Lord Addington
Main Page: Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Allen, has drawn our attention to a very important facet of our society. Initially when thinking about the economic and social value, a little part of me said, “Economic value? You cannot put an economic value on this”. Well, you can because you are doing something that would not otherwise be done, and that makes our society a better place to live in. You are saying, “Get involved. Do something. Get something you are involved in. Interact with people”. When it comes to the economic value of small clubs, there is something that nobody else has mentioned: every small club that I have ever seen is actually a labour exchange as well. It is a recruitment base. I am not sure that the taxman approves of mates’ rates all the time, but things happen there. It is a place where you have a social connection.
What allows that to happen? It is the volunteers. Let me make a plea for a group of volunteers who we have not named yet. We talk about the coaches and the organisers, and we have even heard about the person who makes the sandwiches. Let us say something about the treasurers and the secretaries, the people who take on the legally required work that would not happen without them. What do we do to support them? Not much. This is where the worlds of sport and politics can talk to each other, because we are all dependent upon the person who looks up the rules and keeps the budget—all these functions. Indeed, the world of politics at the moment is totally dependent, as are our party machines, on people who do this work. The people who are involved in sport do it for even purer motives: that is, to go out and have interaction that helps you. Are their motives any purer than those of the person who runs the local choral or am-dram society? Probably not, but you are still doing something that will make your life and the lives of those around you slightly better.
What do we do to help these people? As I said, not that much. The governing bodies in sport invest some time, training and organisation, but not enough. What is required is for the political class to get its act together and support the people who take on these—let us face it—fairly boring but essential jobs. You do those jobs to allow yourself and other people to become involved in those activities. We have never really taken them on and supported them properly.
It would be very helpful if local authorities had a combined strategy to make sure that more people are encouraged to get qualified and do those jobs better. The mistakes that occur in those voluntary organisations —and they do occur—could be minimised: everything from fraud to simply filling out the wrong form. Cricket—I always remember the correct terminology in cricket—provided me with a little list of things you have to do: business rates, community and amateur sports clubs, tax relief, corporation tax, grants and loans. These people deal with that lot, and I have not exhausted the list, which goes on and on: recruiting new members, making sure that you have money in the right place to pay a groundsman, or to pay the fees so that you have a pitch to play on or a hall to train in. That is all required from them, and we are not addressing and supporting these people in any way sufficiently.
Coaches often get praise, but they cannot function without that background. The players who go out there and provide the base, the interaction, cannot function without that going on. Can my noble friend therefore just start to give us a little hint of what we are doing to encourage and support these groups of volunteers, which are dominant in all forms of social activity? I will kick my own party in the shins, and say to the Opposition Benches, “Hey, let’s join in. Let’s make sure that we encourage everybody here to get involved”. If we leave this group alone, we start to leave the real foundation alone.
We then turn around and say, “The state should organise when you play your sport, what you should do, and what goes on”, or we go to somebody who does it for economic profit. Okay, fair enough, it would still happen, but not in the same way. More money would be siphoned off, and it probably would not happen as often. You suddenly start having to say, “Who are our target?”. In the same way, when the state says that it wants to develop certain athletes, is it interested in the older person it is helping just to stay healthy? Not to the same extent. All these other activities are going on, but that social interaction is not going on. If there is another way, it is probably not as good. That comes back to the initial concept mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Allen: the idea of value. How are we supporting and building up those groups?
You could say a number of things. It is a good idea to support and recognise these people through local and national honours, but there are not enough of those to go round. We can turn around and say to everybody else—to other groups—“You have a duty to go in and encourage people to take those roles on”, but unless the sports themselves develop that, it will not happen. They will not be able to do that properly without the structure and some form of government support. It may not have to be big financial support, but it will have to be something that encourages and builds. It will go on almost for ever—as could I on this subject, but I will not. It is great, but please can we pay attention to the basis and foundation of what is going on? If we do not, we are in danger of saying, “Go and join in and get on with it”, without having anywhere to channel that energy.
That energy needs to be channelled—and wonderful as the Olympic Games makers were, we discovered afterwards that we did not know what to do with all that energy. Sometimes people said, “That was fun, but I’m going back to the rest of my life”. It is about giving them something else that they can go to, and the fact that we give them a structure to go to is very important. We cannot provide for great big one-off issues such as the Olympics to happen all the time; we have to make it easier and more attractive to put down those foundations. We have a group of people who will pay a membership fee to fill out forms to allow other people to take part in a social activity that benefits the whole of society. If we do not support that, we are definitely looking a gift horse in the mouth and trying to pull its teeth out at the same time.