Sport, Health and Well-being National Plan (NPSRC Report)

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I first welcome on to the pitch, if I may use a rather cheap sporting analogy, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and congratulate him on his debut and his excellent maiden speech. We look forward to hearing more from him.

I should also congratulate the committee on producing such a comprehensive and thought-provoking report on an increasingly critical subject. I agree with many of its recommendations, not least the need for a national action plan, and I would argue that, if we are serious about uniting health and well-being with sport, then, yes, we do need a dedicated ministerial post within the Department of Health to take ownership, as this is a complex and fiendishly difficult area to get right.

In the report, I thought that the University of Cambridge’s MRC unit made a telling point when it suggested a

“national plan for active lives”

rather than for “sport and recreation”. It is the word “activity” that I will focus on, because this has become a huge issue—not just for sport, health and recreation but for education, the economy and the workforce.

If noble Lords have not done so already, I encourage them to read the latest report from the Economic Affairs Committee—I declare my interest as a member—entitled Where Have All the Workers Gone? The UK has seen an alarming drop since 2019 in the number of economically active people. This trend is now the single biggest drag on economic growth and may continue for many years. It raises major questions over our nation’s health, and in particular workforce fitness in an ageing population.

In just three years, some 500,000 people in the UK have been added to the long-term sickness category, taking the total to 2.5 million. In addition, hundreds of thousands of apparently healthy 50 to 64 year-olds have opted to retire early and become economically inactive. So that is a partial response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, on economic cost.

As we know, levels of physical activity have fallen in recent years, not helped by the surge in sedentary hours spent online. This has happened in spite of the legacy of such events as the London Olympics, or indeed the £1.5 billion spent by Sport England—to which I will come back in a moment.

Talking of Sport England, I find the setting of activity targets too simplistic and binary. You are deemed “active” if you do more than 150 minutes of activity a week and, bizarrely, “fairly active” if you do just 30 minutes a week. I appreciate that Sport England is taking its cue from the Chief Medical Officer, but it should look at the medical research on reducing the risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes 2, cancer and dementia. In all cases, the recommended activity tends to be at least 30 minutes a day, or 200 to 300 minutes a week—a huge difference. I suggest that these targets need to be recalibrated to reflect the real health benefits, particularly at the margins.

In terms of measurement, we should be leveraging the health and sports tech companies to provide far more comprehensive and sophisticated data, focusing not just on the number of minutes but on the intensity and type of exercise. In my former life, I was an information and data entrepreneur, brought up on concepts such as statistical significance, return on investment and impact analysis—all highly relevant here, but largely absent in terms of execution. We discovered that Sport England distributed £1.5 billion in grants over five years but knows which local authorities the funds went to for only £450 million of that. So we can forget about impact analysis, or any sort of effective evaluation.

We are struggling with a multiplicity of players and stakeholders, both national and local, while the health and well-being remit runs across departments—DCMS, health, education, the Treasury of course, and now levelling up. This week’s Cabinet reshuffle has resulted in the “digital” part being removed, so it is CMS and not DCMS. But digital is so wrapped up in media, as we can see with the Online Safety Bill, that I am not sure the department has lost the right letter.

That said, I welcome the right honourable Lucy Frazer as the new Secretary of State—the eighth, by my count, in the past five years. One of the Government’s excuses last year for delaying yet again the launch of a new sports strategy was that the then new Minister needed time to settle in. In view of this, I ask the noble Lord the Minister when this strategy will realistically see the light of day.