Hugh Robertson
Main Page: Hugh Robertson (Conservative - Faversham and Mid Kent)(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mark Pritchard
Indeed. I should like to put on record my thanks to Mr Speaker for his active support of tennis and of Tennis for Free in particular. Given the huge amount of money going into tennis generally, from the Exchequer and the lottery, does the hon. Lady accept that a future Wimbledon champion—junior or senior, male or female—is as likely to come from the Tennis for Free courts as from private courts or those where an entry fee is charged?
The Minister for Sport and the Olympics (Hugh Robertson)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) on securing this debate, and I thank Members for their many contributions during her speech. The hon. Lady is absolutely right: tennis is a game enjoyed by many millions of people in this country. Absolutely central to our plans for the Olympics, and beyond, is to get people to focus on tennis for not just two weeks at the end of June and the beginning of July.
We want to ensure that tennis is played by as many people as possible, for as much of the year as possible, and I was very encouraged to see in a recent survey that tennis was highlighted as a sport that many more people wanted to play. Interestingly enough, although everyone concentrates on those at school and in their early 20s, tennis was seen in the survey as an incredibly popular sport among those who want to play it later in life; so although people are rightly enthusiastic about getting more young people playing, it is also important to remember that fact.
I thought I would first quickly give the hon. Lady a bit of background, talk about the opportunity, which she rightly highlighted, offered through the new sport strategy, and then address the issues she raised about Tennis for Free. She is absolutely right that by 2013, Sport England will have invested more than £26 million of public money in the Lawn Tennis Association, much of which is driven by lottery receipts. The hon. Lady mentioned that when she talked about increased investment in sport. Sport now gets 20% of the lottery take, up from 13.7%, and lottery receipts are rising, so more lottery money is available for sport than ever before.
The hon. Lady made her points very fairly and did not line the LTA up directly in the shooting gallery; nor should she—the contributions of many other Members have shown what the organisation has achieved. It is important for a Government, and indeed for Sport England, to have just one point of contact in any sport. When I took over the role of shadow Minister for Sport, someone told me that golf has 19 representative bodies in this country. It is important to have one body in overall charge, and clearly that should be the sport’s national governing body. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this argument, the LTA has, as Members have pointed out, worked hard to bring more tennis into schools through the AEGON partnership and the new allplay scheme it has just launched, and wheelchair tennis is one of the fastest-growing disabled sports in the country. The LTA deserves enormous credit for all that.
The hon. Lady mentioned the youth sport strategy. She is absolutely right—there is nothing party political about it—that lottery funding has injected a considerable amount of cash into sport for the best part of 15 years, which has transformed funding for both Olympic and community sports. To be honest, it is deeply shaming that over those 15 years, the number of people playing sport—the problem is not confined to tennis—has flatlined or gone down. There are a number of reasons for that. First, the target of 1 million was, to say it in the nicest possible way, what a target of 1 million sounds like: plucked off the wall as a nice round number. It was not gained by burrowing deep into sports, finding out what they could deliver and coming to a target.
The second problem is that the measurement is now generally regarded as faulty. Active People uses the measurement of three separate sessions of half an hour’s exercise a week, a direct lift from the old health model. The perfectly sensible idea was to streamline all this, but it is extremely difficult for most people to manage three separate sessions of half an hour’s sport. The problem was brought home to me by England Hockey, which produced the example of a young hockey player, playing in the top levels of the southern leagues, who trained on a Tuesday night and played league hockey on a Saturday, but who failed the Sport England measure because they were not doing three separate sessions of sport.
That problem was compounded by the fact that the survey is collected solely through fixed telephone lines. As hon. Members will know, hardly any young person in this country operates on a fixed telephone line any more; everybody uses mobile communications, social media and the rest. As the Minister, I have suffered the ridiculous situation of calling in sport governing bodies such as the LTA to explain why their figures are falling and being told, “Actually, our figures show that the number of people playing is rising, but the survey is not picking them up.” In my 18 months as Minister, I have found that the single most frustrating thing. Using a survey that measures more accurately what is happening is key.
The third issue involves how sport governing bodies—the LTA is not exempt from this criticism—went into the whole sport plan process. It was a good idea of James Purnell, as Secretary of State, to empower governing bodies to drive up participation, but some saw it as a means to drive the commercial model. They would get more people interested in a sport, and then those people would pay money to watch the pros play. That is different from influencing consumer behaviour and driving the societal change we need if we are to get more people to playing sport.
Meg Munn
I appreciate what the Minister says about the difficulty of counting how many people are playing, but one thing we can count is the number of courts. From my constituency and others, we know that some areas have no courts and that many courts are in disrepair. That is important and must be addressed.
Hugh Robertson
The hon. Lady is absolutely correct, as she has been in much of what she has said. Having given her a bit of background, I will move to the youth sport strategy.
The strategy was announced a week ago. Instead of continuing with the old strategy and its flatlining figures, we will encourage sport governing bodies to concentrate much more effectively and in a more focused way on the 14 to 25 age group, in the hope that if we can get people out of school and into community clubs playing much more sport, there is a much better chance, because sport has been established as part of their daily lives, that they will keep playing later. We will not demand that all sports focus exclusively on that age group, but we definitely want a renewed focus on it.
As part of that, voluntary groups and sports clubs will have the chance to access a £50 million pot to help ensure that the widest range of sporting opportunities are available to that age group. That is exactly the sort of pot that such schemes ought to pitch into. Alongside that sits the 2012 legacy scheme Places People Play, which will provide £135 million in funding, the majority of which will be targeted at small facility improvement through grants of less than £50,000. It strikes me that a great many tennis facilities would benefit from precisely that sort of funding.
I am glad to say that the scheme has proved far more popular than we ever thought. The first round was dramatically oversubscribed. The funding extends right across the piece, from fixing boilers and doing up changing rooms to repairing holes in roofs. Those are the sorts of thing for which small clubs find it difficult to raise money, but they are essential to increasing the number of people playing sport. Sport England will do a series of subsequent rounds of the programme. I encourage everyone here to get their local tennis facilities to apply for the fund. There are two streams. One, at the top, is Iconic Facilities. If Members have a big sports club in their constituency to which a lot needs doing—many of them will have tennis facilities—it can apply for funding. The other stream is Inspired Facilities: a sub-£50,000 pot to cover exactly this issue.
On Tennis for Free, I must be a bit careful. It is absolutely my job as Minister to set the overall strategy and then hold sport governing bodies, in particular, to account for how they spend their money. Over the past year, participation figures for a number of sport governing bodies—I will not name and shame them publicly—have tailed off. In some instances, we have removed funding from bodies that have failed. The new youth sport strategy will give payment by results. If we find that some sports are doing well, they will get more money. Those sports that just continue in the same old way and do not increase numbers will have their funding taken away.
However, it would be going further than a Minister should to delve into a sport and instruct the sport governing body exactly how to allocate its funds. I hold governing bodies to account for what they are doing across the piece, but I do not tell them to fund individual organisations. There is also a secondary point. The part of the whole sport plan into which I suspect Tennis for Free will fall is lottery funding, not Exchequer funding, so it is illegal under additionality rules for me to tell the LTA how to spend its funds. That said, I am keen for the LTA to work much more closely with Tennis for Free, which is an interesting and innovative scheme. I hope, as does the hon. Lady, that it will succeed. Clearly, it must prove that it can, but I suspect it will have an important part to play in the mix for achieving her aims.
The most constructive thing that I can do as a result of this debate is to give the hon. Lady an undertaking that I will write personally to the chief executive of the LTA asking him to meet Tennis for Free to bottom out exactly what can be done and what issues remain, and to write back to me. I will then copy that reply to her, so we can be sure that something will come of this debate.
Hugh Robertson
Absolutely. That is part of the whole sport plan process. My instinct is that that principle is probably there already. The whole sport plan, as it works at the moment, has not changed at all since the last Government were in office. A better way of answering that might simply be to say that sport governing bodies have a fair degree of autonomy to drive up participation in any way they see fit, as long as they get more people playing.
Clearly, it is a new idea. If we are investing public money, either through the lottery fund or the Exchequer, we need to ensure that it gives value for money and works. I encourage Tennis for Free and the LTA to work together more closely. I will broker that meeting and monitor what happens.
Finally, such relationships are important. In some sports, they work well; in others, they work less well, and tennis might be one of them. The important thing is that both sides take an open and constructive approach. I leave the hon. Lady with this thought. It does not help if organisations trying to get funding from sport governing bodies are permanently hammering them in the press. That produces a siege mentality that I suggest might be part of the problem.