Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Baroness Davies of Devonport Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Davies of Devonport (Con)]

My Lords, I travelled the world from the age of 11, competing or working at all major sporting events, and I was very proud to be part of the 2012 bid team. I am also very proud to say that my dad coached my noble friend Lord Holmes. I have seen the benefits that hosting a major Games brings to a host city and country, and the challenges that it poses. For example, compare the difference between my first Olympic Games in Montreal, which financially shackled the locals for decades, to the amazing success of 2012, which ended up being the exact opposite—uniting our country as I have never witnessed before. I am sure that those who attended the 1966 World Cup will also have that feeling.

Sport can do miraculous things. It can be uplifting, inspiring and hugely beneficial to regeneration and business. It can leave a legacy, raise community and national emotion, and bring cohesiveness. But we must get it right. At the sporting events I have been around within the last century, I have seen sport increasingly relegated to a level sometimes less important than the opening and closing ceremonies or events that take place around it. This can sometimes detract. More importantly, it makes events extremely expensive to host and to organise. There must be a balance. At present, we are getting it wrong, which is so many fewer countries are interested in hosting major events. We need to get back to centring the sport, with sensible budgets. I say this not to be boring and restrictive but to be practical.

It is the sport, with the human stories of triumph over adversity, that people remember, bringing the action into our living rooms, inspiring the champions of tomorrow, and, hopefully, also inspiring a healthier nation as people get back to old habits and try new ones. That is a massive part of hosting any event; it is what brings our communities together, how athletes can be used to bring good by changing behaviours, selling our country to the world, building trade and tourism by providing a shop window with economic benefits to hotels, restaurants, merchandise and transport —all the things that we all know and have talked about already.

Infrastructure and legacy are also extremely important. We built more 50-metre pools in the three years leading up to London 2012 than we built in the previous 30 here in the UK. As a young swimmer, I had to travel from Plymouth to London to be able to swim in an Olympic-sized pool. Australia has a policy of building one if they have a community over a certain size; it has 400 50-metre pools in their country, which has a population of 27 million. I do not know whether noble Lords would like to guess how many we have in the UK. It is not even 30. Australia says that residents should live within a 15-minute drive of a public aquatic centre. At the moment, we are closing pools at an alarming rate, and in the last few weeks we have seen at least 17 people die from drowning.

I have been presenting sport since the late 1980s. The BBC has not missed a major sporting event for decades, but recently there has been a huge decline in coverage. It did not do the world swimming championships last year. It is not doing the home Commonwealth Games this year, gallantly rescued by Glasgow, or the European championships that are on in Paris, not even that far away. Swimming, still one of the UK’s biggest participation sports, has not been on terrestrial television since the Paris Olympic Games. When we hold UK events, we must have them covered on the BBC, not just on the red button, radio or hidden online. If public money is being used to bring these events to our country, the public ought to be able to see them without them being behind a paywall.

I had a recent conversation with the BBC, which is not covering anywhere near the variety of sports that it once did, including swimming, rowing and triathlon this summer. I was informed last week that the BBC does not expect to cover swimming until the next Olympic Games in LA. That is four years in between showing swimming—one of our biggest participation sports and a sport that saves lives, so it is important to inspire people to want to swim—and that is not good enough. Nearly two-thirds of the BBC’s sports budget goes on football, while every other sport has to scrabble around to get any airtime whatever. Surely the job of the BBC is to be a national service doing a national job for the whole community.

Lots of points have been made today, but I have two final points that I would like to make. We must bid for fabulous, inspiring, growth-generating sporting events, but we must centre the sport using existing facilities, including university accommodation, reduce peripheral events, and make them affordable. Multisport events are hugely popular and the public love them. Secondly, our national broadcaster must cover all major international events that come to the UK, showing a broad stretch of sports, so that young people are not limited to just the big three. Certain sports are growing, but a lot of other sports are just disappearing. The disappointment the British swimmer community feels at being abandoned is tangible, and I know that other sports feel the same way. It makes it difficult for our hard-working athletes to get sponsorship to stay in their sport if they get no exposure. This does not happen in other countries. We are one of the worst countries in the world for showing a variety of sports on our terrestrial television. Kids cannot be what they do not see, and we desperately need our kids to be inspired.

My final thought—again, I do not mean to be depressing —is that the Commonwealth Games were rescued from Victoria by Glasgow because of cost. For the next two Olympic Games, there was actually no competition to have them because not enough countries bid. There was only one for each of the Games. So we have to be sensible in the way we place our bids.