UK Sport: Elite Sport Funding

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on securing this debate. I also thank him for his interest in the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Basketball, of which I am joint chairman. I should also declare my interest as chairman of the Basketball Foundation, a registered charity established by the clubs which comprise the professional British Basketball League—the BBL—with a view to encouraging and supporting the community outreach activities of these clubs and of other basketball clubs around the country.

This is not the first time that I have argued the case in your Lordships’ House for more public funding for basketball. I make no apology for doing so again today. I am sure that noble Lords with strong interests in other sports, such as badminton—particularly those supported by UK Sport—will be relieved to hear that I do not intend to argue that UK Sport should make basketball a special case and support it at the expense of some other sport which it presently funds.

I would, of course, love to see our national basketball teams compete in the Olympics, and would enthusiastically applaud a decision by UK Sport to enable the British Basketball Federation to make it happen. However, I would not want it to happen at the cost of our country slipping down the medals table. I love to see us at the top of the table, and I do not mind which sports have won the medals. Nor, frankly, do I take much notice of the educational background, or even the ethnicity, of our athletes when I proudly watch them standing on the podium singing our national anthem. For me, sport is one of the few areas of life where innate ability, combined with dedication and sheer hard work—and perhaps luck—make all the difference. It is one of the few areas where what counts is who you are, not who you know. That is why I believe that Dame Katherine Grainger is right to say that our hero athletes can unite and inspire us as a nation. At a period in our national life when we are riven by debate caused by the Brexit referendum, the Government would be well advised to support anything that unites us and, to this end, to put more money into all aspects of sport, both elite and grassroots.

I am probably revealing my naivety in comparison with some noble Lords who have spoken when I say that I am prepared to leave it to UK Sport to do its job of backing Olympic winners. I do not want to make life more difficult for UK Sport by asking it to use its limited resources to solve a number of other major national problems, such as urban deprivation and ethnic and racial discrimination. UK Sport is already helping to tackle those problems by providing inspiration for our young people through the success which our athletes achieve internationally. That said, those problems need urgent attention and sport, particularly basketball, can play a major role in tackling them.

Basketball is a sport which has a particular attraction for members of our inner-city communities, and especially our BAME communities. This is partly because its world-renowned heroes such as Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and our own John Amaechi are, to a large extent, members of these communities. We see the practical effect of this in our national teams: 75% of our men’s senior team are members of our BAME community; 85% of our under-20 men’s team and 75% of our under-18 and under-16 men’s teams are members of those communities. The figures for our women’s teams are lower, but not significantly so. This, of course, reflects the fact that more than half—58%—of basketball’s adult participants are from BAME communities, even though those communities make up only 10% of the UK adult population. Even more striking is that approximately 17% of Basketball England members live in the country’s most deprived council wards, as defined by the Government’s definition of multiple deprivation. Some 18% of basketball clubs are located in these wards.

Basketball is clearly a sport that reaches parts of the country that other sports cannot reach. As such, it delivers all the well-known benefits of sport—good health, confidence, self-esteem and improved mental capacity—to those who have the least going for them in terms of family income and advantage. For me, whose professional career over the past 30 years has been concerned mainly with keeping communities safe, basketball offers the unique capability of being able to reach directly into these inner-city, disadvantaged communities to improve the life chances of those most at risk of getting into trouble with the criminal justice system. By doing this, basketball can play a major role in keeping communities safe.

But those communities, by their very nature, cannot afford the facilities or coaches necessary to mount effective basketball programmes, although most of the sport’s biggest stars honed their skills on the streets or in public parks with nothing more than a ball and a hoop. So who should fund these facilities? Private commercial and philanthropic funding for inner-city recreational basketball is very hard to come by. There are many reasons for that, including the fact that, although basketball is the second most popular sport after football for 11 to 15 year-olds, it is played mainly in state, as opposed to independent, schools, and has very little social cachet. For that reason, public funding is the only realistic, short-term way of getting basketball into our inner-city BAME communities, to enable it to work its magic in terms of enhancing the life chances of the youth of those communities and keeping them out of trouble.

As I argued earlier, I would not want to see this money taken from other parts of the sports landscape, particularly elite sport. It should be found from those government departments with statutory responsibility for keeping people out of trouble, enhancing their life chances and keeping us all safe. Just as the Foreign Office supports the foreign language service of the BBC, I propose that the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Education and others find the funds to support basketball from their departmental budgets as a contribution to building,

“a country that works for everyone”,

to quote my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. How that money is distributed to these communities is a matter for inter-departmental consideration. It could be through basketball’s governing bodies, a new agency or charity, or through police and crime commissioners— who, by the way, have responsibility for keeping our communities safe and who would jump at the chance of taking on this new task. What needs no further consideration is the urgent need for action.