Olympics and Paralympics (Funding)

Debate between Damian Collins and Rehman Chishti

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend has an excellent idea —perhaps we can hand it to each other on the Camber road and wish it well on its way. I am sure that my constituency, which will see the Olympic torch on 18 July, will put on some spectacular events as well. It will truly be the part of an Olympics that inspires the whole country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Louise Mensch), who is a fellow member of the Select Committee, said, it is an opportunity for the games to go to the country as well as for the country to come to the games, which it will do when they are staged in London.

[Rehman Chishti]

As a fellow Kent MP, does my hon. Friend agree that we in Kent are very proud of our colleague, the Sports Minister, for doing such a fantastic job on the Olympics?

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and fellow Kent Member. It would be churlish of me not to agree with him. All of us in Kent are extremely proud of the role that my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson) has played, as Sports Minister, in steering the Olympic games safely through the final development of the facilities and planning. He has been ably supported by an excellent team at LOCOG and the ODA, which have done a terrific job in ensuring that the games will be ready on time, We can all be proud of that as we look forward to their happening.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) referred to how the Olympic games will inspire young people across the country. They are a major sporting event. One of my first sporting memories was probably of Sebastian Coe winning his gold medal in Moscow in 1980. The 1984 Olympics were an inspiration to my generation of school children across the country not only for the great variety of sports on the athletics track but for the hockey, which I mentioned earlier. We know that children will take a great interest in it and find it very exciting. Their memories of the London Olympic games will be a defining moment of their young lives, and might inspire them to take up a new sport or pursue an existing interest in sport. The legacy is difficult to quantify at this stage, but we all have faith that it will be an important part of the games.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Collins]

I completely agree. The aquatics centre is not only a stunning and iconic building, but a venue for elite athletes to compete where one is badly needed. That will benefit not only people in east London, but communities with good access to the Olympic park. My constituency of Folkestone will be only 55 minutes by high-speed rail from the Olympic park, so athletes there will also benefit. However, there will also be a community aspect. The fact that parents can take their children swimming at the aquatics centre at the Olympic park after the games is a wonderful way not only to encourage young people to start swimming, but to inspire them through their surroundings, as they will know that they are swimming in a pool where some of the greatest swimmers in the world have competed. When the Select Committee visited Munich, as part of our inquiry into football governance last year, we saw that the aquatics centre from the Munich games is still used even now, more than 30 years later, by the people of that city as an important and cherished community facility. That is a vision for the future of what the aquatics centre in the Olympic park in London could be like.

[Rehman Chishti]

Does my hon. Friend agree that initiatives such as free swimming for the under-11s and over-65s in Medway is a fantastic way to benefit communities and promote participation in sport, linked to having sports centres such as Medway Olympics park, which also help people to take part in those sports?

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is a great advocate for Medway and everything it strives to achieve, and I am certainly happy to congratulate it on that excellent initiative.

Earlier, my hon. Friend also touched on the work of Sport England. I would like to add my thanks to Sport England, for its support for sporting facilities in my constituency through the Places People Play fund. I was delighted to join the fund in presenting cheques to the Folkestone sports centre and the Hythe sports pavilion, which have received combined funds of £60,000. That money is being spent now, and those facilities that are being refurbished will be ready before the Olympic games, so that those who are inspired to take part afterwards will have newly refurbished facilities ready and waiting for them. It is good not only that the money has been made available, but that it is being committed and that those facilities are being improved.

The Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), mentioned the sporting participation target and the Government’s decision not to keep to the target of 1 million people increasing their active participation in sport. I think we would all hope that the long-term legacy is indeed a greatly increased participation, but it is difficult to know now exactly what that increase will be, over what period it will happen or even whether we could exceed that target. The Minister and the Government should look, and continue to look, at how targeted intervention through sporting programmes for particularly needy young people could be an effective part of the legacy of the games.

Let me say a little more about that. If money is left in the contingency for the Olympic games by the time the games are staged—I appreciate that there will be many demands on it—perhaps the Department could look at the possibility of using it to help those people. We know from a number of excellent sporting initiatives—the Premier League’s Kickz programme, the Rugby Football Union’s Hitz programme and its Second Chance programme run in young offender institutions—that sports can play a dramatic role in changing the lives of people living in challenging circumstances, particularly young people. These programmes are often delivered at very low cost and are exceptionally good value for money, but the programmes delivered so far are often relatively small projects in relatively few neighbourhoods around the country.

I believe that the research done so far suggests that these programmes can have an excellent impact. An excellent report, “Teenage Kicks”, produced by the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, focused on a project delivered by the Kickz programme run in partnership with Arsenal football club at Elthorne park in London. It showed that within a one-mile radius, there was a 66% reduction in youth crime. If the project were responsible for only 20% of that reduction, it would have demonstrated a return on investment of £7 for every £1 spent.

I mentioned the Second Chance programme run by the Rugby Football Union. A report was recently produced based on the pilot at the Portland young offenders institution. It followed what happened to those youngsters who had engaged in the sporting programme. It found a reoffending rate among the young men of about one in five. That might sound quite high, but if we consider that the average reoffending rate for young men in that institution is one in two, this shows a dramatic transformation in their fortunes.

As so many of the facilities already exist in young offenders institutions to provide sporting programmes, it is simply a question of bringing in the coaches and support to deliver them. They can be delivered at low cost. It has been estimated that if one of these sporting programmes stopped just one young person from reoffending and from being recommitted to a secure centre, that success could pay for the delivery of the entire programme within that single young offenders institution.

Some excellent work has been done in this area, but we need a proper study, sponsored by the Government, to see how to deliver these sporting programmes both within the community, targeting vulnerable young people in areas of relatively high crime and antisocial behaviour, and within the young offender institutions themselves. We need to ascertain what rules we can devise from the work done so far and work out how to plan these schemes and projects on a much bigger scale. We also need to work out what incentives we could provide to companies and sporting organisations to run and fund more of these trials.

This could be an incredible legacy of the Olympic games. A study with the backing and weight of the Government to demonstrate how best to run these programmes and the success they could bring would be a worthwhile achievement and pave the way for more programmes like this in the future. It would be excellent if we could use sport to touch the lives of more people in some of these hard-to-reach communities. It would require a piece of major research, preferably led by the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, and a unified approach across Government.

The Government have with the aid of lottery money supported the Olympic games, and I believe that hon. Members of all parties are united in their admiration for the start of the process—it was begun by the previous Government and has been continued subsequently with the support of Members across the House. The value of the investment is widely acknowledged. It would be excellent if the Minister could use his position and stature as the Minister responsible for the Olympics to take a lead on understanding how these sporting programmes could work to benefit people throughout the country and if he could work with colleagues in other Departments, particularly with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Education. The Government have a strategic interest in sport across a wide area of government, and it would be good to see a co-ordinated approach, which the Department for Culture, Media and Sport could lead.

[Rehman Chishti]

My hon. Friend has praised sports centres in deprived areas. In Medway, in north Gillingham, £11 million has been invested in the Medway park centre. There is a difference of seven years between life expectancy in that area and life expectancy in the other part of the constituency. Training centres of that kind perform the important function of inspiring people in socially and economically deprived areas.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is right. Such facilities are often most needed in harder-to-reach economic areas. Sporting provision in those areas need not be expensive. The success of the midnight basketball leagues, which have been operating in major urban centres in the United States, is one example. Programmes like that are not expensive to deliver, and they can do a huge amount of good.

So far the debate has not focused on the business legacy, and I want to record my admiration for the initiative to create a business embassy at Lancaster house. Corporations and business people from all over the world will come to London to be part of the Olympic games. It is excellent that there is a venue where they will be able to learn more about what this country has to offer in the long term: about the resources and facilities that exist here, and about the businesses that are ready to take advantage of their being in London and demonstrate, for instance, the way in which we can develop our trade routes and interests around the world.

I note that two days of the session at the business embassy will be dedicated to the creative industries, in which the Select Committee takes a particular interest. We should all be proud of that, because it reinforces the message that the Government are sending in their campaign to market everything that Britain has to offer the world in the run-up to the games. Of course the games themselves will be a great showcase for the United Kingdom and London, but we also want a legacy that will last for many years after they have ended. We want them to serve as a massive advertisement for everything that the country has to offer.