BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the Members’ register of interests and declare that I am a board member of the BBC and work as a freelancer, mostly in sport. I will extend this debate on creative culture to sport and elite women’s sport, and want to take a short time to describe the impact that sport has had on my life.

Watching the London Marathon in 1981 gave me the opportunity to think that somebody like me could do wheelchair racing. In 1990, when the BBC took a brave decision to put Helen Rollason on “Grandstand”, as its first female presenter, that was a special moment. The public debate was, “How dare they allow a woman to be on television, talking about sport?”—because obviously none of us know anything about it. She was incredible; she changed the dialogue around women’s sport and the Paralympics, pushing hard to move away from the very patronising coverage that we had experienced beforehand. That had a huge impact on my life.

Last year, BBC Sport set out to try to “change the game”. The ambition was pretty simple: to make a huge commitment to women’s sport. While in 2019, it accounted for only 3% of UK TV sports hours, the BBC delivered 33% of sports viewing figures and is the most popular destination for sports fans in the UK across all platforms. It is amazing to think that the continual investment in showing women’s games is changing the conversation. I am glad to say that I do not often have to have the conversation any more about the fact that “Women don’t play football like men”. No, they do not, and that is why it is exciting; it is about giving young women the opportunity to see others.

Having the Women’s FA Cup final, the Women’s Football World Cup final, and the Netball World Cup on the television changes the conversation. In a changing world that is not easy, when sports rights can be expensive and there are funding limitations. Some 45 million people watched, listened or read about Change the Game, and it has 30 million followers on social media; 11 million people watched the TV coverage of the Netball World Cup.

The Women’s Sport Trust did some research during the summer looking at the proportion and prominence of women’s sport stories put out by different media companies. Of the top 10 stories on the BBC Sport homepage each day, 46% featured women’s sports. If we look at the World Cup, 28 million TV viewers tuned in, with 11 million watching the semi-final between England and the USA. I am very proud to say that that made it the most watched sporting event of the year, bigger than the likes of the Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon and the Six Nations. It has been proved, again and again, that people want to watch women’s sport.

The FA has stated that from September onwards, there were more than 850,000 committed participants playing 11-a-side, or small-sided football competitively, with a retention rate of 23% among existing adult female participants. That is a direct impact of being able to see women’s sport on television. There is also more money flowing into the women’s game because of this. Barclays paid £10 million to sponsor the Women’s Super League—I never thought I would see that happen—SSE sponsors the Women’s FA Cup, and Gatorade extended its global sponsorship of Manchester City to cover the women’s team.

We should never underestimate the impact on young women of being able to see other women play sport at elite level.