Community Sports Facilities

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) on securing this timely debate. I congratulate the Minister on his strong performance as a Minister since 2010—he has been outstanding. This is obviously an important year for sport. I also congratulate my hon. Friends on their contributions so far, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley), who has given me an idea. One of the sporting facilities in my constituency is a top-100 listed golf course, which happens to be next door to the crematorium, so I will encourage my local council to investigate the possibility of recycling heat into the clubhouse.

I would like to talk about how I see sport and how sport benefits the individual, the wider community and the nation as a whole. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West and I share a passionate belief that sport can and does do good and should be encouraged and supported in every possible way. Forgive me, but I would appreciate some indulgence as I take a tour of my constituency. I am proud to do so, specifically on this topic, because it has possibly some of the best community sports facilities in the country. In my experience, the people of Bracknell and the surrounding area are generally quite happy, and I think that those two things are linked.

Bracknell has three sports centres, including an Olympic swimming pool, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West competed in once upon a time. The Coral Reef water sports park is a separate facility that is visited annually by hundreds of thousands of people from the south of England. The Look Out discovery centre on Crown Estate land in Swinley forest, which is used for mountain biking, walking and running, has 250,000 visitors a year. We also have one of only three trampoline centres in the south of England. Lily Hill park houses Bracknell rugby club, and I remember playing there aged 19—not so long ago. I lost the game unfortunately, but was very impressed with the facilities. We also have numerous football clubs. In fact, my first visit to my constituency was to play football for Wycombe district football club at the age of 11, and I lost that game as well. We also have a baseball club, which is a five-time national champion. Those are just the community facilities—state-owned, dare I say. We also have a ski slope, an ice rink and an outward-bound youth challenge network, which are all privately funded and are now profitable going concerns. That is just Bracknell.

In Sandhurst, we have 80 acres of land owned and managed by the local town council. We have football pitches, a very successful cricket club, a skate park, a tennis facility and we have the annual Sandhurst fitness funday, which I attend every year because it tries to improve the health of the community. In Crowthorne, we have the Pinewood centre, which is an old TB hospital with a series of wards—TB hospitals had big wards and were in the middle of nowhere. When it was closed, the local council took it over and each ward now houses a society, including a remarkable gymnastics club. When I visited, the doors had to be opened to allow people to run in to do the vault—the standard of the gymnastics is awe-inspiring. There is a judo club on the same site, which included an Olympian. There are also football teams, and boxing clubs in Crowthorne and Bracknell.

Finchampstead includes Finchampstead memorial park, which has a very successful cricket club. We have a football club that is tied with Reading football club, and there is a netball club. I could go on and on. It is a remarkable series of communities all within my constituency. All the councils and councillors—Iain McCracken is one of the people responsible for the portfolio at Bracknell forest—should be congratulated on their success in maintaining all the facilities over the past few decades.

On the sustainability of sports facilities, I do not think that it is the state’s responsibility to fund all facilities; that is not sustainable and makes no sense. The state has a role as a partner, but charity and private money should also play a part. We cannot go back to an age when it was the council’s responsibility to provide all facilities, because that is nonsense. I am proud of the fact that a large number of facilities in my constituency are a partnership between the community and the council.

The wider point that I would like to make about sport is that it is good for us, and as a doctor, perhaps I can say that more strongly than others can. It makes us healthy, and I still see too many patients who are obese, who drink too much, smoke too much and have lost the drive and desire to get on and to compete in life.

Sport from an early age is important, and I mean competitive sport, not the nonsense about everyone being a winner. Life is tough, and trying to protect children from the realities of how competitive life is, is abusive. I would not describe it as child abuse, but it is abusive, because those children enter the workplace and wonder why they cannot deal with competition. Sport has an important role to play in physical health, but also mental health. We need to get back to believing and understanding that we want winners. To have winners we must have losers, by definition. We need to connect effort with reward. Sport is a way to do that and educate people.

Sport can also benefit communities. As I said earlier, I think I have such remarkable communities in my constituency because sport plays a large part in their life. That is why sport is so important, so integral to a happy environment and to the well-being of each of my constituents.

The Football Foundation is an example of an agency that has money from the Government, premier league and the FA. I am doing a fellowship with the Football Foundation, learning about the industry of football, warts and all. The best part has been coming to understand and see the impact that the Football Foundation is having up and down the country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West and I had the pleasure of a tour of facilities around London a few months ago. When one visits the facilities, such as the ones near Wormwood Scrubs—they were in a shocking state and are the responsibility of the council—one realises that the council is under no statutory obligation to provide leisure facilities. I am not going to make a party political point, but at the moment it tends to be Labour councils cutting back and blaming it on Government cuts. The reality is that the way in which those sports facilities are being managed is not sustainable.

The Football Foundation model puts in a proportion of the grant to help and support schemes that have an aspect of sustainability, be it a bar, a crèche or whatever. Thereby the facility is maintained, is successful and popular in the community.

[Simon Hart]

My point might relate only to isolated rural areas such as mine. Does my hon. Friend agree that in many places it is the work of local charities—not the big corporates—and local businesses, volunteers and lottery funds that keep the sporting facilities and infrastructure together?

[Dr Lee]

That is an important intervention. Many times, the local builder or plumbing firm sponsors the football shirts. My hon. Friend is right.

Organisations such as the Football Foundation need to work in partnership with communities and councils, in order to establish much needed sports facilities. I do not know whether anyone here has tried to book a five-a-side football pitch anywhere in the country. It is a woeful situation; it is not possible to get space on those pitches. Why have we not got more of them? The reason at the moment, I think, is that the foundation is struggling to get match funding from councils. Perhaps the Minister might look at making it a statutory requirement for councils to concentrate on leisure facilities. He might say to councils that cutting sports facilities will increase Government expense in the provision of health care services.

[Justin Tomlinson]

On that point, as I mentioned in my speech, local authorities can look at this as an opportunity. My local authority invested through Invest to Save, paid the money off in 13 months and has been making a profit ever since. Because there is such a chronic shortage, 3G football pitches are potentially very profitable.

[Dr Lee]

My hon. Friend is right. To quote the phrase of “instant gratification” used by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West, the difficulty is that it is all about the instant—it is about how to cut and balance the books. No long-term perspective is taken. The reality is that if I play football for a year, that is not likely to make an impact on my health when I am 70. This has to happen over a number of decades in order to get the return. A longer perspective on the part of councils and Government needs to be taken.

There has been the woeful selling of school fields. I drove past a school near where I live: we have more flats and more houses and fewer school pitches. It is lamentable, particularly in the year of the Olympics and the European football championships and in a country that is passionate about sport. I have stood on football terraces up and down the country. People are passionate about sport, about their club winning—not competing or taking part but winning. I think we can harness that. The best way to do that is to ensure that there are sustainable facilities.

In conclusion, my constituency is a model of how communities can engage in and support sport, financially and through participation. The well-being of the community is much enhanced in the process. Sport and the provision of community sports facilities can lead to better health, behaviour and community spirit.