Coalfield Areas: Sports Facilities

David Linden Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen—in a different forum from our usual Wednesday morning standing engagement. I am conscious that the Division bells might ring in a moment, but I will keep the Chamber going until such time as we are interrupted.

I commend the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) for securing and kicking off this excellent debate. We have heard excellent contributions from the hon. Gentleman himself, the hon. Members for Bassetlaw (John Mann), for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant)—who I will come back to in a moment—and for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), and the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron). I do not always agree with my friend, the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock. I did not agree with him—as hon. Members will have seen from my excessive gesticulation—when he suggested that we should have a UK-wide approach to spending on these matters, but I suspect that we shall have to disagree on that.

I am delighted to begin the winding-up speeches on behalf of the Scottish National party. I want to refer to one or two initiatives in Scotland, as the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock did, before placing on the record my plea—not to the Minister, because this is a matter not for her but for my colleagues back home on Glasgow City Council—for some sports facilities in Glasgow East.

Before I do that, I want to pay tribute to the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, which receives financial backing from the Scottish Government in Edinburgh. Some £750,000 has been pledged to the trust this year to support the enabling of grassroots activity, which can tackle issues relating to employment, sport and training. We know the good work that the trust does and what good value for money it is—it has been reported that it delivers £1.81 for every £1 it receives, so it almost doubles the money it receives.

One of the three current priorities of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust is health and wellbeing, and encouraging sport. Since 2014 it has run an annual football event for five-a-side teams aged 14 to 16 in each country, with finalists going on to play against each other in the home internationals. It is one of the few occasions when Scotland seems to do well at the moment, so I will certainly support that. The trust also recently ran a sports challenge, inviting sports clubs and groups to bid for financial support, to encourage those young people to get involved. It was not just football and rugby that benefited; we saw basketball, lawn bowling, boxing and even an Australian rules football club receive support.

The hon. Member for Mansfield was right to frame the debate in the way he did. A particularly hot topic in my constituency at the moment is the need for a new sports facility in the village of Baillieston. The village grew out of a number of small hamlets, including Crosshill, Barrachnie and Bredisholm, which developed as farming and weaving communities in the latter part of the 18th century. However, the opening up of the Monklands coalfield, with the construction of the Monklands canal and later the railway, stimulated the rapid growth of Baillieston. It soon acquired the typical character of a mining village, although some weaving survived until the end of the century, and we still have the last weavers’ cottage on Baillieston Main Street, which I am glad to see has been done up.

A continuous programme of pit sinking drew in workers from across Scotland and beyond, and the population grew rapidly to reach almost 4,000 by the time of the first world war. Of course, for reasons of politics, Baillieston does not have that mining industry now, but it is a radically different place. We once again have a growing population and the issues associated with that, and for that reason residents in that part of my constituency are quite right to say that they want proper amenities and facilities that reflect the dynamic and growing population that now lives in Baillieston and its surrounding communities. Since being elected, I have been working closely with my SNP colleague, Councillor Elaine Ballantyne, to apply maximum pressure to Glasgow City Council to make sure that the community gets what it was promised many years ago. A sports hub is what they were promised, and it is what we will deliver.