Sports Funding (Rural Communities)

Part of Petitions – in the House of Commons at 8:32 pm on 4 December 2013.

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Photo of Steve Barclay Steve Barclay Conservative, North East Cambridgeshire 8:32, 4 December 2013

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, which reflects the complexity of the different bodies and the role of the Department in drawing this matter together and producing data that he and I can use to scrutinise how effective the taxpayer pound is in getting to the front line. He is right to draw attention to the isolation in rural communities where there are not the same options as in the cities. That is why it is important that we do not miss out across the 46 different governing bodies.

I also want highlight the lack of accountability around how awards are allocated. There is a real irony here. If we look at elite sport—at British cycling for example—we see the power and accuracy of real-time data. Those data enable us to understand what is happening across the full activity, and yet for the Department and the national governing bodies, it is unclear how that is being demonstrated to Members of Parliament so that we can accurately see whether the £120,000 we are getting, which is a fifth of what Cambridge gets—and Cambridge is just down the road—is actually the right level. The Minister’s assistance on that point would be appreciated.

I want to bring my argument to life with a few local examples. Let me take the complexity of the various bodies. Wisbech tennis club in my constituency currently has 130 members, which is a 14% increase on last year, and yet it has only grass courts and no lights. The club is very restricted as to when it can play, in terms both of times of year and times of day. If it rains, play must be suspended. The Lawn Tennis Association advised the club in 2012 that its bid for two courts and lights was too modest, and that to win LTA support it had to put in a bid for four courts. Sport England then changed the funding of the LTA, which led the LTA to withdraw its support. It was a classic example of two sporting bodies giving conflicting advice, which meant that the bid failed.

The club then put in a second bid. It still followed the LTA’s advice of four courts, but took out the lights. Sport England turned it down. This was logical to a certain extent, because without lights the club could not get the same numbers of people playing. The club was therefore penalised a second time for following a national governing body’s advice on securing funding from another body, Sport England, which strikes me as a pretty illogical process.

A third bid is now proposed for next week. The club has already spent £8,000 to £9,000 on planning and other things to get to exactly where it was at the very start, which is a bid for two courts with lights. This is a sport in a growing market town with massive levels of immigration from eastern Europe. Tennis helps to bring people together in the way that sport does at its best.

Let us look now at communication. Coates football has teams of all ages and 11 acres of playing fields, but no changing facilities. I welcome the fact that Sport England confirmed funding for the club, which coincidentally came through last week, but unless the funding comes from the other bodies, there will be insufficient money to deliver the facilities. Again, we need the different bodies to work together.

The third issue is the challenge to national governing bodies. On Friday, I will have the privilege of attending March amateur boxing in the Braza club. Some 40 kids train at the club three or more nights a week, yet the club has never had a penny of grant from the Amateur Boxing Association, which is given £4.8 million by Sport England. As taxpayers, we hand over £5.8 million to boxing, yet only £1 million of that goes to the clubs directly. The question is: where is the rest going? The chief executive of the body is on a six-figure salary, yet the volunteers at March boxing have to pay a fee to the ABA. The Government are quite rightly allocating significant funds to the boxing body, but the kids who are training in the club and not causing trouble and the volunteers are not getting the support that they need.

The Rugby Football Union has done many good things. It has been involved in some good schemes with Thomas Clarkson in my constituency, but if we look at the data, we see that 0.74% of its annual funding goes to the eastern counties of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, yet we form 4.5% of the population. How am I, as a Member of Parliament, supposed to assess whether that is the right level? What is the role of the Department in assisting me in doing so?

I welcome the allocation of funds from the Minister. I know that she is passionate about sport, and indeed Mr Sutcliffe was widely respected across the House as a Sports Minister who was passionate about getting money to the community groups, but there is an alphabet soup of bodies and there is complexity. Complexity always drives up costs. We are talking about volunteers in our community groups doing what we all want them to, yet the system is not getting the money to them in communities such as mine. I hope that the Minister will agree to meet me to discuss the bids coming in next week from Wisbech tennis club, Coates and March boxing club so that we can deliver on our shared objective of getting more people playing sport in rural communities such as north-east Cambridgeshire.