Olympic Legacy (S&T Report)

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his Select Committee on their report on sport and exercise science. It considers in detail whether there is any evidence that the Games have left a lasting legacy to encourage the nation to be,

“healthier, happier and more active”.

It questions whether the science-based support for high-performance athletes, as measured by medals at the Games, was sufficiently comprehensive and adequately disseminated to assist future generations. In commending the work of the committee on reviewing sport and exercise science as applied to elite athletes and how that work can be disseminated to a wider public, it is of no surprise to me that very little elite research is published in the United Kingdom.

It is certainly true that some sports fare better than others in this respect but in our flagship sport—football—those who earn a living dance to the tune of the paymaster. When Alex Ferguson employed a team of sports scientists, he did not want its work made publicly available to Chelsea. As a result, the Premier League has no research-based ethic, in part because of the powerful marketing machine of professional sport in the United Kingdom, and in part because there is little equipment research as the great confounder is the constant change of kit for commercial gain. The public want to buy the style of football boots used by Messi or Bale. The money is in the kit that people want to own. Tennis players will employ one model of shoes for a year and the likes of Adidas and Nike, with their research teams, will fiercely guard their commercial-in-confidence research. Every season brings a new range of kit—new ski shapes and sizes; new tennis shoes. That commercial reality is a major inhibitor to long-term research.

Secondly, it is very difficult to extrapolate the science of elite sport down to the recreational player. The science required to provide a marginal gain to Chris Hoy is of little relevance to the recreational cyclist in the country lanes this weekend. The outstanding work that Sir Clive Woodward, his team, the coaches and the intricately woven sports scientists undertook for Team GB in 2012 only marginally impacts on wider participation. For this is specialist science; it is world-leading scientific knowledge. It was borne out by 29 gold medals, as opposed to one in Atlanta only 16 years before when such specialist knowledge was absent.

This valuable work is now being taken forward by UK Sport and its subsidiary the English Institute of Sport, focusing as they are on performance solutions based around a holistic range of science, medicine, technology and research designed to increase the probability of success by optimising training programmes, maximising performances in competition and reducing the number of training days lost to injury. Clive Woodward was a pioneer in aligning and integrating this approach for the British Olympic Association—I declare an interest in having had the privilege of being chairman from 2005 to 2012, through Beijing and London—and while there are wider benefits we should not overstate the case for its application to recreational sport.

That said, there is room for wider dissemination of research where it does not impact competitive advantage for young athletes. Other countries do better in this respect. The NHL and NFL in the United States are examples. The NFL collates data centrally and provides public awareness programmes without disclosing the internal secrets of the sports scientists at the Miami Dolphins or Seattle Seahawks. Australia and South Africa deliver excellent sports science research.

The main reason for the difference is the sources of funding. In countries where research is funded by those without vested interests, the prospect for dissemination is enhanced. For countries such as ours, where tight funding control is exercised via our Premier League football clubs and governing bodies of sport, operating as they do in a highly competitive global market, the opportunity for long-term funded research is restricted.

On the wider issue of an Olympic legacy to improve the nation’s health, it is universally accepted that we need to address the challenge caused by obesity among young people, the expensive consequences we face as a country from having low levels of physical activity, inadequate facilities, and an absence of policies to address improving the nation’s health. I regret that we still have a department of sickness, whose default position to sport is the treatment of sports injuries, rather than a proactive Department of Health geared to improving the nation’s health. It is not as if the challenge came to light only during the Games. I would argue that government had a better approach to the subject 150 years ago, when the modern Olympic Games were constructed on the premises of preparing a physically active and fit generation—in that case, principally of men to fight for king and country.

Indeed, between the two world wars the British Government made comparisons with Germany and Italy and quickly recognised that as a nation we were physically ill prepared. The then Minister for Health, Sir Hilton Young, later Lord Kennet, asked at a dinner of the BMA in 1935 whether something could not be done,

“to bring home the benefits of physical culture, which was a culture of mind as well as of muscle”.

The challenge was accepted and was followed by the establishment of the BMA’s Physical Education Committee, the Central Council for Recreative Physical Training, which became the CCPR and now thrives as the Sport and Recreation Alliance under the chairmanship of Andy Reed. It was established then, in 1935, as the first significant body to receive government funding to meet the grave concern about the physical health of the community. It is indicative of the approach at the time that of the 34 original members of the council, no fewer than 14 were members of the medical profession. I declare a somewhat distant interest in that one of them was my grandfather, who was the president of the Royal College of Surgeons at the time.

Alongside those 14 sat seven physical educationalists and three prominent politicians, including Herbert Morrison. The wider aims they pursued resonate to this day. They sought,

“to establish the closest link between the Council and those responsible for physical activities in voluntary organisations and to investigate the best methods of placing the specialised knowledge of the physical training associations at the service of the population”.

They wrote their own mandate,

“to help to improve the physical and mental health of the community through physical recreation, by developing existing facilities for recreative physical activities of all kinds and also by making provision for the thousands not yet associated with any organisation”.

The last 80 years have seen successive Governments struggle to translate these aspirations into political reality, despite subsequently hosting the Olympic Games in London on two occasions.

However, as the Select Committee report and its recently published sister report on Olympic legacy highlighted, hosting the Olympic Games in London offered a unique opportunity to this country to raise the bar. Those of us involved with sport saw this as being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take wide-ranging steps to create opportunities for a more active society on a national and integrated scale. Hosting a great Games was always, in my view, more than 17 brilliant days of Olympic sport and the breathtaking excellence of the Paralympic Games. As important was the objective to leave a lasting sports legacy for young and old, able-bodied and disabled, the length and breadth of the country. The sponsoring department for the Games—the DCMS at the time we won the bid to host the Games in 2005—set a target shared with the departments for education and health in the DCMS public service agreement 2005-2008 to:

“Halt the year on year increase in obesity among children under 11 by 2010”.

In reality we have witnessed a growing prevalence of obesity among all age groups during this time.

So why were the Olympic Games so important in this context? I would argue that the remarkable success of the Games—the brilliance of Sir John Armitt and Sir David Higgins in overseeing the design and build of the facilities for the Games on time and on budget, and the platform they created for the BOA to field its largest and most successful British team in over a hundred years, coupled with the work of the organising committee in putting on the Games—led to a level of national commitment and inspiration that was unparalleled in our time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, for politicians the Olympic Games were manna from heaven. The inspiration was there, and public enthusiasm backed by all-party support was in abundance. What was needed was the political will to translate inspiration into participation through improved facilities and a transformational change in priorities capable of matching the brilliance of the Games.

The opportunity for health and education to lead this agenda remains as strong as it did 80 years ago. Physical activity, not just sport, is the key to keeping people healthy and reducing the burden on the healthcare system. In Raising The Bar, the report I wrote with Kate Hoey when the bid was won in 2005, we called on the Government to: begin work on pioneering a nationwide programme of sport and exercise medicine, echoed in parts of this new report; substantially increase the number of training schemes for GPs as well as for sport and exercise positions; prescribe physical activity to patients, both for remittal and for preventive healthcare goals; and plough half the money saved by the proposals into the provision and maintenance of suitable sport and recreational facilities.

Of course, at the heart of such a programme is the need for co-ordination in government. In my view, the Department of Health should lead a major cross-government strategy to promote the health benefits of physical activity, so as to reinforce its importance. It was hoped that the Cabinet committee would launch this nationwide sports legacy to encourage the nation to be, to quote from the report,

“healthier, happier and more active”.

Indeed, we have had a raft of welcome initiatives labelled legacy projects, but no more initiatives in total than have been launched on an annual basis since the inception of the National Lottery. To us who are passionate about sport they are very welcome—to many other people they may pepper the daily bulletins with government press releases—but they have not transformed the landscape of the health of the nation. Now we have this report which concludes with disappointment at,

“the apparent lack of joined-up thinking in Government about the Olympic health legacy”.

The scientific case for a unified, high-priority national campaign could not be stronger. The twin causes of so much of the burden on the National Health Service are either genetic or environmental. On the environmental side, so many diseases are preventable if you maintain a healthy lifestyle. We need lifestyle departments, with teachers qualified in relevant disciplines in every school, both primary and secondary. We need to design opportunities which young people enjoy. If you want to try to improve the health of the nation it has to be through a sport that people can do by themselves. A sport requiring 22 people to take part is never going to be easy to facilitate and roll out nationwide. If you want to get girls involved, which should be a priority, it has to be in activities they want to do. They do not all want to take part in outside team sports, which is why dance is such an important option.

In closing, the report also calls for further work to be undertaken on international best practice. There is no better place to begin than Finland. No more than 30 years ago—I speak with affection and respect for that great country—it was characterised as a heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking, unfit country. It has completely changed. The past two decades have been marked by a major shift in emphasis from competitive and elite sports to health-enhancing physical activity for all, as seen most clearly in two successive sports Acts and a government resolution. Now, increasingly, multi-sectorial initiatives have led to substantial changes in the public funding of sports organisations, services and the construction of sport and recreational facilities. It is a system built on the enthusiasm of volunteers. In stark contrast, it is also a country where local authorities are central to the delivery of facilities. In the UK, sport and recreational provision is a low-priority, discretionary-line item in local authority budgets, too often to be cut first.

Finland’s sports policy places health enhancement before competitive or high-performance sports. It prioritises well-being and health and supporting children’s and young people’s growth through sports. It recognises the health benefits of the cradle-to-grave approach that is so important. We need a health and fitness programme that is both low-cost and designed from cradle to grave. Cycling, swimming and, in Finland, cross-country skiing figure prominently—all activities that you can do from five to 105. A similar nationwide approach in this country would be politically popular. I can think of no better leader of that initiative than the Minister.

We have a nation inspired by the Games. Surely it is time to translate that inspiration into participation and, in so doing, embed recreational activity as a fundamental building block for a true Department of Health in the 21st century.