Lord Moynihan
Main Page: Lord Moynihan (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Moynihan
My Lords, I start where my noble friend Lady Doocey finished by recognising London 2012 as a story of great achievement, great British creativity and great British involvement. The fact that the Olympic park was completed on time and on budget is to a great extent thanks to the skill and professionalism of more than 1,000 British businesses. The Olympic Delivery Authority’s contract for the construction of the Olympic stadium resulted in work for 240 UK companies, with many more subcontractors. This included the supply of steel from Bolton, turf grown in Scunthorpe and seats from Luton. More than 40 UK companies won contracts to work on the velodrome, including supplying the timber for the cycling track from Sheffield and seating structures from Barnsley.
The Olympic and Paralympic Games have been a catalyst for delivering this urban regeneration of the East End in six years rather than 26. My noble friend in sport, the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, has been the torch bearer in the project to steer that area of London into a vibrant urban legacy for future generations—I emphasise that to my noble friend Lady Doocey—of the local communities. That has been at the heart of everything she has done, for which she deserves the congratulations and support of us all.
We are now ready for 15,000 athletes from more than 200 countries to come to both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. They will be competing for 4,400 medals. More than 3,000 officials will preside over the world’s fiercest competition and—would you believe it?—20,000 accredited media will carry the action to billions of people around the world. We are holding the equivalent of 26 world championships at the same time over 19 days, transitioning the city and then holding another 20 world championships for the Paralympic Games over 12 days. More than £700-million worth of goods will be procured for the Games, including 900,000 pieces of sports equipment—every one to perfection. For example, there are 8,400 badminton shuttlecocks, 6,000 paper archery target faces and 510 hurdles for the athletes. We expect around 8 million spectators, with 800,000 people expected to use public transport to travel to the Games on the busiest day. I say to my noble friend Lord Davies that, of course, transport is a concern and security has also been expressed as a concern. However, to have an investment because of the Games of some £6.5 billion, not least in upgrading and extending transport links to get people to and from the Games, to ensure that London keeps moving, is surely beneficial both for the Games and as a legacy project.
I shall refer to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Haskel; I was going to say my noble friend, as he frequently is on the subject of sport. He raised an important issue. I am not here to defend the definition of a breakfast menu; nor, I am sure he would accept, am I here to argue over the margins of the legal definition of ambush marketing. I hope that I can give him some comfort by saying this from the London organising committee perspective. It raised some £2 billion from the private sector to put into the Games. That has come not least from TV rights and, of course, ticket sales. Above all, it has come from sponsorship rights. Protecting those sponsorship rights is inherently important in retaining the value of that essential contribution to a £2 billion package which has not resorted to government funding.
I think that the noble Lord was focusing more on the future. In that context maybe I can give him some comfort as I have a good degree of sympathy with his point. At the end of this year, the rights will return from the London organising committee to the British Olympic Association. We are in discussion at this time—well in advance of the end of the year—to see how we can showcase British expertise among the contractors and subcontractors who have been involved with the project, to ensure that they get some recognition moving forward, without losing the right of those commercial advantages that the British Olympic Association will have to support the young athletes of the future once the Games have moved on from London 2012. The noble Lord makes a very important point but I give him the assurance that we are already in discussion with those contractors, such as Sir John Armitt—he has been critical in this, as the noble Lord knows—and with the Government to see whether we can find a solution to recognise and showcase the outstanding work that has been done for these Games, and to work with those companies to make sure that not only they succeed but that young athletes in the future are given the support they so richly deserve when it comes to moving on to future Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Lord Haskel
I thank the noble Lord for that reassurance, but the point that is being continuously made to me is that the Olympic city itself is a wonderful shop window and it is not allowed to use the Olympics as such.
Lord Moynihan
I have made a distinction, I hope, in trying to assist the noble Lord about what happens when those rights return to the British Olympic Association. He made a very important point about the future benefit to those companies being showcased for the work that they have done and what is happening today. What is happening today is clearly a matter for the legal department and, as I say, I am not here to defend a legal department that is looking in detail at the definition of a breakfast menu. However, I am very concerned as chairman of the British Olympic Association that companies that have done a huge amount of work for these Games should be able to showcase in the future and win further contracts in the future. Sports facilities around the world are a multimillion-pound business, and it does not end with the Games in London. For them, it is the beginning of a long road, and we should be there to support them on that road. We need to get the balance right between ensuring their recognition—which is important to their business—on the one hand, and on the other the return of the rights of the British Olympic Association, which for over one hundred years had to rely purely on private sector funding; there was not a pound from government in those hundred years. The only way to do this is through the sale of the rights through sponsorship. I believe that we can achieve that balance.
I will move on to the work of the Government. The House should have nothing but praise for the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson. He fought for our athletes in maintaining funding for our Olympic and Paralympic teams after London 2012, going into the Rio cycle. He has boosted the credentials of this country to make sure that we have a decade of sport, by supporting our successful bids—and I emphasise that all these have been successful—to host the Rugby League World Cup in 2013; the Commonwealth Games, of course, in 2014; the Rugby Union World Cup in 2015; the World Athletics Championships in the Olympic stadium in 2017, and what a magnificent achievement it was to win that bid; and, not least after our great victory today, the Cricket World Cup in 2019. This will be a decade of sport for the United Kingdom.
However, Hugh Robertson will not be short of future challenges when the curtain falls on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. There is a need to restructure British sport. It is still a myriad of too many quangos and of public sector-driven and overlapping bureaucracy. I have always believed that the role of government in sport is to empower, not to micromanage. Where sport is at its best, it is driven from the athletes up, with the support and enthusiasm of their parents, families, friends, clubs and schools. It provides the ideal opportunity to implement the Prime Minister’s earlier objective of “big society, not big government”. The months after the Games will provide the best chance in a generation for fundamental reform. A leader like Hugh Robertson, who has won respect across the sporting world, has the ability to take on the forces of the past and deliver a true sporting legacy for the future. However, delivery of that sporting legacy will be our biggest challenge.
Against this background, the British Olympic Association will continue to perform its role as an independent voice for sport. When the Government, the mayor’s office’s attention and the Olympic movement move on and LOCOG is disbanded, we will still be there for the athletes. It is my view that sport holds a mirror to society. The values of sport reflect the values of society. Many of the principles and ideals inherent in sport have a broader application to our lives as a whole. The standards of probity and integrity in sport should mirror the highest standards of behaviour in society. The corresponding forms of sanction and discipline should apply if that behaviour is flouted. Keenly contested though it is, winning at any cost is inimical to the very essence of sport and to its philosophy of team spirit, honesty and loyalty.
The concept of fair play is one of sport’s most cherished tenets. Cheating, by whatever means, from overt fouling to match fixing to doping, is not fair play and has no place in sport. On 7 November last year, the greatest living Olympian, Sir Steve Redgrave, stated, with reference to the World Anti-Doping Agency:
“A two-year ban for doping is almost saying that it’s acceptable”.
He was speaking for clean athletes across the globe. Yet last month was marked by a deeply disappointing development. The Court of Arbitration of Sport formally declared the British Olympic Association’s lifetime ban for serious drugs cheats unenforceable. That effectively denied the British Olympic Association the autonomy to select Team GB athletes. We held a special meeting of all the governing bodies of sport to consider the effect of the ruling. There was a universal condemnation of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision to reduce to two years the bans for first-time offences. Let us hope that it is not tantamount—as postulated by my noble friend Lord Higgins—to giving a green light to the use of drugs in sport. If this proves to be the case, and nothing is done to stem the tide, we will drift inexorably towards a sporting world in which competition between athletes is equally competition between chemists’ laboratories. At the British Olympic Association and in the corridors of the IOC, national Olympic committees and international federations, we may have lost the battle. However, on behalf of the athletes whose interests we represent, we must win the war.
My noble friend Lord Higgins suggested that the benefits of performance-enhancing drugs may pass and go away during a period of two years. That may be a seriously wrong observation. If I had taken growth hormones throughout my teens and had ended up six feet tall like my noble friend Lord Bates, I guarantee that I would not have shrunk back to my present height in my 20s. That was a light-hearted way of making a serious point. If one takes a cocktail of drugs to enhance one’s performance in training and can do eight, nine or 10 times more circuit training in the winter than one would otherwise have done without those drugs, even when one comes off the drugs one can attain high performance levels with the muscular structure one has now acquired illegally by taking the performance-enhancing drugs, sometimes for a very long time. The case of growth hormones is extremely important, especially for people in their teens.
Lord Higgins
I entirely agree with what my noble friend said; perhaps he misheard me.
Lord Moynihan
I am delighted that I did mishear—and if I did, I may have done so slightly mischievously in order to make my point. I am more than grateful to my noble friend for raising the subject.
I turn briefly to the Paralympic movement. There is no doubt that the Paralympic Games this summer will be one of the highlights of 2012. When I was Minister for Sport, I went to see my then Secretary of State, Nick Ridley. He was not the greatest fan of sport. I recall a packed House of Commons for the Second Reading of the Football Spectators Bill. I was a nervous Minister for Sport and he, kindly as ever, offered to do the most difficult task, which was to take on the Second Reading speech in a packed House. The former Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, leant across the Dispatch Box. I had been going to football matches regularly for the previous couple of years in order to be able to answer questions. Denis Howell asked: “So, Secretary of State, when was the last time you were at a football match?”—to which Nick Ridley replied, “At Eton, under duress”. It was a classic example that contrasted with how many days I had spent at football matches, watching 18 First Division games and 14 from the rest of the divisions. He was a great Secretary of State.
I went to see him that Wednesday morning. My headline requests were that we should have £1 million to set up the British Paralympic Association; that we should establish a ministerial review of disabled sport; and that we should request support from government to encourage the IOC to make it a requirement that any city bidding to host the Olympic Games also hosted the Paralympic Games thereafter. Nick looked at me and simply said, “Fine”. I did not stay for further discussion, but said thank you and exited to a broad smile from his private office.
True early heroes of the Paralympic association such as Bernard Atha and Dr Adrian Whiteson in particular—the latter has gone on to mastermind the Teenage Cancer Trust—should be celebrated this summer. Since that time, many Paralympians have inspired us, showing a generation that it is the ability of athletes that we should focus on rather than their disabilities. The seeds of this transformation in society were to be found in Headley Court, Stoke Mandeville and the work of Jack Ashley and the others in Parliament who steered through much-needed legislation on behalf of the disabled. This year’s Paralympic Games will be the culmination of all their work.
The British Olympic Association has been transformed over the past four or five years. It has listened to the voice of athletes as never before. The voice of athletes has been heard in the meetings of the advisory board, on which my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft and the noble Lord, Lord Paul, continue to sit and give their guidance and wise advice. When I walk in to meetings of the National Olympic Committee, I am proud to see in front of me one of the most expert boards in British sport, which is why the BOA will continue to play a central role in the centre of sports policy.
However, what we will focus on now, above all, is giving maximum performance support to our athletes, all 550 of them who will be selected for Team GB this summer. One hundred and one have already been selected. Why should we give them that support? One example gives the answer. If you were fortunate enough to watch the Games in Athens, you would have seen the great gold medals that Britain won in the coxless four, Kelly Holmes’s 800 and 1,500 metres, the men’s 4 x 100 and Chris Hoy’s first gold medal in the 1 kilometre time trial. The final times of those five gold medals added together were 12 minutes and six seconds, but the difference between all five being gold and all five being silver was 0.545 of one second. That is why it is so tough to win gold medals at the Olympic Games, and that is why the work of the British Olympic Association should be devoted—every minute, every hour, every day—to supporting every one of our athletes on Team GB to deliver their best performance on the day. If we do that, we have the talent to match the success that we had in Beijing.
Our aspirational target remains fourth place in the medal table. It will be tough, incredibly tough. We will not beat the Chinese, Russians or the Americans, and the Germans and the Australians will be very much on our heels, but if we can continue to support our athletes, along with their families, their coaches and their governing bodies, we will see remarkable feats of sporting success this summer. I have every confidence that our Olympic and Paralympic teams will deliver, and I wish them well.