Sport: Team GB and ParalympicsGB

Nigel Huddleston Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston (Droitwich and Evesham) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome the hon. Member for Warrington South (Sarah Hall) to the House and congratulate her on a very eloquent, gracious and personal maiden speech. She has shown today that she will make great contributions to this place over the coming years. I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my declarations when I was Sports Minister—I may touch on that in a moment. I also take this opportunity to congratulate the Sports Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Barnsley South (Stephanie Peacock), and the shadow Sports Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) on their roles.

As a former Sports Minister, I know that the role has upsides, but it also comes with a lot of hard work and graft. The role often involves dealing with the downsides of sport—regulation, racism in cricket, head injuries in rugby, financial distress and so on—with sports governing bodies, and coming up with solutions in challenging areas such as trans, where we are all trying to ensure we get the right balance between accessibility and fairness and safety. I know how hard governing bodies work on that, and I know that will be a challenging area for the Minister.

There are some upsides, too. I know there is a lot of noise at the moment around declarations and attending sporting events, but as Sports Minister it is the hon. Lady’s duty and responsibility to get around the country and be a champion for all sorts of sports. I hope the noise around that does not stop her from doing her job. That is really important, because not all sporting events are Wimbledon; the job is also about championing disability sports, women’s sports and lower league sports around the country. I want to see her at those events every weekend. She will not get criticism from me for doing any of that.

There is another downside to being Sports Minister. On calls with Sports Ministers from around the world, they all introduce themselves as the former world champion of this and the former gold medallist of that. Then it comes to the Brit and it’s like, “I’ve got a medal from sports day at my school back in 1984.” Slightly embarrassing! The other downside, I am afraid, is often being required to be in photos along with a lot of very fit, handsome and beautiful people, which is slightly challenging, or being invited to enter the ring to spar with a world champion boxer. I would get asked, “Minister, would you like to participate in the 100 metres final?” with journalists waiting there with cameras just to humiliate you. “No, thank you very much!” But it is an amazing job and one that I enjoyed very much.

If you will allow me, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to say a huge thank you, as I have never had the opportunity to do so. I was appointed Minister for sport and tourism in February 2020. It was the job I had always wanted. A few weeks later, however, we were in lockdown and there was no sport and no tourism. As a result of the work with the various sports governing bodies, in particular Sally Munday and Dame Katherine Grainger at UK Sport, and Tim Hollingsworth at Sport England, and the incredible team at the Department, we were able, over time, to get sport up and running again. I am really proud that we did, because we all know how important it is to health and mental health. And let us not forget that sport is a major economic contributor to the UK. It is a massive export earner for the UK. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in sport and supported by sport, plus it makes us all feel good and unites us.

That brings me to another point, which the Under-Secretary will find out about at some point in the future, should she ever be unfortunate enough to be reshuffled into a different role. A number of Members would say to me, “We used to like you when you were Sports Minister, but not so much now,” because the role is not particularly party political. I am glad that that will be the tone of today’s debate.

We should not and cannot take the amazing success of our Olympians and Paralympians for granted, and we are all here to applaud them today. They have put in an incredible amount of personal effort to achieve that success. The United Kingdom punches way above our weight in sport. That is not an accident. I think all of us would applaud the work of John Major, for example, on the initiative back in the 1990s to ensure that money went into sport—which was often controversial—through the national lottery. That has continued ever since. I know how difficult it is to argue for money for sport, but sport is so impactful on the health and mental health of the country.

What incredible success we saw this year, not only in the medal haul, which is important, but in the personal success stories and personal bests. The medals are a really good indicator of our global success, in particular —my God!—that of the Paralympians. They were second in the medal table again. That speaks volumes of the United Kingdom. We champion people with disabilities: we applaud them and literally put them on a pedestal. The Paralympics is a way to show what people with disabilities can do, as opposed to focusing all on the time on the things they cannot do.

The UK has a fantastic global reputation, in particular for disability sport. I thank everybody involved: not only, as I say, the governing bodies UK Sport and Sport England, but the broadcasters who put the Paralympics on TV at prime time. The British public watched the games in their millions. That is not the case in many other countries around the world. The Under-Secretary is probably being approached by other sports Ministers from around the world saying, “How do you do it? You have incredible success. How did you come second to China in the medal table?” and TV is one of the reasons why.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup said, we are very successful. Back in 1996, we got just one gold medal. We are the only country to have achieved gold medals in every single Olympics in the modern era. That is remarkable, and funding is fundamental to that. From 1996, because of co-operation and taking politics out of a lot of it, we have had a broad consensus on backing sport. Long may that continue.

I would also like to take the opportunity—many of us in the House are very proud of our constituents who participated in the Olympics and Paralympics this year—to applaud Olympic swimmer Matt Richards, Matt Skelhon, Issy Bailey, Rebecca Redfern and Matthew Redfern on their incredible success. I know—I have met them multiple times—that they have very proud parents.

Let us not take sport for granted. We like to applaud our sportspeople for very good reasons. Funding is majorly important. I express my huge gratitude and thanks to the sports governing bodies, UK Sport and Sport England, for what they did during the pandemic when I was Sports Minister, as well as for what they do now. I applaud them; they make us all proud. I applaud the Olympians and Paralympians too. They make us feel good and we are so proud to support them.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I should put on record my thanks to Emily Craig, a gold medallist from my constituency who comes from Mark Cross and for whom Rotherfield recently organised a tea party. If the Minister wants to win a gold medal, she should definitely come to my constituency.