Birmingham Commonwealth Games Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Lord Addington

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 25th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I will make a few comments. First, on my amendment, I think we covered part of the international co-ordination and spreading the events in the previous debate, but if the Minister has more to say on that I will of course listen gladly. The main thrust coming through here is represented by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, effectively asking whether the Government will enact their own sports policy properly, which involves the department of health co-ordinating with the Department for Education and local government to make sure we have facilities to get out there and participate in grass-roots sport. Competitive sport is there at grass-roots level; it is just not as well done. I pray in aid my own sporting career. I am afraid that I missed Second Reading because I was playing rugby against the French Parliament. Yes, we lost. I recommend parliamentary rugby to anybody who wants to see the detail of the game, because we are so slow that you do not miss anything.

A good sports policy alone does not create champions. They often come by freak and fluke, and the very lucky get through. A good system will leave a supply of them. A really good sports policy will provide second-team and third-team players for small clubs and address the health problems, et cetera. People saying, “Wow, isn’t he great, let’s look at him on TV”, but then sitting down with beers and chips and saying, “Let’s try another channel” does not help very much. We need to get people out there to take part.

Perhaps we should be set up differently, but schools are a great facility. I started my club career playing on a school pitch that was lent to a small club that had just got itself a ground. We came through after 10 or 15 years of using school pitches. We must not stop that spontaneous growth of sport. We have a tradition of organising ourselves at a far higher level than any other country in Europe. Doing it ourselves means a cheaper facility. We should help and support that, as these amendments would do, enacting a sports policy which says, “These bits of government should come together”. Surely if something as exciting as a Commonwealth Games cannot allow us to do that, we really are missing a trick.

[Lord Foster of Bath]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, is 100% right; schools must be involved in trying to ensure the sporting legacy that we desperately seek. There have been financial problems, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. However, there have also been many initiatives over the years to do the most sensible thing: link sports clubs with schools, so that youngsters have an opportunity to try a far wider range of sport and find one that they are interested in. When they leave school, they would then have somewhere to continue participating in that sport. Sadly, we still have dreadful figures about the drop-off rate of sports participation at the end of the school years.

I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, which has my name attached to it. He rightly points out that although in all the multisport events in this country over the years, we have had a range of very good legacies—buildings, contracts, upskilling and so on—we have failed to develop a sporting legacy from any of them, and certainly not at anything like the level that we hoped for.

I notice that the organising committee’s current legacy plans were on just one page of the Social Values Charter it put out in October 2019, saying that everybody is working together and that it is still in the process of developing long-term legacy plans. As I am sure noble Lords have seen, a number of new appointments have been made to the legacy and benefits committee; I welcome that. It has identified nine key themes for legacy. One of them is what we are speaking about: physical activity and well-being. Against each of the other eight, various organisations are also referenced, but in relation to physical activity and well-being the DCMS is listed as the lead body. The Minister said that it is the responsibility of the organising committee, as an NDPB, to produce regular reports on issues, and we have been assured that legacy will be one of them. But can she tell us what plans the Government have—and her department has—to produce a legacy planning report? It would give those of us who are interested an opportunity to comment, and perhaps collectively achieve for the first time what the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is keen for, as am I: a true, lasting sporting legacy from a multisport event.