Safeguarding Children and Young People in Sport

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this timely and important debate, and on the sympathetic way in which he outlined the case of Ian Ackley. I also welcome Ian to Westminster and congratulate him on his bravery, because it is only through his bravery and that of others that dangerous individuals such as Barry Bennell have been locked up—put away—and a light has been shone on this unacceptable and despicable practice.

Young people being interested in sport is key for their development and fitness, and it is important that we do everything possible to give them a positive environment when they are learning and nurturing their skills and developing the traits that we hope they will take further into a sporting career, or just into life generally as they get older. Of course it is imperative that we protect children in sport. However, it is also important, as the hon. Gentleman said, that we protect adults who genuinely want to help children in sport. We must alienate and root out the small minority who would use their place in sport to try to harm children in despicable ways.

I want to focus my remarks on what we are doing in Scotland to safeguard children in sport. There is currently a partnership between Children 1st and SportScotland, working with local authorities, local sports trusts, leisure trusts and sports clubs to ensure that we do as much as possible to protect young people in sport. Children 1st and SportScotland published a 116-page document entitled “10 steps to safeguard children in sport”. It is important that everything is in there to ensure that the maximum guidance is available to everyone involved in sport. It is imperative that we get that document to all people involved in sport in Scotland and across the UK.

In preparation for this debate, I spoke with my local sports development officer in Moray Council, Kim Paterson, who explained that she is the only tutor in Moray—quite a wide geographical area—who is delivering the safeguarding and protecting children course. Since January she has run 10 courses and each of them has had the maximum 20 participants, so 200 people in Moray have taken the course in the past few months.

Kim told me that a number of people are almost forced by their national governing body to do the course, so they approach it like a tick-box exercise—they feel that they have to do it. However, when they leave at the end of the day, they tell Kim and others involved in the class that they never knew there was so much information available about protecting children in sport. They might start the course a bit apprehensive about having to do more training, but they leave with far more information, and that is a positive development. If they want to go on further, there is the In Safe Hands course delivered by Children 1st, which is the next level up, looking at child protection officers within local clubs.

People sometimes see these courses as tick-box exercises; they attend once and then never go back. However, it is best practice to renew them every three years. We should all be encouraging people to ensure that they keep up to date with the standards expected of them. Children 1st and SportScotland are looking at an online version for refresher courses in future, which I would very much support.

The debate is timely and reminds us of the bravery displayed by Ian Ackley and others to ensure that individuals who caused harm in sport were brought to justice and did not get away scot-free. As the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate said, we live in different times, but that does not mean that we should be complacent. If we became complacent, by assuming that this might have happened in the ’70s or ’80s but would not happen in 2018, we would all be letting down children and young people in our areas.

There has been progress across the UK—great work has been done to protect and safeguard children and young people in sport—but I truly believe that there is more to do. Today’s debate reminds us all of the horrors of the past. We must ensure that we do not allow that to be a distant memory and we keep up our efforts to ensure that our children can continue to enjoy sport, to gain from sport and to live their dreams in sport, but that they do not suffer nightmares, as many did under Barry Bennell and others.

[Several hon. Members rose—]