Football

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 6:45 pm on 15 December 2004.

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Photo of Lord Moynihan Lord Moynihan Shadow Minister (Sport), Home Affairs 6:45, 15 December 2004

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, on securing the debate. He is a strong supporter of football and has, as many noble Lords said, done a great deal for the advancement of the sport, especially at grass roots level. I echo his comments on many areas, not least on the abhorrent—if occasional—and wholly unacceptable racism in football. Players and the FA are right to take racism seriously. It is utterly unacceptable inside or outside sport.

However, the noble Lord is not alone in this Chamber in his support for football, as we have heard this evening, not least from the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, as president of the Football Foundation. He leads an organisation that contributes so much to sport in this country with great skill and enthusiasm. Additionally, I commend the Football Association for its efforts at the grass roots—be it coaching schemes, sport for disadvantaged children, women's football, as we have just heard, or indeed disability sports initiatives. The FA does that work highly effectively.

I begin with one of those grass roots initiatives. The FA's 3 Lions coaching programme began about two years ago. Its principal aim is to offer children free after-school football coaching in FA-accredited clubs. Clubs are encouraged to forge links with local schools and to connect with schoolchildren. The schemes are administered at local level, and funding is allocated by the FA according to how many school links are formed.

Although still in its infancy, the scheme has already reaped two distinct and important benefits. First, it offers children the kind of structured, enjoyable sport that should be a staple of school life, but is now rare indeed. Secondly, it offers participating football clubs a sustainability of membership that was previously beyond their grasp. Children who go to a club as part of the 3 Lions programme are more likely to become full members in the future.

The scheme is a good one. Investing in local sports clubs and enabling them to provide sport for our children makes sense because sports clubs are where so much genuine enthusiasm for the game lies. That is precisely the reasoning behind our Club2School sports initiative, which we launched last week. Club2School will offer every child two hours of free coaching each week in a local sports club. That will be in addition to the target of two hours physical activity in national curriculum time. Children should be able to choose which sport they play according to local availability and sports clubs, and national governing bodies will receive funding dependent on the number of children that they attract to their sport.

In that context, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, was right to focus on the importance of clubs. In short, we must double the amount of sport available to children without increasing the burden on our overstretched yet enthusiastic and able teachers. Instead, we should shift the responsibility for youth sport provision on to the shoulders of those who are genuinely, actively enthusiastic about their sport in our clubs. It seems eminently sensible that, wherever possible, children should be taught football by a qualified football coach, and our policy has met with widespread approval. It builds on the good practice of the FA's 3 Lions scheme. It builds on the excellent work undertaken by all those involved in coaching programmes in accredited clubs.

In fact, the only party to remain silent on the matter are the Government, until yesterday. After cancelling the announcement on school sport which was planned for last week, the Labour Party unveiled its new school sports policy. The most widespread coverage of this policy was in today's Daily Mail, which said that the policy was just "more of the same":

"It is a re-re-re-announcement; a rehashed, reheated stew of old promises".

The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, was absolutely right about the huge increase in lottery money spent in sport, but let us not forget that, at the Labour Party conference in 2000, the Prime Minister stood up and announced that he would spend £750 million over three years on school sports facilities. My noble friend Lady Morris of Bolton talked of the importance of access to football pitches. That £750 million over three years should have gone towards ensuring that we had good school sports facilities. Sadly, it is now four years after that announcement, and only £40 million of the £750 million has been spent.

What is more, the school sports partnership scheme alone is not the answer. It produces a patchwork quilt of sports provision in which the amount of sport a school offers is usually determined by the head. That can place unwanted and unreasonable burdens on competent, enthusiastic teachers, and it fails to offer many children the sporting chance that is their right. Worse still, it completely fails to make use of the thousands of volunteers in the clubs who are ready and willing to get involved.

The policy will barely scratch the surface of many of the problems that we have talked about this evening in engaging young people in football. However, if we scratch the surface, we soon see that the Chancellor has not completely lost his parsimonious streak. Other proposals announced include a real-terms cut in the funding allocated to both Sport England and UK Sport, through which many of the government policies for the development of English football are funded. This is the first time in history that the budget for the sports councils has in real terms been cut. The right honourable Richard Caborn, the Minister for Sport, has achieved a unique achievement. The 12th Minister for Sport is the only Minister for Sport who has managed actually to reduce, in real terms, the forward budget for the sports councils and decrease the number of people who participate during his term of office.

The Government's own statistics show the seriousness of the problem. Since 1997, participation in sport has gone down. We now have the highest rates of childhood obesity in Europe. I regret to inform the House that more than 5 million of our 8 million children do not even receive two hours of quality physical education a week inside and outside school. It is time for a major shift in sport policy for our schoolchildren. That shift should be to the sports clubs that want to provide sport for young people and need to have people coming through their doors.

As my noble friend Lord Lyell mentioned, football, just like all sports in the United Kingdom, is massively dependent on volunteers. It relies heavily on the outstanding and undervalued contribution of those people who give their time freely to coach, referee and support local clubs. Yet worryingly, the Office for National Statistics estimates that the value of formal volunteer activity on which sport in this country depends has fallen by a staggering 26 per cent in the past eight years. People are giving up volunteering in sport, and the reason most often given by those people is the,

"risk, fear of blame and litigation", the so-called compensation culture. The Government would have us believe that the compensation culture is basically a myth, but that is simply not the case, and changes in policy are needed to prevent the slow death of volunteering in sport. A series of steps needs to be taken in this context. I quote the chief executive of Sport England:

"Take the volunteers out of sport; you take the sport out of England".

They are simply too important to lose.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester began by talking about the international perspective. Internationally, the Government need to do far more to support the football authorities in ensuring that they have influential representation on international bodies. FIFA and UEFA should be high on their list of priorities. In parenthesis, I must say that it is utterly unacceptable that the ICC may leave these shores. The Chancellor has an opportunity to raise our country's level of influence on the world stage of sport tomorrow in answering Treasury Questions on this subject. I for one will be using every opportunity in the passage of the International Organisations Bill, that starts in your Lordships' House tomorrow, to keep the ICC here.

Our use of sport as a tool of international development is minimal. Where we employ it, we use it well. Just look at the excellent work undertaken by Garth Crooks and his colleagues in the Caribbean. Our record to date for bidding for and staging international events is unacceptable. We must place a far higher priority on working with the FA and with all governing bodies to ensure that the international federations that are already here stay and that those seeking to come to these shores receive the necessary support so to do.

I regard this as having been an excellent debate. Politicians are most out of touch with the people whom they represent when they fail to feel and understand the way in which football and sport resonate with the public in all sections of society. Pick up your newspaper. For every page of politics there are five pages dedicated to sport. Tonight, it has been demonstrated that noble Lords in all parts of the House are very much in touch with football and the wider world of sport and feel passionately about it, for sport is nothing if not about ambition, emotion, enjoyment and opportunity.