Children: Sport

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in the two minutes and 59 seconds available to us, it is difficult to add much to this debate, other than to say, like my noble friend Lord Moynihan, that when you ask government to get involved in this you are asking all of government to get involved, and to reorganise in a way that government seems to find extremely difficult to do. Under any colour we have seen so far in government, departments do not like to co-operate. Simply to make a change that will help the country’s youth to take part in sport, you have to cover half of Whitehall. I was just doodling here and have written down Health, Education, DCMS and Ministry of Justice; all these departments have an input into some of the introductory schemes that virtually all sports take part in. The noble Baroness mentioned Chance to Shine, but there are dozens of schemes, involving virtually all sports. They have worked out that, if you offer an introductory package, it allows people to get involved in a sport.

I do not like the use of the term “non-competitive”, because sport is basically a physical competition. Whether or not you record the scores on a board that sits there forever, or in a pile of books that become dusty, along with photographs of people with—shall we say—outmoded haircuts and unfashionable shorts, the essence of what is happening is competition. The idea that you get a ball past somebody or move it into a space where somebody else picks it up and moves it up is the essence—but I probably did not have time for that little bit of semantics today.

Organising sport so that people can come in, try it and get accustomed to it has to be done in conjunction with government and, as my noble friend has already said, local government. Leaving this to a voluntary choice is bound to leave it squeezed whenever times are at all hard or whenever you get somebody who simply does not regard sport as a top priority. My noble friend is, of course, right. Unless government takes on the responsibility for encouraging people to access the great amount of voluntary help outside and co-ordinate across the entirety of it, sport will ultimately always have these peaks and troughs. Our challenge is to make sure that when times are bad progress is not lost and that we do slightly better than stand still. That is effectively all we can hope for—to make it very difficult for somebody to say, “No, that is not important”, because every time you do, you end up paying for it somewhere else, usually in the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health.