UK Sport: Elite Sport Funding

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the debate and I draw your attention to my interests on the register. I am the chair of ukactive, vice-president of the LGA and I fit the noble Lord, Lord Addington’s, definition of an “old athlete”—many years ago, I was a lottery-funded athlete. In April last year, I published a report on duty of care in sport, which the Sports Minister, the right honourable Tracey Crouch MP, asked me to undertake.

Lottery funding was set up to transform the medal winning opportunities and it has done so. I want to point out that in Atlanta, although the Olympic team won one gold, the Paralympic team won 39 and were third on the medal table—but the funding is extremely welcome all the same. There is huge public support and a real feel-good factor when teams win. Medals matter—they always have—but we must understand that there is a cost to winning medals that is not just financial. The 2012 Games were an incredible experience and we were absolutely right to do it. The Games provide a moment of inspiration: there are athletes who are competing now because of London. I competed because of the 1984 Olympics.

Elite sport is the showcase, but it is a small part of the structure. Many sports are able to show the impact that winning medals has on participation. I have long thought that major sporting events—I need to be clear on this—on their own do not change the world or participation. It is not fair to expect the 10 days of the Paralympics to change the lives of all disabled people. It changed the lives of many Paralympians, but the reality is that for many disabled people, it changed little. It did not make buses more accessible, nor stop disability hate crime.

While it is not impossible to make a GB team or qualify for a major games, if the sport is not funded at the elite level it is likely to be very much harder. Young athletes need to be able to see the top of the pyramid and believe that they have an opportunity to get there. I understand that funding is not limitless and that there are challenges over lottery receipts; all sports want more money. But I would like to ask this: how do we inspire a nation if the opportunities to compete at the highest level are limited because there is no funding? There is a symbiotic relationship between elite, grass roots and wider participation. We also cannot forget the impact that volunteering has on sport.

I would like to look at one sport in particular, which I hope will provide a useful example: badminton, for which we won a medal in Rio. However, it is not in the funding cycle through to Tokyo for the elite side of the sport. Badminton has the largest schools championship in Europe, involving some 42,000 young people between the ages of 11 to 16. If badminton is played in your primary school, you are four times more likely to play it at secondary school. That has been made possible because of lottery investment and it could not be done without it. Approximately 50% of the people who participate in badminton would not be classed as “sporty”. For around £5 million of local money, the lottery has provided £70 million of investment into local facilities and that has been a key part of the growth in participation. The lottery investment into the world-class programme delivered not only the medal in Rio, it delivered a 245% growth in participation in London alone. Some 66% of the legacy growth across the country was among those aged under 16. Badminton believes that the lottery funding works and needs to be protected. I agree with that, although I probably have a different view on how the total sum of money should be spent.

I should like to ask the Minister about the status of the response to the Every Sport Matters agenda, which the non-Olympic and Paralympic sports have presented to UK Sport. I understand that the landscape is not simple. We have UK Sport, Sport England, the home nations sports councils and devolution. It is not a simple system to work through. I think that we need to start looking at this in a different way and consider how truly active we are as a nation. I am delighted that Sport England is looking at new ways of managing participation and funding projects differently. That is fantastic, but if we have less active people, we have fewer people coming into sport. We are a nation of sports lovers and we are a nation of people who like watching sport, but perhaps participation is a little further down the agenda. My own journey into elite sport was not about a pathway. I was paralysed at the age of seven. The world was not very accessible back then and my father believed that I ought to be fit and healthy in order to be able to live in an inaccessible world.

Part of the challenge is how we talk about sport. What do we mean by that? Do we mean competitive sport, physical literacy or physical activity? Sport is a subset of being active, and that is why we need to change some of the narrative. It should not always be sport for sport’s sake, we need to look at physical activity as a preventative front line of the NHS. We need to be thinking about the health of the nation and how we could fund projects in a different way. The reality, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has said, is that a four-year funding cycle for elite sport does not fit into a five-year election cycle, let alone anything else. We in the UK do incredibly well in sport at the highest level, but the inactivity crisis should be of huge concern to us all. If we look back at the medal success of the Olympic team in Beijing, we see that 37% of our Olympic medallists came from the independent sector. I cheered every single one of them on, but that is not how sport should be in the future.

As the chair of ukactive, I said at our national summit last year that activity is the golden thread that runs through every part of our lives. Today’s young people are the least active ever and we need a serious shake-up of the school day to save “generation inactive” from a lifetime of ill health. The fittest children today would have been considered some of the least fit and active 30 years ago. We need to bring activity back into children’s daily lives. PE takes up just two hours of the 168 hours in a child’s week, and that is only during term time. Research by ukactive has shown how the school summer holidays can drive a sharp wedge between the activity levels of the affluent and deprived children. We need to work with partners to open up dozens of schools over the summer to address this inactivity.

Children are never going to turn up to a nutrition session on its own or talk about oral health, the subject of an earlier debate that I spoke in. They might not turn up to a session about mindfulness, but sport has the power to do a huge amount. Nelson Mandela said:

“Sport has the power to change the world”.


By looking at how we can engage children through freestyle dance classes, football or whatever sport it may be, we might just have the chance of showing them the merits of a balanced and healthy lifestyle. We will then have a much greater chance of bringing these children into sport. Sport is absolutely wonderful and it has given me so many things in my life, but it is time to think a bit more widely than just sport.