National Women’s Sports

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to celebrate the success of national women’s sports, particularly in team sports.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is no secret as to why I have brought this issue forward. We have had a long run of great sporting success. For someone who would sooner cheer for Scotland, unfortunately this has been mainly by English teams. We have all seen our national women’s sides enjoying a tremendous run of success in team games that were originally thought to be male dominated.

The Euros were an odd one—for me, a hardened rugby union player, football suddenly became enjoyable to watch. This was not only because there was a successful team to relate to, but also for the sheer joy the players seemed to have in competing and in that success. Who would have thought that a song, brought out in 1969 by Neil Diamond, would be belted out with such great gusto and with which everybody would join in? “Sweet Caroline” has become an anthem for British sport. It happened because a group of female players enjoyed and enlivened their success. It engaged the vast majority of us in a way we did not expect.

This success has been backed up—though this is a little bitter-sweet—by the England rugby union team, which had 30 consecutive victories at international level. I do not know how many records that broke, but it was magnificent. If we cannot celebrate this degree of success with better grace and embrace it a little more than we have done so far, we are going to be in trouble.

The whole structure of sport encourages people to take part and enjoy it. I am asking the Government what we are doing to get the best social, health and emotional health benefits from it. How are we going to do this?

What did we do to allow that success to be seen? First, we made sure that it was all on free-to-air television. If either of those tournaments had been tucked away in even the most brightly lit corner of a streaming service, the vast majority of the population would not have seen them. This had to be something that the BBC and ITV particularly took on and said, “Here it is.”

It is also about the warm-up to it, not just the events. Women’s football has been available for a long time, mainly on the BBC—we have seen it. If you did not see it, it does not really matter, and that applies to any form of public entertainment or engagement that goes on. For the first time, rugby union having the women’s competition in stand-alone tournaments when you can watch it has been massively beneficial to getting people engaged in it.

Why does this matter? If you are getting the women and girls to think that sporting activity is normal, you can encourage more of them to take part in it. It is not a totally closed book because they are out there now, but most of the clichés and stereotypes which have stood against female participation are thus addressed. You are going through and making sure that people can get out and get involved. How do you access this and encourage people to do it? You start at school, I hope by having a smorgasbord of opportunities to try. You encourage children to get out there and enjoy the sports that are going on. However, the thing about school is that you leave it. Generally speaking, people drop out of sport post 16, 18 or 21, when they leave this controlled environment where to an extent it is made easier for you or you are encouraged—indeed, forced—to take part in sport.

What do we do to break that down? You encourage children to try sports, hopefully ones that are culturally available to them. For instance, if you are talking about codes of rugby, I suggest that St Helens rugby league might be your first port of call—this might be the first opportunity to celebrate that other bunch of Lionesses who got into the semi-final of that particular tournament. You have to make sure that it is culturally available for your background and the groups that you are going out to, and then you must encourage people to go from the club at the school to the small amateur clubs—the big, professional, international, shiny stuff does not really matter that much as regards the benefit to society if you do not get people taking part in these games on a voluntary amateur basis.

In this country, government is very lucky that we have a tradition of sports clubs which founded themselves, fund themselves and look after themselves. Sport does a lot. Government helps but primarily, sport helps itself. That is why they are there and why, for instance, local government finds itself assisting football clubs with their grounds, not providing all of them as they do in most of Europe. The Government should be encouraging that. One of the easy ways of doing this is to make sure that there is an effective link between school and club activity. You get better coaching and the idea that you can carry on afterwards. I hope that this will be encouraged.

For women and girls, this might mean expanding the traditional bill of fare. We have just spoken about two sports which are not encapsulated in the traditional diet of netball and hockey, although they should both be represented. Indeed, both those sports have had their degree of success but possibly, if we televise them more we might do them a bit of a favour. However, maybe that is taking the debate a bit too far down one avenue.

How are we going to encourage this, making sure that that offer to take on these things in later life is done? We have to do more on that. School sport partnerships took a step in that direction—I do not know whether they were all-encompassing and fully working that through, because in most cases they got stopped when they had only just started to get going. Can the Minister give us an idea of what they are going to do?

I return to one of the things which government should probably do more of, which is to celebrate better team sports generally. We are in an odd position here, in that we have handed out honours and awards like toffees for people who have had modest successes. It was great back in those heady days when England won the Ashes for the first time, but they should have beaten Australia before that. Everybody got a gong—or whatever the correct term is in cricket; others will correct me later—at the end of it, even if they sat on the bench. Then England win the Rugby World Cup. Great: everybody gets a gong. The England women’s team were amateurs in 2014. The definition of amateurs is that you pay to play, you are not paid; you give up time and effort and you put money in. When they won the World Cup—and they are much more consistent about getting to finals, and so on, than the men—two of them got medals. Has the person who devised that for a team game never actually watched a team game, let alone participated in one? Do not goalkeepers and defenders count in football, or the people who do the hard work to win the ball in rugby, or is it only the glamour boys? I speak as someone who was definitely in the grunt brigade.

This is what the Government could easily do. If it upsets some weird table of achievement or the giving out of awards, give one medal to the entire team and give people a copy of it. That is a way out. The example I give of where that has been done is the equestrian teams for eventing. There used to be one medal; now they give them each one, but it still counts as one medal. That is something that the Government could do easily.

I know the Government had a lot on their plate this summer, but they did not have an official reception for the Lionesses: come on. There was enough of the Government left to celebrate that better. Why did that not happen? You could probably do it now and nobody would lose any Brownie points for having a party late, as opposed to not having it.

As the clock beats me, I thank everybody for taking part and hope that the Government will be able to answer my questions and the other thoughtful ones that I know are coming.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for securing this important debate on the success of women’s sport. The timing is, as noble Lords noted, particularly apt with so much success occurring across women’s sport, not least the success of England’s Red Roses reaching the final at the women’s Rugby World Cup last weekend—and coming so tantalisingly close to winning the tournament—and the Lionesses at this summer’s Euros. I am very happy to be responding to this Question for Short Debate at such an exciting time, and I assure noble Lords that His Majesty’s Government are keen to build on this success and momentum to create a lasting legacy for women’s sport.

The Government are fully committed to supporting women’s sport at every opportunity, pushing for greater participation, employment, commercial opportunities, visibility—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Addington accentuated—and opportunities at school. It is important that we take the time to recognise and celebrate success, which is why today’s debate is so important as well as so timely.

This summer we witnessed a major success in women’s sport the Lionesses beat the German team at Wembley to lift the UEFA European championship trophy. This inspirational tournament was staged in July across England, from Rotherham and Wigan to Southampton and Brighton. As noble Lords have noted, the final at Wembley was attended by a record crowd of over 87,000 people. That was not only a new record for a women’s international game in Europe but broke new ground for a women’s or men’s Euros final tournament game. The tournament also became the most watched women’s Euros ever, with a global cumulative live viewership of 365 million people across television, out-of-home viewing and streaming. This massive figure is more than double the number that watched the last UEFA European Women’s Championship in the Netherlands in 2017.

The tournament was truly a ground-breaking moment for the sport and has dramatically boosted interest in the women’s game, bringing it to the forefront of people’s minds. The event held for the Lionesses in Trafalgar Square the day after the final was a momentous occasion and saw 7,000 fans celebrate with their heroes. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State and the former Prime Minister Liz Truss met the Lionesses at their training ground to congratulate them and were very proud to support the event in Trafalgar Square. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, said, it is also important that we focus on the long-term legacy by way of celebration. To commemorate their already incredible achievement, we are working with the Football Foundation and the FA to name sites after the players in towns and cities that shaped their careers. We hope that that will inspire many generations of more players.

We will also continue to invest in grass-roots sport to bring on the next generation of Lionesses. We know how valuable physical education at school is: it gives pupils an opportunity to excel, to be active and to lead healthy lives. My noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington talked about the importance for bone density and preventing diseases such as osteoporosis. That is why we are actively working with the Department for Education to understand the barriers that prevent the ambition of two hours of PE a week being achieved. We will also continue to work with the Department for Education to ensure that girls have equal access to sports.

There is more work for us to do to identify and address the different barriers to participation that exist for young people; we have heard about some of those again today. We will continue to adopt a more targeted approach as part of our new sport strategy. Alongside this, the Department for Education is working on updating the School Sport and Activity Action Plan, which will set out steps to improve PE teaching in primary schools and to help schools make better use of their sport facilities.

On facilities, my noble friend Lord Sandhurst spoke about the importance of single-sex changing facilities. The Government are committed to maintaining the safeguards that allow organisations to provide single-sex services and we do not plan to announce any changes to the law.

Aside from the Women’s Euros, there are a number of other recent examples of success in women’s sport. Over the last week, we have seen the England Red Roses reach the final of this year’s women’s Rugby World Cup, as well as the other Lionesses—as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, put it—reach the semi-final of the Rugby League World Cup. The Great Britain team reached the semi-finals of the Billie Jean King Cup for the first time—as my noble friend Lady Sater said—in 41 years. Great Britain’s women also won three medals at the recent Gymnastics World Championships in Liverpool. Jessica Gadirova claimed an historic floor gold medal for Great Britain on the final day and sealed Great Britain’s first ever women’s all-round World Gymnastics Championship medal with bronze in Liverpool. This year’s Commonwealth Games also highlighted the success of women’s sport with Eilish McColgan’s outstanding performance in the 10,000 metres, to give just one example. Some 173,000 spectators attended the T20 women’s cricket at Edgbaston, a record for women’s cricket.

It goes without saying that Emma Radacanu’s win at the US Open in 2021 truly inspired the nation as well. A peak audience of 9.2 million tuned into the match on Channel 4, including 48% of 16 to 34 year-olds. The UK’s honours system can provide a way of recognising stellar sporting achievement and moments of national celebration. Examples of this include the MBEs awarded to the GB women’s hockey team who won gold at the Rio Olympic Games in 2016 and the damehood awarded to Dame Laura Kenny as a result of her becoming the most successful female cyclist in Olympic history following her performance at the Tokyo Games in 2020.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

The fact is that we have given out honours to every member in a team. If you are giving out only two, the only team you are ever going to honour is beach volleyball. Can we do something about it?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I take the point the noble Lord raises. Of course, the honours system is independent of government, but his point will be well heard and, I am sure, fed back to those who sit on the independent committees.

All those sportswomen, whether honoured yet or not, are inspiring the next generation to follow their dreams. We are looking forward to this momentum being maintained and built on with the rugby league World Cup final this weekend, the ICC women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa, the FIFA women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, the netball World Cup in South Africa and the Solheim Cup in Spain. I am sure all noble Lords will want to send our best wishes to the mixed England team who are in the finals of the wheelchair rugby league World Cup tomorrow.

As noble Lords can see, there is much to celebrate in women’s sport, but it is not enough that we celebrate these successes; we must continue our hard work in ensuring that they continue for decades to come. We are doing this by investing £230 million between 2021 and 2025 to improve grass-roots facilities across the UK. In addition, after Emma Radacanu’s spectacular win, we put just under £22 million into tennis court facilities. We will also look to continue our world-leading reputation for hosting major and mega sporting events and bringing all those special moments, like the Lionesses’ victory, to the United Kingdom. Major events make people feel good in a way unlike others and it is right that we should all have the opportunity to witness at first hand the successes of our brilliant athletes, men and women.

With this in mind, we must continue to build our pipeline of sporting events so that we can inspire more people across the country to watch, participate in or volunteer in sport, putting emphasis on the need for events to consider their social impact and legacy at the early bidding stage, to maximise the benefits after conclusion. It is worth highlighting in that regard that we successfully won the bid to host the women’s Rugby World Cup in 2025 in May this year, and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Hayward for securing the financial commitment from the Government for that and pass on, via him, my congratulations to the Kings Cross Steelers for their victory in the Bingham Cup. Hosting the women’s Rugby World Cup in 2025 and delivering the legacy programme will generate transformational social impacts across rugby fans and more widely, including in the towns and cities which play host, and the legacy programme will look to focus on access to rugby for women and girls across the country. The 2026 ICC women’s T20 World Cup was announced as being awarded to England and Wales in July this year, another important opportunity that will further boost the ECB’s strategy to make cricket a gender-balanced sport.

The UK has also won the bid to host the International Working Group on Women and Sport from this year until 2026, another great opportunity not only to share the fantastic work we are doing but to learn from other countries. There is no doubt that the visibility of women’s sport is continuing to grow, and this was boosted earlier this year when we added the FIFA women’s World Cup and the UEFA Women’s European Championships to the listed events regime, meaning both tournaments will remain available for free-to-air television broadcasters and to the biggest audiences.

We want to continue to build on recent successes, such as the Women’s Euros and the good work already being done to encourage more women and girls to participate in sport and physical activity. We need to look ahead and be prepared to take advantage of opportunities and find ways to overcome challenges, such as have been outlined in today’s debate. We need to keep talking about issues relating to women in sport, asking questions and pushing ourselves to do more, so that women can continue to be in the driving seat of our national sporting success and not just of the Government Car Service. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for today’s debate and to all noble Lords who participated in it.