Sport in the UK

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

In the spirit of the sporting values of keeping to time, being efficient and delivering on goals, I will try to keep to my five minutes. It was originally going to be a 10-minute oration, of which I was terribly proud, as the new chairman of the all-party group on sport, but that has now obviously bitten the dust.

We are a great sporting nation. We all remember the super Saturday of the 2012 Olympics and Archie Gemmill versus Holland in 1978. I was fortunate enough to be at the World cup semi-final last year. It is obvious that we are sports mad. Some 27 million of us do more than two and a half hours of sport a week. For the nation, sport probably ranks as the No. 1 pastime, I suppose, outside of work and bringing up children, and it has always troubled me somewhat that sport has not played a greater part in Government policy.

When I had the pleasure of being a Minister, for those two glorious years at the Ministry of Justice, I embarked straight away on trying to introduce sport into the criminal justice system as much as possible. To say that when I suggested this I encountered some resistance—a degree of inertia at the Ministry of Justice—would be an understatement. It took me six months to convene my first meeting on sport and its value in the criminal justice system. What was fantastic about that meeting, when it actually took place, were the people who attended—people who were already deploying sport effectively in the criminal justice system. They were trying to help often vulnerable adults and young people to turn their lives around.

There were such inspiring characters at that first meeting, including David Dein, who used to be a director at Arsenal and who, along with Jason Swettenham from Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, is embarked on a project twinning professional football clubs up and down the country with prisons. There was also John McAvoy, an infamous armed robber from an armed-robbing family, who discovered while he was a prisoner that he was an outstanding indoor rower, set a load of world records and is now a Nike-sponsored endurance athlete; and Jane Ashworth at StreetGames, which works in the community to try to dissuade people from committing crime in the first place. These people were putting into practice, via their own hard work, charity and so on, something that I think the Government should have been doing for a long time.

Off the back of that first meeting, we had a second, and I managed to eke together the massive sum of £70,000 to commission a report on the value of sport in the criminal justice system. That report, by Rosie Meek from Royal Holloway College, is worth a read. Anybody who is interested in the value of sport and the impact it can have should read it. It is particularly interesting on the impact of contact sports such as rugby, including the work of Saracens at Feltham, and boxing. Unfortunately, the Government, and No. 10 in particular, took a rather odd view of the introduction of controlled boxing into controlled circumstances. That view was not backed by any evidence whatsoever, but was driven by the fear of silly headlines in tabloid newspapers.

Boxing in the community—Fight for Peace is a particular example of a charity—is undeniably doing remarkable work in trying to dissuade young people from participating in a life of crime. Anthony Joshua, a classic example of someone who was on remand, turned his life around through boxing. The list of examples of where sport has changed people’s lives is long and continues to grow. If we can bring about a change in our prisons whereby sport plays a significant part in a typical prisoner’s life, we would be doing something remarkable. If we could take prisoners out of the environment in which they find themselves—often locked up, drugged up and so on—and put them into a sporting environment, I am utterly convinced that we could address the rather woeful reoffending levels that we have in the adult male estate, and particularly in the youth estate.

In summary, I am a passionate sports fan. I was alright at sport as well once upon a time. It has made a huge impact on my life, and I just wish that we could use the sporting values of fair play, participation, resilience, hard work and the pursuit of excellence in every aspect of Government policy—in healthcare and education—but I feel particularly passionate about changing the lives of offenders and giving them a second chance.