Community Sports: Impact on Young People

Lord Polak Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Nye. I was weaned on golf. My late mother was the lady captain of the Lee Park Golf Club in Liverpool. I agree with everything the noble Baroness said.

I thank my noble friend Lord Wood, as I shall call him on this occasion, for initiating this debate. It is very important. He made a comprehensive introduction and has already done the bits I was going to talk about. We do not meet only here; we are often on the terraces together watching our beloved Liverpool.

I congratulate the two newbies, the noble Lords, Lord Shamash and Lord Hannett, on their excellent speeches. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Shamash, will not mind if I call him a north Londoner rather than a Mancunian. He will understand, being a Scouser. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, a fellow proper Scouser, to the House.

Today is a bit like a local derby, with the noble Lords, Lord Wood of Anfield and Lord Hannett of Everton, here. This reminds me of the Scouse sense of humour. Noble Lords who know Liverpool will know there is a shopping area there called Liverpool ONE. Everton has a shop in Liverpool ONE and the shop is called Everton Two, so anyone who writes a letter to it has to put the address, “Everton Two, Liverpool ONE”. However, they beat us 2-0 this time.

People who know me assume, because of my involvement in politics, that I did PPE at university. I did not; I did PE. Sport is my great love. In preparing for this debate, I looked up Edge Hill University—again, up in the north-west—and noticed that it has an MSc in sport, physical activity and mental health, in association with Everton in the Community. The course examines how mental health can be improved with sport, physical activity and exercise, and I was really impressed. I ask the Minister how widespread these courses are around the country—once again, the north-west seems to be in the lead.

I promise not to stay too much on the topic of Merseyside, but my great interest, beside all sports, are cricket and football. The noble Lord, Lord Wood, mentioned the Chance to Shine cricket programme. It is an amazing programme that exemplifies the transformative power of cricket, fostering inclusivity, community engagement, personal development and access to sport, providing central life skills and helping to shape a positive future for disadvantaged and disabled young people. We cannot do better than that.

On the subject of football, my noble friend the Minister knows full well my interest in the health and well-being of the Premier League, so that the league is able to continue leading its funding and supporting programmes in over 100 club community organisations across the country. I hope the Government will do nothing that could impact the continued growth of the Premier League. That growth allows funding to increase, and that funding impacts positively on so many lives and communities throughout the country, whether through the Premier League Primary Stars programme, Premier League Inspires or, as the noble Lord, Lord Wood, talked about, Premier League Kicks. The importance of the Premier League to the economy is well known. I was thinking about the tourism that it brings into this country. Over 1.5 million tourists come from abroad into our country for game days.

I cannot resist coming back to the topic of my hometown. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, talked about, Everton in the Community has over 120 full-time staff offering more than 50 programmes covering a range of social issues—health, employability, anti-social behaviour, crime, education and so on. I refer noble Lords to its brilliant and excellent website.

Liverpool’s LFC Foundation is not that shabby either. As its website says, its mission is:

“To harness the power of the LFC Family to create life changing opportunities for the most underserved communities home and away”.


Last season, the LFC Foundation supported 123,000 young families across Merseyside and beyond.

I shall finish by focusing on individuals. Not just the sports themselves—we have all talked about that—but individuals can make a difference. I am glad the noble Lord, Lord Shamash, has just left the Chamber for a minute because I am going to ignore Marcus Rashford and what he did and talk about Jamie Carragher, the great icon who used to play for Liverpool. I do so because what he did and got involved in, the particular issue that I will raise, can change people’s lives.

During lockdown, I was watching the TV when I saw a guy talking about his son, who had passed away at a swimming baths in Liverpool at the age of 12. Oliver King sadly died of a heart attack, and there was no defibrillator at the school. I realised that the swimming pool he was talking about was that of my old school, where I learned to swim. I contacted the Jamie Carragher foundation and said, “Is there anything I can do to help?” It came back very quickly, and I subsequently worked a little with Jamie and with Mark King, who was in the year below me—the father who lost his son.

Thanks to Nadhim Zahawi, when he was Secretary of State for Education, and thanks to the brilliant work of someone such as Jamie Carragher, there are now—or will be—defibrillators in every single school where they were not before. That will change lives because it will save the lives of so many people, and that is what individuals have the ability to do in sport. I just hope that there will be many more Jamie Carraghers and, dare I say it, Marcus Rashfords.

I will also finish with a quote, because everybody seems to be doing it. I am going a little further back than the noble Lord, Lord Wood—to the late, great Bill Shankly, who I also talked about in my maiden speech. He said this:

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that”.

Football Governance

Lord Polak Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

As I said to the noble Lord’s noble friend earlier, football itself can take forward some of the recommendations in the fan-led review which we endorsed in April, such as financial redistribution throughout the leagues. We urge them strongly to do that, and my right honourable friends have done so directly.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, we need to be a little careful that we do not throw the baby out with the bath water. The Premier League is the envy of the world; it attracts the world’s best players. As a Liverpool fan, I could not let this debate go by, being led just by an Evertonian. I urge us to be very careful to ensure that the Premier League stays the premier league.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend raises some of the complex issues with which my right honourable friends are grappling in their discussions with everybody interested in this matter, including supporters’ groups and the fans themselves, and they will bring forward our answers in the White Paper.

BBC: Freedom of Information Legislation

Lord Polak Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am delighted to echo the right reverend Prelate’s congratulations to BBC News on that recognition.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, if the new team at the BBC want to return it to the British Broadcasting Corporation we have been so proud of, and are sincere in their wish to draw a line under the past, does the Minister agree that they should also apologise for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of public funds keeping the Balen report secret? This report was commissioned to investigate biased BBC reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are they hiding and what are they afraid of? Will she urge the BBC to be completely transparent and honest and publish the findings?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely acknowledge my noble friend’s wish to see transparency in all regards. The Government absolutely agree that the BBC should be a beacon in setting standards and that the recent Dyson report, in particular, showed that in some instances it has fallen far short.

Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Polak Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Fleet on her terrific maiden speech. It reminded me of my school days in Liverpool, at King David High School, where music was key. We had 500 pupils and four orchestras; in fact, when a new pupil arrived and they were not holding a violin case, we knew that they were a pianist.

I also congratulate my noble friend the Minister on her introduction of the Bill this afternoon and refer the House to my interests as set out in the register. I will focus my brief remarks on the benefits that the Bill can bring. Like other noble Lords, I am grateful to the organisations that have sent in information. I commend them all on the work they undertake to keep noble Lords updated and informed.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, I was particularly struck by the material I received from KickStart Money—a coalition of savings and investment firms with an important mission that I fully support. The goal is simple and clear: to ensure that every primary school-age child leaves school at the age of 11 having received a high-quality and effective financial education. The coalition of supporters of KickStart Money was brought together by the Investing and Saving Alliance in response to research which found that habits and attitudes towards money can be formed in children as young as seven, thus making education at a young age vital to their future financial capability.

Just a few weeks ago, KickStart Money was fortunate to have had a meeting with the right honourable Gavin Williamson MP, the Secretary of State for Education, to discuss how financial education at primary school level helps to form positive attitudes towards money and establish important saving habits for future life. KickStart Money also won the Good Money Award last December, at the 2020 Better Society Awards, for its work in championing early-intervention financial education and funding vital money management lessons for almost 19,000 primary-aged children, delivered by MyBnk.

The Bill, which the Government have brought forward, is to be welcomed and provides an exciting opportunity to educate young people. The Bill will rightly expand the dormant assets scheme across the financial sector to make, as we have heard, potentially just under £900 million available for good causes—and clearly there must be more. What better cause could there be than using some of the funds to ensure that all primary school children receive that high-quality and effective financial education? It seems to me that the lost assets of those who have not managed their money effectively should be used to ensure that the next generation builds strong money-management skills and positive saving habits. In fact, I suggest that it is deeply appropriate.

As a result of the economic impact, more than one in four UK adults has low financial resilience. That comes from the FCA’s Financial Lives survey of February 2021. It also seems that the pandemic has had an impact on the younger generation, where six in 10 young people are saying that Covid-19 has made them more anxious about money issues. Research by the Money and Pensions Service has shown that money habits are formed at the age of seven, as I said, and evaluation of KickStart Money’s financial education programmes has shown how money management lessons can close the gap in financial capability, levelling up the playing field between those who receive some form of financial education at home and those who do not.

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that this type of education is vital and will find a way to ensure that the opportunity is not missed to use the assets of financial mismanagement to create a society where young people can be given tools and skills at an early stage to prevent people falling into debt or financial vulnerability by focusing these dormant assets to ensure that primary schoolchildren develop a positive money mindset as early as possible.