Budget Statement

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I add to the much deserved congratulations to my noble friend Lady Moyo on her maiden speech today.

I turn—unsurprisingly to the Minister, I am sure—to the closing part of the first part of her speech: namely, the decision to arrest the closure of public swimming pools in this country. First and foremost, my congratulations go to the Government on responding to the powerful campaign, of which I was a part, for additional Budget funding for swimming pools. Public leisure facilities with swimming pools are a critical component of the strategy to promote the nation’s health and the safety of children, and the £63 million package is indeed a welcome lifeline. I agree that Sport England is best placed to manage the one-year funding package, and local authorities will be able to avoid the wholesale closure of pools predicted in the absence of such support. Too many of our pools face underinvestment and further pressures, including escalating operational and maintenance costs, in the face of unprecedentedly high energy bills.

I suggest to the Minister that, of that £63 million package, the £40 million of the fund which has been allocated to decarbonisation and long-term energy efficiency is a masterstroke and should not be limited to a one-off, one-year policy. Pool operators that use imaginative ways of improving energy efficiency—for example, as the Minister mentioned earlier, capturing the heat generated in data centres—should not be rushed to compete in a one-off, one-year competition. I hope this initiative will be built on in the future as we move towards net zero. I also hope that the initiative taken by the Chancellor, a former Secretary of State at DCMS, will now be adopted in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to support the many council pools that are under threat of closure there.

The backcloth to this announcement is not optimistic. If we look back at the decade which started with the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, in which I declare an interest, since 2010 we have lost nearly 25% of our public pools—we have lost 382 of them. Pools play a vital role in helping communities engage with sport and physical activity. The Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs accelerated the decline in those aquatic facilities at the tail-end of that decade which should have seen the sports legacy from the Olympic Games increase, not decrease, the number of facilities in the UK. More than 85 pools have been closed and not replaced since 2019—a sad decade indeed. That was made worse by the fact that the provision of sport, recreation and leisure activities by local authorities is a discretionary line item, not a mandatory line item as it is, for example, in Scotland. If we really want to address these issues, not just in swimming pools but in leisure and an active lifestyle, we need to recognise and concentrate on putting the right amount of money behind local authorities in particular and making that a mandatory, not a discretionary, line item.

This measure goes further. It recognises that swimming pools play an important role in our communities for all ages and all people. Swimming is more than a recreation; it is a key life skill. Physical inactivity is associated with one in six deaths in the UK and is estimated by the Government to cost the UK £7.4 billion annually. Deloitte has published research which shows that improving the level of physical activity in the workforce would benefit the UK economy by up to £17 billion a year.

As pointed out in the report by your Lordships’ National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee, which was debated on 9 February this year, it is recognised that the time has come to have a radical rethink of financial incentives and health policies, both within and outside the workforce. Members serving on that committee unanimously called for a national plan for sport, health and well-being. It was pointed out that successive Governments over decades have tried to address stagnating activity levels, with disappointing results. Nearly 40% of all adults are active for fewer than 2.5 hours not a day, but a week, which includes walking to work and the shops. It is not surprising that the noble Lord, Lord Willis, who chaired that committee, reflected:

“How is it possible that the UK is world-leading in elite and professional sports, that 3 billion people across the world watch our Premier League matches in over 187 different countries and that … at Olympics after Olympics … we have failed at grass-roots level to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to be more active, despite all the investment that successive Governments have made?”—[Official Report, 2/2/22; col. 1208.]


With schoolchildren facing growing obesity, with PE marginalised in the school curriculum and no longer inspected by Ofsted, with many primary school teachers getting fewer than three hours’ training in a three-year degree course, it is not surprising that physical literacy in most of our primary schools means nothing. With the closing of swimming pools and leisure facilities, tragically we have become one of the most inactive nations in the world.

When looking for solutions, the Chancellor could do worse than turn to New Zealand, whose strength at elite level is celebrated across the globe for a nation of just 5 million people and whose success lies in a strong emphasis on participation and opportunity for all. There is a pathway for all local communities and all people wherever they live in New Zealand to become engaged in sport, health and well-being activities. From that platform, podium success for the elite is delivered because every child is assessed in order to be able to deliver their potential and every community is offered help for health, well-being and physical activity.

However, the chancellor in New Zealand goes further. The country has a well-being budget that brings health, sport and well-being together into one policy framework, delivered to Parliament by its Finance Minister, who happens to be the Deputy Prime Minister. The only way in which that could be delivered here would be to move responsibility for sport and recreation into the Department of Health, as proposed by your Lordships’ committee. Being embedded in the Department of Health, by moving the 25 civil servants responsible for the sector from the DCMS to the centre of government, would enable the Department of Health and Social Care to live up to its name—not a department of treatment but a department taking an important lead in the area of health promotion, with all the benefits that are so needed in this country today.

The evidence is clear. Systemic reforms to taxation, regulation and policy can allow the fitness, sport and leisure sector to play its fullest role in getting the UK workforce moving more and supporting our national productivity. The time for action is now. A National Plan for Sport, Health and Well-being provides an excellent starting point and, like Sir Patrick Vallance’s first published report into the regulation of emerging digital technologies referred to yesterday, the sport, health and well-being report of your Lordships’ House should have all its recommendations accepted in full.

We desperately need changes in departmental responsibility, budgetary support and enlightened policy thinking if we are to address the steady closures of sport and leisure facilities, increasing levels of inactivity and obesity and the consistent, corrosive decline in participation and active lifestyles that we have witnessed since the wonderful hosting of the Olympic and Paralympic Games here in London, now over a decade ago. Helping to save our swimming pools is very welcome, but facing the wider challenges that I have outlined is long overdue.