Coalfield Areas: Sports Facilities

Debate between Albert Owen and Ben Bradley

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that this is an hour-long debate and the Minister has protected time. The Front Benchers have five minutes each and the Minister has 10 minutes.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered sports facilities in coalfield areas.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. The purpose of the debate is to highlight the importance of properly funding and managing local sports facilities in former mining areas, and particularly to talk about the potential of miners’ welfares as a community hub and asset. It is great to see so many colleagues from all parts of the House present here.

Many community sports facilities in coalfield towns were built by British Coal and have since been handed over to the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, a national charity supporting former miners and their families with help and advice on disability, ill health and financial hardship; the organisation has responsibility for miners’ welfares. There are about 250 recreational charities still operating as independent welfares and an additional 425 where a municipal authority acts as the trustee. In some communities, these facilities are the only remaining social and sporting amenities available for public use.

Some centres have adapted and evolved to meet the needs of their local communities; some trustees run very successful football clubs, while others run bowling greens and other facilities, for example. Unfortunately, many have not been successfully run and their buildings and sports grounds have been run down. I am concerned that those facilities are not receiving the investment required to maintain them to a decent standard.

There are several local clubs that I would like to mention, but I will stick to two key ones, although there are many others like them across Mansfield, north Nottinghamshire and the rest of the country, all linked to former collieries. The first is Welbeck Lions football club, in Meden Vale, which is located at the old miners’ welfare and provides sporting facilities to one of the most deprived communities in the region. It has eight junior and two adult teams, with a further three in development, and has been proactive in forming positive plans for future expansion. I have hosted a meeting for it with the Football Association and other supportive organisations.

The club and its volunteers provide an invaluable service to the local community. The club is keen to grow and expand, but improving its playing surfaces is a priority. It also needs floodlit pitches, which are required to allow the senior team to compete at a higher level and the under-19s to play in a midweek floodlit league. It has an array of further issues: the sports pavilion only has one toilet and cannot meet modern regulations, and security is a concern, with vandalism and pitches plagued by dog fouling. The young people who engage with the Welbeck Lions are often from deprived backgrounds. Statistics show that Meden Vale, where the club is based, is among the poorest communities in Nottinghamshire, and the positive impact that sports facilities have on the lives of local people should not be underestimated.

The second is Forest Town Arena, formerly the welfare and now home to AFC Mansfield. It is still a focal point for the community in Forest Town and a venue for all sorts of local events. There has been good management and investment, and the result is a nice facility; it shows what can be done, and what more could be done, with the right support and co-ordination. The community spirit that once held mining communities together is very much still there, whatever the Labour party’s political broadcasts might suggest. The organisations that kept people together have evolved and some have moved on, but in some areas the pubs and social clubs that used to be the centre of life have disappeared, and coalfield communities are left with often run-down community facilities and a lack of funding and support for sports provision.

A 2008 report by the Audit Commission stated that social regeneration had been the least successful component of regeneration in the coalfields. In 2010, the Department of Health commissioned a report that sought to look at health inequalities in coalfield communities, which raised concerns about whether the previous emphasis on economic regeneration came at the cost of health and social projects. The report stated that the health behaviours of men, women and children in those areas were often characterised by poor statistics around smoking, alcohol, poor diet and nutrition, coupled with inactivity. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that the facilities needed to support more exercise and activity are not up to scratch in many of those communities.

More recently, the benefits for mental health of participating in sport have been established. Studies have shown that sport can improve mood, decrease the chances of depression and anxiety and ensure a more balanced lifestyle. Again, we see higher levels of long-term mental health problems across the age range in coalfield communities compared with the rest of the country as a whole. Sports facilities are not just important for locally well established teams and aspiring world-class sportsmen; they offer a wide range of benefits, including improving the health of younger and older people and creating positive opportunities for socialising.

The new community focus criterion of Sport England could be hugely beneficial for areas such as Meden Vale, Warsop or Mansfield, if that sport could be focused on bringing welfares back to life as a community hub for health, sport, social activities and even the provision of services. In Warsop, where they have unfortunately recently lost a leisure centre, a community hub based around a welfare that could bring all those things back together would be life-changing for many people in the community. It is more cost-effective than an expensive new building and could be done in some of the areas of most need, where activities already take place.

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust has supported projects in coalfield areas and helped to respond to the threat of closure of outdoor sports facilities such as pitches, playing fields and pavilions. The trust has invested millions of pounds in sports facilities in England such as multi-use games areas and 3G or AstroTurf facilities. One of the trust’s current priorities is health and wellbeing, and I am pleased that sport features heavily in its work. In 2006, it undertook a comprehensive review of sport and recreational facilities across coalfields, which provided details of facilities that were available to coalfield communities prior to the financial crash.

It would be helpful if the Government supported the trust to update that database and review which facilities remain and which are no longer available. For those facilities that are no longer in use, I would be particularly keen to learn how they were disposed of and what reinvestment was made in the communities when those facilities were lost. If land was sold, where did the money go?

As well as the grants that Sport England provides, dozens of national governing bodies award funding packages, as do local authorities, but trustees of coalfield facilities often do not have the experience to apply for those grants. It is also the case that many applications have conditions covering things such as minimum participation, which can be difficult. Once established, helping to bring different teams, clubs and other community organisations together under one roof in a welfare-based community hub could help to facilitate bidding for and winning investment to make the centres self-sustaining in future.

As I mentioned at the beginning, coalfield communities are often in a slightly unusual position in that many of their community centres and local sports facilities have a background in the coal industry rather than being built and maintained by local authorities. Since the transfer of miners’ welfare clubs and community facilities to CISWO, facilities such as football pitches and bowling greens have often not been looked after effectively. In my former role as a district councillor I was involved, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), in a campaign on Bestwood Miners’ Welfare, which has been affected by ongoing issues surrounding its management and the maintenance of its facilities. I am keen that the Government look at how local authorities and sporting bodies can be encouraged to work with CISWO on local sports and health and wellbeing priorities in order to support such communities.

In my experience, CISWO is not always the best at facilitating effective management of the facilities and ensuring that they are looked after. It works hard to support former miners and their families and provides important assistance to those individuals, but I am concerned that, in prioritising the individuals rather than the long-term community legacy, it is allowing facilities to become run down and in some cases turning a blind eye to poor management, which is detrimental to communities.

Money raised from community buildings seems often to be invested in other priorities of the organisation and not put back into the community it came from. While that money might be spent nationally on campaigns, or on information and support for individual miners, it is being drained out of local facilities and leaving coalfield communities worse off. I am concerned that CISWO might not be providing suitable support for the trustees of these facilities and I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to investigate how the process could be improved to support the facilities more effectively.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood has previously raised concerns in the local press about CISWO taking money out of Nottinghamshire with little investment in return. He has rightly criticised it for profiting from the sale of land but not reinvesting the money back in local facilities. That is not happening only in Nottinghamshire; I know that in Yorkshire there have been similar problems. The Yorkshire Post ran an interesting story about recreation grounds in mining communities last year. I fear that CISWO’s strategic decision to focus on former miners as individuals rather than on communities, while perhaps understandable at one time, is now increasingly to the detriment of those communities.

The good news is that in Mansfield and Warsop, and across many other mining towns, there are facilities that still exist and space available for sports amenities. I am not asking the Government to commit to funding a series of brand-new facilities. It is often cheaper to refurbish and improve current facilities, with some help. I am convinced that some money already exists within a number of external organisations that could be utilised in this way.

I am keen to highlight that improving sports provision in coalfield communities will not take huge resources. I want Ministers to consider a small injection of funding to support coalfield areas in improving sports provision, which will improve health and wellbeing and rebuild social cohesion. However, it is just as important to get the political will behind improving facilities, and the Government should look at ways to encourage CISWO, local authorities and sporting bodies to work together to improve sports grounds. For the most part, facilities have willing groups of trustees and volunteers, so the main challenges are getting them to work together, giving them the skills and getting CISWO to release funding, along with support from national sports governing bodies.

As I touched on earlier, Sport England helps many communities with health and wellbeing programmes, looking at ways to support community assets and to provide multiple services from one facility. Miners’ welfare clubs and sports grounds in coalfield communities have traditionally been used for a range of purposes, and I hope that Sport England sees the potential of many of those facilities as hubs for multiple services. That would also tie in with its work with deprived communities.

Sport England’s funding programmes, such as Inspired Facilities and Protecting Playing Fields, are helpful, but I would like to see a specific focus on coalfield communities and protecting the facilities that currently exist in those areas. As a Government, we should aim to prove that we are committed to supporting coalfield communities, to advancing the cause of some of the country’s most deprived areas and to genuinely be about helping the “just about managing” to have a better quality of life.

At the end of 2015, the Government published “Sporting Future: A New Strategy for an Active Nation”, which emphasised the importance of harnessing sport for social good. It was a positive publication and a step in the right direction, and the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that the Government would

“target funding at groups which have traditionally had lower participation rates”.

That includes places that are less active and less healthy, and coalfield communities generally top the charts in those statistics. Coalfield communities are generally some of the most deprived in the UK, with poorer health outcomes and lower levels of physical activity. I hope that Ministers look to coalfield communities when considering their duty to ensure that absolutely everyone can benefit from sport, because, as the report notes,

“the biggest gains and the best value for public investment is found in addressing people who are least active.”

I thank the Minister for her attendance, and hope she will be able to address some of my questions. I also hope to hear positive contributions from Members from across the House. I thank hon. Members for their time.

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that I will call the first Front-Bench spokesperson at 5.10 pm.

Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Debate between Albert Owen and Ben Bradley

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Albert Owen]

Yes, there is. We need to negotiate from a position of clarity and strength, and I do not see us doing so. Without the proposed commitment in the Bill, I do not see the Government saying that they intend to go for third-party or associate membership of Euratom. We have not even seen the legal opinion that the Government were given about the need to leave Euratom in the first place. I support the need for nuclear safeguarding, and I will support the Bill on Third Reading, but new clause 1 is sensible, because it suggests that the Government should approach Euratom members and ask for associate membership, to give us the continuity and certainty that we want.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman says that he wants continuity and certainty, but can he not understand the difficulty involved in writing into the Bill the outcome of negotiations that have not yet happened? How can Parliament effectively write into law that we are going to have a transitional period when the negotiations have not yet happened?

[Albert Owen]

The Government say that we need a transitional period for EU withdrawal, and it is obvious to me that we also need one for Euratom. The Government have said that we need to leave Euratom at the same time as we leave the European Union, but I stress again—I hope that the Minister will clarify the position—that nobody other than the Government has seen the legal advice that tells us that we need to exit Euratom. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) was absolutely right to say that there is universal support for the idea of our having associate membership. I have not met anyone who works in the industry who says that we should move away from Euratom. If we do, they—the workers; Prospect, the union; many of the experts who gave evidence to us; and the Nuclear Industry Association, which is the umbrella body—feel that we should have associate membership. The new clause therefore speaks on behalf of the industry in the first instance, and we as legislators should listen to what the industry is saying; we should not listen to the Government’s ideological grounds. The only reason why the Government want to leave Euratom is that they do not want to be under the European Court of Justice—that is the crux of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend, who will know much more than me about SNP Members and their outlook on life.

Our relationship with Euratom is a subject for negotiation. The Government have been clear that they will seek continuity, and they obviously want standards to remain as high as possible. How that connects directly with Euratom is not for this Bill; it is for negotiation directly with the EU. The exact nature of the relationship will of course be closely connected to trade, customs and countless other arrangements.

In Committee, we saw Labour’s attempts to get either a commitment to Euratom, which cannot be given in this Bill, or associate membership, which does not exist and this Bill cannot create. We need to build our own framework so that we are prepared to incorporate whatever kind of relationship with Euratom results from the negotiation. The Government have been clear that that is the most helpful and connected relationship that we can have, so we cannot lay out in this forum what that will look like. We need certainty and structure and to have our own plans in place—not just on paper, but well developed and physically in place—so that we can have continuity regardless of what happens further down the line, meaning that we need to crack on with things now to be ready in time. We heard evidence in Committee about the time needed to put things in place, so we need to crack on now.

I do not understand where the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) was coming from in his speech. While very eloquent, he did not seem to grasp that we cannot write into the Bill things that have not yet happened or are not yet agreed. We cannot include a transitional period, and the Government cannot accept an amendment that foresees a future negotiation with another party, the result of which we just do not know. We need to be ready on exit day. We need to ensure that we cannot be taken by surprise and that continuity is ensured.

[Albert Owen]

I understand that the hon. Gentleman is on message, but the message is wrong. The words that I used in my contribution, which was echoed by SNP Members, were not mine, but those of the industry and the experts within it. For once, will the Government start listening to those who understand the industry, rather than bantering about who on which side of the House might be wrong?

[Ben Bradley]

I am sure the Minister will agree that we need to support the industry and that we need to do what the industry asks. My point is nothing other than that. My point is that we cannot make that decision in this Bill. It is for the negotiation to decide at a later date.

New clause 1 neglects to recognise that an implementation period is subject to negotiation and must be agreed directly with the EU—we cannot do it unilaterally. The idea of implementation before withdrawal also does not fit with broader plans and discussions that have been mooted for transition out of the EU after withdrawal in March 2019. It simply does not fit. The Government clearly cannot include in a Bill the outcome of a discussion that has not happened.

We need to decide the basic framework now and act accordingly.