Comprehensive Spending Review

Baroness Billingham Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Billingham]

My Lords, let us not beat about the bush but focus our attention on one specific area by considering the impact of the Government’s actions. In the spending review, the Government claim that they have been forced into making a series of choices, which they allege are based on seeking “fairness” and “reducing … wasteful spending”. My question for the Minister is how wiping out all the advances made in school sport in the past decade can be seen as either fair or a reduction in wasteful spending.

Yes, it has been hard making those advances. I can recall many Members from all sides in this Chamber taking part in those debates. There have been passionate debates, but we have always had a consensual and positive view about sport. How we fought and railed against the couch potatoes. How furious we were at the selling off of school playing fields. How we moaned about the loss of grass-roots sport and, equally important, the demise of competitive sport in all our schools.

I can name all of you—from the alliance to the Cross Benches and my own side—who challenged the Labour Government to put sport back into the curriculum and into extracurricular activities as well. How we all rejoiced when a minimum of two hours of sport in the curriculum was announced, and how we cheered even louder when we heard of the “Kelly hours”, which gave us the prospect—at long last—of an additional five hours of sport in state schools. That was a triumph, of which we could all be justly proud.

How could the Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt, be so docile when Michael Gove announced that £162 million that was previously earmarked for annual sports funding was to be redirected to general schools funding? The outcome of those changes is inevitable. School heads, desperate to do well in Ofsted inspections and in league tables, will inevitably be led to transfer money from PE into their more academic programmes. Michael Gove will thus be able to hide behind the human shield of heads’ self-determination—a cowardly and sneaky way to behave. At the same time, the specialist school system, under which some 400 schools became sport focused and 3,200 sports co-ordinators were introduced—one in every secondary school in the country—was wiped out.

As for the timing of these disastrous cuts, are the Government aware, or do they even care, that the 2012 Games were supposed to set our young people alight and encourage others to take up new sports? Their legacy was to include thousands of others making a new life for themselves in the sporting framework. In fact, the successful bid stressed the value of sporting heroes time and again. The 25 per cent cuts in total spending will decimate school and grass-roots sport and make a mockery of Seb Coe’s promises that the legacy is as important as the Games themselves. That will adversely affect not hundreds or thousands but millions of children. It is carnage and it is grossly unfair.

We will reap the rewards with more obese and disaffected youngsters and the loss of the skills and international sporting success that we are all so proud of and eager to attain. I guarantee that more than 80 per cent of any medals that we win in the London Olympics will be won by competitors from private school backgrounds. The future will be more unfair and divisive. When I hear the head of Eton College announcing the sale of its famous playing fields, I will know that the alliance is indeed playing fair and that school sport will be taken from all youngsters, irrespective of their background and schooling. I await the response to that possibility from the Prime Minister and, indeed, from many of his Cabinet colleagues. At that time, I might be convinced that we are all in it together, but I doubt it.

This weekend we put the clock back an hour for totally misguided reasons and not based on the greater good. The coalition Government have just turned the sporting clock back to the 1980s, to the previous time that the Conservative Government wrecked school sport. They should be ashamed of themselves. They have a chance to think again and reverse this appalling strategy. If not, a whole generation will be lost to sport. That surely is too high a price for any nation to pay.