Coalfield Areas: Sports Facilities

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I thank my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley), for securing this timely debate. I represented part of his constituency until the boundary changes of 2010, so I know Warsop and Welbeck extremely well. I recall the work that I and my office put in to get the initial significant grants to bring Meden Vale’s playing fields up to any kind of reasonable standard, but that was the beginning of the process, not the end. In former mining communities such as Meden Vale, with the level of enthusiasm and the number of volunteers there, it is fairly obvious to me that the Government are sitting on a health gold mine.

CISWO, with its legacy from the coal industry, is responsible for more playing fields in England than any other single organisation—a phenomenal fact. However, it has never taken that responsibility seriously. It has never had a plan. I have had many battles with it, even over basics such as getting investment in. That contrasts totally with the less well funded Coalfields Regeneration Trust, which has done and still does a superb job with meagre resources; it has pennies where pounds are needed. Its approach has been absolutely to the point in terms of recognising the economic and health benefits of investment, including in sporting facilities. The hon. Gentleman was right to highlight the important role that the Coalfields Regeneration Trust still plays. It could do more with more resource.

I am interested in the possibilities around CISWO and its land. The CISWO land in my area includes land in Harworth, a former colliery. It has cricket and football clubs. There was also provision for weightlifting and archery—Olympic sports. It was given £43,000 for floodlights, so that the football club, which has been very successful, can be promoted. The colliery is good at raising its own money, but it has never had any significant outside investment, only small amounts.

The land is there, and one of the Football Association’s multi-purpose, floodlit, full-size 3G or 4G pitches could be put there instantly, losing no facility whatsoever. It has a car park and changing rooms. It has the infrastructure. It has the community involvement, including among kids, and, critically, it has the volunteers. This is low-overhead sport. It does not require paying loads of people to do loads of things; it is volunteer-led. That kind of investment there would work. However, those volunteers are not the kind of people who have spent their time learning the routes to bid for various sums of money, so the money goes elsewhere, and they continue to spend their time running mass-participation events.

Costhorpe does not have any infrastructure. It has the fields, although it gave them over to the district council, and it has the cricket pitch. It lost its tennis facilities, and the bowling facilities are long gone, although the land is still there. However, there are no changing rooms, so kids playing football have to change in cars. There are no toilets, although the youth club is sometimes open to give that generous assistance. Again, it is pretty simple and pretty basic: any plan for sport—or for football, which is the biggest sport played there—would have that automatically built in. Football bodies, with their mass wealth, are not doing that.

There is also Manton. I actually employed a member of staff, Kamini Patel, who spent three years battling with CISWO to allow investment in the facilities there. We pooled our money, Sport England money and various other types of money and put in changing rooms and a little multi-use games area. It was transformed from virtually nobody using it—one club, one football team—to thousands of kids using it, and thousands of girls playing football there. That continues to this day. It has decent changing rooms, decent toilets, a proper, safe car park, safe access and a little tuck shop room to make teas and coffees.

An all-weather facility could be put in Manton and the numbers would dramatically increase again. It needs a bit of assistance to get that going. It could also do with infrastructure money for the boxing that is held there, which is only just legal in the building used for it. There is also athletics there, which is highly successful. We are talking about potential Olympic medal winners training in the summer on grass marked out at the miners’ welfare. That is not the standard that we should aspire to in this country.

It seems to me that there is a huge opportunity for the Minister and for the Government. The facilities, the land and the consent are there. CISWO is not a dynamic organisation, but it is not the irritable blocker that it was when I dealt with it five or 10 years ago, when it tried to block every single thing. It gave me plenty of grief simply because we wanted to turn drinking clubs into sports clubs for kids. That has now changed, and CISWO will not stand in the way, but it needs some pump-priming. It needs the Government to say that they will put in extra money if it opens up football, cricket or athletics facilities, but what should the Government’s price be for doing that?

My final point, Mr Owen, is the biggest and the most important, and the one you will be most interested in, as will the Minister, I am sure. Any Government funding should be conditional on putting the NHS in the middle. The Government should tell the NHS that it has to be part of this. We put some good money into Manton miners’ welfare, and you cannot move for the vast number of parents and grandparents watching young girls and boys play football there on a Saturday morning. It is a wonderful sight, and statistically it is the Football Foundation’s most successful ever project. I hope it is listening in and recognising that.

What if NHS involvement was one of the conditions? Doctors could recommend walking round the pitch three times for each grandparent. Reading University’s academic research suggests that that will probably add half a year to their life if they do it every time they watch their grandchild play football. Let us bring in a little bit of quantified active participation and literally bring in NHS branding—force the NHS to think through using these facilities as part of its work. The key target group in Mansfield, Bassetlaw and other coalfield communities is the parents and grandparents watching their kids involved in physical activity. If what I have suggested is part of the deal, we will save the taxpayer a fortune. Three times walking round the pitch is quantified activity. We should say to those running the facilities, “It is part of your responsibility to get all the parents and grandparents doing it, because that is why we are putting the money in.”

That would be huge for the NHS. That is the little twist that I would build in. It would be transformative in coalfield communities. It would be great for mental health stuff and all the rest. Say to people, “Aye, go and have a drink if you want on a Saturday night, but these aren’t drinking clubs. They are sports clubs. As they were originally, so they are going to be again—a great national asset brought fully back into use.” What a chance for the Minister to be performing round the country and seeing great success in what she has done!