Basketball (Funding)

George Howarth Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley) on initiating this debate, which is timely and important for basketball in this country.

I should declare several interests, none of which is remunerated. First, I am a trustee of the British Basketball League Foundation, which the hon. Gentleman chairs. Secondly, I am a member of the all-party basketball group, which my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) chairs. Thirdly, I am a supporter of the Mersey Tigers—which was a great thing to do two seasons ago, as they won every bit of silverware in sight. Sadly, they have since been less successful, mainly as a result of financial difficulties. Last but by no means least, my grandson Luke plays basketball for his school and for a non-school side in the area. In fact, he played earlier this evening—unfortunately I have no idea what the outcome of the game was, because he has not sent me a text. I therefore have a number of reasons, both personal and to do with my involvement with various bodies, to support basketball.

I want to make three points—I will try to be brief. The first is a general point—it has been made by several hon. Friends, as well as the hon. Member for City of Chester—about the impact that the sport can have on specific communities. Basketball is a very inclusive sport. People do not have to have a lot of expensive equipment to play basketball or be associated with a club that might have difficult membership requirements; nor does it require massive support—it does require support, but not massive support—at the grass-roots level.

A further point that has been made is that young participants, male and female, gain great health benefits from their involvement in the sport, no matter what level they play at. A number of health authorities of one kind or another have recognised that and have supported clubs that have been successful in building up grass-roots support. If we are to be successful in basketball nationally and internationally, the first requirement will be to build up that grass-roots support. Nothing comes from nothing, and we will succeed at elite level only if we can get youngsters from the ages of eight, nine and 10 onwards to participate in the sport. That model has worked well in other sports, and it is no different for basketball, except that basketball reaches parts of the community that other sports might not.

That is not just my opinion as a Member of Parliament or as a grandfather with an involvement in the sport. If we look at the successful clubs—particularly Leicester and Newcastle, but also the Cheshire Jets—we see that they are sustained by the activity that takes place at grass-roots level, especially among young people. That is particularly important, and I am sure that the Minister will agree that that is the kind of successful model that we want to build.

[Stephen Mosley]

The right hon. Gentleman will probably be aware of the problems that the Cheshire Jets had, and of the launch of a new club, Cheshire Phoenix, in November. The new club has real community support: it is community owned and community based, and it took a real team effort from the entire city and county to get it going. It is a brand new club with huge aspirations and a huge amount of support. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the support that those other clubs have, but Cheshire Phoenix has it as well.

[Mr Howarth]

I must inadvertently have referred to the team as the Cheshire Jets, because I was aware of the developments that had taken place. I wish the Mersey Tigers well, but I hope that Cheshire Phoenix does well too. We are all from more or less the same part of the world.

The successful clubs demonstrate the fact that, with vibrant grass-roots support, it is possible to build a successful professional club and that, beyond that, we can build a successful national sport and perform well internationally. That brings me to my point about the decision, based on the estimate of our Olympic prospects in Brazil, which I think was wrong. I do not intend to labour the point, but I hope that those responsible will revisit the subject, because if they do, they will recognise that the route to qualifying for Brazil includes European qualification, and that there is a demonstrably strong chance that the UK team could qualify by going down that route. The team’s potential for qualification has been underestimated. I understand that the issue of governance has also been raised, but I have yet to receive any explanation of why that might be the case. The Minister and I had a brief discussion about this last week, and I hope that we will be able to find out more about what is at issue. There might have been a misreading of the true situation in the sport.

I know that the Minister cares passionately about sport, and that he is a fair-minded man. I also know—because he told me so—that his powers of intervention are limited in these matters. I accept that, but he does have considerable influence and I hope that he will use that to question the basis on which some of those decisions have been made. I also hope that, in a quiet and unassuming but effective way, he will be able to encourage those responsible to reconsider their decision as a matter of urgency.

[The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Hugh Robertson)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley) on securing the debate and on the manner in which he presented his case. This was actually going to be the third thing I intended to say, but it is probably worth saying it now. I shall proceed with certain amount of caution tonight. The appeal is due in front of the UK Sport board—on Wednesday, I believe—but that, in any event, is not the end of the process, as there are a number of further hurdles over which progress could be made. If the terms of the appeal are right—many points made tonight will, I suspect, form part of the appeal—it strikes me that there will be a case that will provoke some further thought. Let me go no further than that. Tonight’s debate does come at a slightly delicate moment.

I have a couple of other points to frame my remarks before I answer some of the specific questions raised. First, it is important—I hope hon. Members will forgive me for making this point—to frame this debate against the fact that this system works. This country’s elite performance system is the envy of almost every other Olympic system in the world. Back in Sydney, we were 10th in the medal table with 28 medals; here we are in London, 12 years later, third with 65 medals. The Australians would kill for this sort of system, as would many others. People in this country are looking at how we did it and trying to work out the processes we adopted. I know from talking to many Australians that they feel they will have to be much tougher and come far closer to our no-compromise approach if they are to catch up some of the ground they feel they have lost.

I was talking to a forum of performance directors this morning. Knowing that I would be responding to this Adjournment debate, I said, “Let me road test this on you. Have we got this right? Have we gone too far, and do we need to crank it back?” They said, “Absolutely not.” They felt that the way the funding awards were made this year was the fairest and most robust method they had been put through. These were performance directors who had done this for a number of years, and they had nothing but praise for the way in which they had been guided through the system by UK Sport and the results that had been reached. I absolutely understand the passion expressed about a sport for which many Members care deeply, but that needs to be balanced with the fact that the performance system for a country of our size has just produced 65 medals and third place in the Olympic medal table. That is an extraordinary success by anybody’s standards.

Let me deal quickly with a couple of other points. The right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) is absolutely correct: I can set the overall strategy for UK Sport, and indeed I do, but it is not up to me to make individual funding decisions within that, because about two thirds of the money that goes to any of these funding awards is lottery money. As anyone who has been in this House for any length of time will know, that is not for Ministers to direct.

My other point is that funding, although I would wish it otherwise in this area, is not inexhaustible. We have done very well to increase the overall budget for Olympic and Paralympic sport by 11%—the only host nation ever to achieve that—and for the Rio cycle, but that does not mean that we can avoid taking tough decisions. This has been one of them. Having been through the decision-making process with UK Sport—it took me through it and Sport England was there, too, so we could look at both funding settlements together—I know it has a chart, and the question is about the point at which we slice up and down the funding pole. That is done by UK Sport on the basis of medal success in Rio.

Let me run through the various issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester. He asked whether I had met UK Sport, and indeed Sport England. I see both chief executives every month, and I spent close to three hours with both organisations going through the two funding awards.

Although I take on board the comments that have been made, UK Sport made the decision on the basis that basketball had failed to demonstrate a realistic chance of qualifying for Rio 2016, or medal potential for 2020. Basketball may be on a fast improving pathway, but the men’s and women’s teams won only one of the 10 games that they contested at the London Olympics, which is not a great performance record.

How are such decisions made? GB Basketball puts a submission forward that goes to UK Sport, and it is then considered by a performance panel with independents on it. Each and every aspect is considered. Other performance directors I spoke to today said that was the best iteration they had been through in a number of cycles. The process is incredibly detailed, and considers not only medal potential for Rio but for 2020. For Rio, the line was drawn at a point where the basketball team needed to medal, which might explain the slight discrepancy in relation to qualification.

On the governance structure, it might be easier to nail down the issues in writing. I have been involved in sport as a politician since 2004 when the Conservative party was in opposition. Throughout that time, basketball has been a frustration because it has obvious and enormous potential, as many of the contributions to this debate have acknowledged. It is a sport that can reach into communities in a way that some other sports cannot, yet it somehow fails to catch alight. That may be because people who play basketball do not always respond to the active people survey, so participation levels are underplayed. There may also have been weaknesses in the structure of the sport.

Netball is a fantastic example of a sport that, from difficult beginnings, has increased its participation base extraordinarily. I have visited schemes run for school- gate mothers in places such as Leicester, to try to get more young women back into the sport. As a result, netball has been rewarded with a considerable increase in funding.

The key question is: what does basketball need to do? I have not yet met him, but I am told that there is a very good new independent chairman. A huge amount of fuss and bother is what impresses people least, so the best thing he can do is take a long, hard, clinical look at the sport of basketball—I hope that many of the hon. Members who have shown enthusiasm for the sport in the debate tonight will play a part—and look at team sports that have tackled this situation successfully. He should look at how cycling has put half a million people on its performance base, and at what netball, a team sport, has done. There must be some transferable lessons from netball to basketball. There is enormous performance-based expertise, which has driven this country from 10th in the medal table to third, so he should make use of the experts in academia and UK Sport, and turn the sport inside out.

There is this hope: although the initial funding decisions have been made and announced, there is an appeal process, and if basketball presents the right case, it will have a perfectly good chance of securing funding. This is not the end of the story, and if the basketball team starts to perform and show that it is likely to qualify, and has the chance of a medal in 2016 or 2020, wherever that turns out to be after the IOC decision this summer, there will be the opportunity to fund it.

I leave the House with the story of gymnastics. I have seen representatives of that sport recently. Its funding was cut—almost completely removed—after a disastrous Olympics in Athens, where the competitors were basically washed out. Gymnastics is a different sport from basketball, but its position is not entirely different. Those people went back and engaged in a long “dig-out” to discover what was required to ensure that the young athletes whom we all see in gyms in our constituencies could turn into Olympic medal-winners in the future. They turned the sport inside out, and established a really tough performance-based culture. The result was plain to see in London, where gymnastics was not only one of the great successes, but arguably one of the most unexpected.

As for the social aspect, I entirely accept the point about basketball’s social reach. However, we do not confine our funding to sports that have a reach of that kind, such as athletics, cycling and, in particular, boxing, which was one of the great successes of London 2012 and which has a huge reach into deprived communities in inner cities. I can reassure Members that UK Sport makes its decisions on the basis of performance.

[Mr George Howarth]

I have been involved—not as a politician—in amateur boxing for a number of years in my constituency. In many ways the comparison made by the Minister is a good one, but the difference between amateur boxing and basketball is that most local clubs are long-established and have a lengthy tradition on which to draw, whereas basketball is in the process of getting there, but is not there yet.

[Hugh Robertson]

That is a fair point. I suspect that it backs up the one I made earlier about the need to take a long hard look at the structure and get it absolutely right. Incidentally, I hope that the right hon. Gentleman’s grandson won his game, and that, if he did, the right hon. Gentleman will convey all our best wishes to him.

Let me end where I started. I thank the hon. Member for City of Chester on initiating the debate, and congratulate him on his speech. I also congratulate all the other Members who have spoken.

I want sport in this country to be successful, and I want basketball to be as successful as rowing, cycling, sailing or of any of the other more obviously successful Olympic sports. It would probably be overdoing it to be say that basketball has had a troubled past, but the fact that it has not taken off has been a source of great frustration to all of us who are involved in it. However, it occurs to me that this may be a moment of opportunity. I am sure that if the new chairman is really prepared to take on the task of sorting out the governance of the sport and ensuring that there are people who understand participation and the performance expertise that drives success at the top end, and if he can take that case to UK Sport and prove that we have a good chance of medalling in basketball in Rio or in the 2020 games, UK Sport will reconsider its decision.

Question put and agreed to.