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

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[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.