stories, whichever part of the population you look at. Among adults, we have some of the highest-achieving athletes and sportspeople in the world; we are good at lots of things and win lots of medals—we had three international Olympians on our committee—so we do very well at adult sports. However, over a quarter of the population is deemed to be inactive and only 36% of people participate in sports once a week. Among children and young people, there are some marvellous boys and girls in our schools achieving at a high level, some of whom enter adult sport and compete at senior level while still of school age. Yet we also have lots of young boys and girls turned off PE and sport who never return to it throughout their lives.

In the wider population, some families and communities, for whom being active is part of family and community life, have lots of sports facilities and thrive, but we also have some places, people and communities who do not have the facilities, the motivation or the encouragement. Thinking about ourselves as a nation—what is good for our well-being and that of our citizens—frankly, although I love football, it is more important to get wider involvement than to have the wealthiest football league in the world. Sometimes, it seems as though we have backed the wrong thing. We are immensely proud of having a lot of money in the Premier League, but we worry less about the neighbourhoods and communities for which sport is not available.

Things need to change. I will take two examples from my background of where the report says this very well. First, it seems minor to say that PE and sport should be core school subjects. The Government responded that it does not matter because they are part of the national curriculum. However, if everything on the national curriculum was treated equally, we would not have core and non-core subjects. “Core subject” means that it is more important than the rest of the national curriculum. If anything has to go—if money is short and anything is not measured or celebrated—it will be the non-core subjects, not the core ones. The notion of “physical literacy” in the report and the move to make it a core subject would give a powerful signal, though not overnight, to people in education and schools that this matters and that change must happen.

Where we are at the moment is that many children in primary school will be taught all their PE by somebody who may not be interested in sport, may not be confident in sport themselves and may only have had between three and six hours of training in the whole of their teacher training. Even in secondary schools, where we have, I hope, qualified teachers—although I am not sure that every class is taken by a fully qualified teacher—when the exams come along, it is the sports hall that is closed so that desks and chairs can be put out. Can you imagine literacy or numeracy lessons being cancelled because there was this or something else in the rest of the curriculum? The message given there is that yes, it is important, yes, it is part of a broad and balanced curriculum, and yes, we see the importance of activity for children, but we are keeping it just below the radar while our messages about other parts of the curriculum are far stronger. Unless that changes, we will fail to lay the foundations with children and young people so that they remain active throughout their life.

If you miss out at school, or you are in a school that does not have those facilities, you look to your community —and the amount of money local authorities spend has reduced in the past 10 years by £0.6 billion, and it is not a statutory duty to provide leisure facilities. So there is something wrong. Imagine if we closed all our GP surgeries, or all our dental surgeries—well, we do have a problem with dentists. But if we closed all those health facilities, we would worry that it would be a crisis. The swimming pool closes, and it reaches the headlines in the local newspaper but nowhere else.

I give those examples, because to me that is saying that we are not yet in a position where policy is giving a clear message about what is important. I am disappointed with the Government’s response—although, to be honest, I could have predicted it; I could almost have guessed the draft. I was probably the same, but it does what Ministers of government departments always do. It says how much they have spent in the past on various pilots or trials and that they have picked out some geographical areas to run some more trials, says that they have a new measurement, and then to top it all says that they have set up a cross-party working group or a cross-party departmental committee. It is a formula that you go down. In government terms it does not cost much, but it looks like a lot when it is written on a piece of paper.

My message is that all that has been done in the past, and it did not work. That is the tragedy of this issue—that when you look at both Governments, you can see that they have made honest efforts, because they want to bring about the change. But a bit more money, another cross-party working group, another pilot and another trial has not delivered the change that we need. The statistics are worse than they used to be. We should say in this area that there should be no more pilots or small pots of money until you tell us what happened to the last ones you spent. What was the impact, what lessons have you learned, and what are you changing in future?

To be honest, it took me some time to come around to the notion of changing the machinery of government, because I am always a bit worried when politicians suggest doing so. It is a bit of a safe haven for those who have worked in the machinery of government—but I have become an enthusiastic convert to it. I can see that the proposal at the core of the report to put this in the Department of Health, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, explained, could give a very big signal that government understands that, if things are to change, the leadership that it has to show is that it will change too. I very much hope that this debate will go on in future years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is a genuine pleasure to join in this debate. I thank my noble friend in sport, to use his expression, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, very much for introducing it. I shall pass on to my noble friend Lord Willis the wishes that have been expressed, and the support of all those who supported the committee. He did a wonderful job, and actually made it a pleasant experience.

We have had one or two voices against the report, which probably makes it slightly more interesting. To deal with the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, first, this is not something that the Department of Health has to do—it is about the Department of Health looking out. It is not about the Department of Health taking over sport; it is about making sure that it happens and making sure that sport and recreation has somebody championing it.

One thing we have not mentioned that we should have done is the fact that we now have the power in the Department of Agriculture to create footpaths. Let us create a footpath and have somebody making sure that those footpaths connect and that the local bus service connects with them, or that at least you can park your car. Footpaths that dump you on to the middle of B-roads without anywhere to walk afterwards are useless to the vast majority of the population. It is about making sure that somebody can do that, and making sure that, in your planning, there is some green space so a child can play—that is the sort of thing which something that looks out can do. It can make sure that a plan for sport actually looks out.

The Department of Health is uniquely well placed because it touches everything. I am afraid that the current departmental structure does not; it mainly just distributes lottery money, and does a little bit of everything else. And if you put it in the Department for Education—as I have said on numerous occasions to numerous bodies, the thing about children is that they grow up. Even if they have a good experience at school, sport must be brought to them, and they need to be told that they are taking it forward. One or two of the Government’s initiatives on that seem to have largely died, and I am afraid that the coalition Government takes some of the blame for that.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

Thank you. We have to make sure that that link is improved because, as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, pointed out, the prosperous classes will carry on playing sport: “We’ve never had a problem, we can afford private memberships, we’ve got cars to take us to places”. Not everyone has those resources.

I will give an anecdote from the village of Lambourn, where I live. Two mothers were in front of me in the Co-op, which is where all the action happens there, and one said, “My son wants to join the football team, but he can’t because we haven’t got a car and there’ll be away games”. I turned around and said, “They’ll probably have a minibus that will drive you there”. The response: “Oh, I couldn’t expect that”. That is a real attitude. Unless we get something that looks at the structure and encourages those for whom it is not easy to take on sport, we will continue on our current path. This is not about new failure; it is a continuation of what we have. As noble Lords have mentioned, 40% of leisure centres and pools are threatened with closure, because we did not include them in our energy support strategies. It was coming anyway—the pressure was there—but this might just be the catalyst. The Government overlooked how important they are.

The Department of Health gets a direct benefit from physical activity, because it is a preventive wonder drug for mental and physical health. It is also a socialising factor. By supporting sport, we can make sure that we take a bigger bonus from it. We have all heard about workforces, retirements and so on, and all these factors will help. Somebody who is active and engaged can possibly be encouraged to go to a second career. All this is there, if we do it a little better than we are doing it now.

In this country, the Government have inherited, historically, something wonderful, which is the fact that much of our sporting structure was done on a voluntary basis and formed by people outside the national structures. Not one of the FA, RFU or MCC is a government-funded or government-initiated structure. Sport owns a lot of its own facilities here. You do not have to put that much in. We are mainly talking about amateur sport, which—I will define it again—is where you pay to play; you do not get paid. People are doing that, and providing a coaching base, putting on activities and social funds, and many other things. If we have some form of government backing to make sure that they are supported, we will take a bonus at all levels. If we make sure that this happens, something positive can come from it.

It does not mean an increase in bureaucracy. I will tell noble Lords how many bits of government bureaucracy we already have here. I picked out 10 schemes from the Government’s response to this report. They include:

“a new sport strategy to be published in 2022,”

the reports Uniting the Movement and Gear Change, and several campaigns, including We Are Undefeatable, Rediscover Summer, the 10 Minute Shake Up campaign, Join the Movement and This Girl Can. I could go on. I am sure that if I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, she would find a couple more. Then you have the ones for individual sports.

Unless you have a central drive—and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned this—little packages, with little impetus but wonderful photo ops, it will die. If anyone has not seen that, I can quote you a few, as well as some that repeat themselves over and over again. That is what we have a tradition of; we do not have a tradition of maintaining and structuring support and driving it forward, which is what we need because, if the Government give a little push, the rest of the sporting community will do most of this for them, if they make it a little easier for it. But we do not do that—we sit back and then decide that, in education, the literacy hour or the new maths scheme to the age of 18 must take precedence, when we all know that physical activity improves grades within the school system. That is absolutely proven and unanswerable.

We have to look at this in the round and make sure that the Government take this seriously, to get the benefits that are so easy to get. If the Department of Health cannot do this, what other department has that degree of reach and authority? The Treasury is the only one, but I am afraid that our Treasury is not about investment but about controlling spending. Can we have a government response that tells us how we will get coherent about supporting this? The health benefits that we have at the moment are under direct threat; they are more difficult to obtain for those who need it most because of the funding structure, given the current financial squeeze and energy crisis. How will we answer this?

For every two or three leisure centres or swimming pools that are closed down, only one will open—we know that. Every voluntary group that uses them, not just for sport but for the arts, social activity and anything else, will also lose its base of operation and all the social and physical benefits. How will the Government get a coherent attitude to this? There is a chance for them to take a huge win here, and I hope that we will hear how they plan to do this, because at the moment we seem to be sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff.