Sport: Governance

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I thank my noble friend Lord Moynihan not just for securing this debate but for the insightful, interesting and in-depth Bill he published, and for securing the seminar earlier this week at Slaughter and May which was a day of incredibly interesting debate right across the sporting landscape. I also welcome my noble friend Lady Brady. Having grown up in Kidderminster, I watched her rise at Birmingham City. Quite frankly, what she achieved in the boardroom in a sport such as football is nothing short of remarkable. It would thus seem petty of me to remind her of Kidderminster Harriers’ cup visit to St Andrew’s when they knocked Birmingham City out of the FA Cup that year, which provoked probably one of the greatest lines on “Sports Report”: “There’ll be some celebrating down the A456 this evening”.

There is no separate world of sport. We love it; we feel it in our hearts. In some ways, that can often deceive us into thinking it is different, separate and magical. It is all those things, but it is no separate world. There are disasters, such as Hillsborough and Valley Parade, disgraceful ticket touting, match fixing and doping. On the other side of the coin, there are Murray’s Wimbledon, Botham’s Ashes and the sensational summer of sport in 2012. This is in our DNA. It is hard-wired into our culture and is part of who we are. It is in our psyche and in our lexicon. It is right across the park.

We are at our best in sport when we put athletes at the heart of everything we do, focusing on the participants, the people at the centre of what sport and leisure are all about. We saw an extraordinary journey from Atlanta in 1996, where we won one Olympic gold medal, to London in 2012 where we won 29 gold medals. That was due to many things, not least lottery funding, but it was also due to a dramatic transformation in the governance of many of the national governing bodies and sports councils of our nations. To see that happen in such a short space of time shows what is possible and demonstrates the journey which we are on. UK Sport was at the heart of distributing that lottery money and driving governance through those lottery awards alongside increased equality and inclusion in sports. In recent times, particularly in sports such as boxing and basketball, we have seen that you can have fantastic athletes who are great performers in the rink and on the court, but if you do not have the right governance, the right people and the right structures and systems around the board table, that can start to damage and massively negatively impact sporting performance.

At the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I am leading a £2 million piece of work on sport inclusion. We are going across football, rugby and cricket to cover the most ground in the shortest space of time, and are looking to drive up participation for girls and women and people from black and minority-ethnic backgrounds and to increase access to sporting stadia across the country, about which I know the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, will say more later.

We launched with Premiership rugby in September. What a fantastic summer. The women won the Rugby World Cup for England—yet the number of women and girls in this country registered to play contact rugby is 0.00057%. The programme will train 480 teachers and coaches in and out of school and work with 1,000 young girls in training camps to get them into rugby, feel the joy of being part of a team sport and appreciate what it is to develop in this sporting community which we all love. In 18 months, we aim to have 7,000 more girls and young women playing rugby.

Similarly, Jason Robinson got the England captaincy and yet 3% of black or minority-ethnic people play rugby on a regular basis. Again, we are looking to increase coaching and to get 1,500 BME people into rugby up and down the country, working with the 12 premiership rugby clubs. They are in the heart of some of our most diverse cities—look at Leicester Tigers, for example. That is where we can make a difference and that goes to the heart of what sport is—the clubs that grew up in the communities. Football clubs, Premiership rugby clubs and county cricket clubs are part of our community, yet all too often they are now massively divorced and separated from it and focus on things other than that community. That is where the link needs to be made to connect the clubs and sport back into the diverse community that is Britain.

In conclusion, we need world-class performance and a world-class talent pathway but, crucially, we need access to inclusive sport for all, all of which should be underpinned and driven by gold medal standard governance.