Public Inquiries

Lord Doyle Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I would be very happy to meet the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about the proposal. I understand her concerns about some of the issues that happened with the infected blood compensation schemes and the support schemes previously, having been briefed on those since I became a Minister in the Cabinet Office. We share the ambition of your Lordships and of the Infected Blood Inquiry that fair compensation is delivered as quickly as possible to every eligible person. That has not always felt as easy when there have been compensation schemes, and we want to actively look at ways we can make that feel more victim-centred rather than too bureaucratic.

[Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, given recent scandals, it is perhaps not surprising that the public regard judge-led statutory public inquiries as the necessary standard. However, this is not always proportionate. Have the Government given consideration to how they can build confidence in other routes for the public, so that people can still get to truth and justice?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We have an inquiry team within the Cabinet Office that has a formal role advising departments and Ministers both on potential new inquiries and terms of reference, and it also gives advice across government on different routes. We are keen to look at what more we can do to advise the public and campaigners of the different options available. I would be happy to update your Lordships’ House at a future date when we have made more progress with this work.

Creative Education Access Bill [HL]

Lord Doyle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 11th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in support of the Bill in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, which would ensure that all our children can benefit from a creative education. The Bill puts a deliberately ambitious proposition before us: that creative education should be an entitlement, not an optional extra, including a minimum expectation for creative learning and stronger partnerships between schools and the creative sector.

It is also a great pleasure to welcome my noble friend Lady Mackenzie of Sherwood to the Front Bench. She brings to the House immense experience from a range of cultural leadership roles, as we have heard, not least from her role in the Cultural Olympiad. We are very lucky to have her. Indeed, having worked with her when we were both special advisers in the Blair Government, I know that I can confidently praise what will be an impressive maiden speech ahead of her actually making it later on in this debate.

We are all here today because of our passion for the arts and the creative industries, and because we know that access to the opportunities that the arts provide is all too often determined by class, geography and money. There are welcome initiatives that are happening today to try to make up for this. James Graham, one of our great playwrights, is doing phenomenal work to try to bring more schoolchildren into theatre productions, and theatres are doing great work; for example, the Royal Shakespeare Company is working with Harriet Walter at the moment to take theatre into schools.

I was lucky to be at a state school at a time when I could benefit from a great arts education, both in core hours and with after-school clubs. Playing the trumpet brought me great joy, even if the same might not have always been true for my audience.

Sadly, under the previous Government, the arts were completely devalued as part of state education. Not only were they excluded from all important performance measures, such as the EBacc and Progress 8 for secondary schools, they were squeezed out of the primary school day. This Labour Government are committed to delivering a curriculum that is rich, broad, inclusive and innovative, with creative subjects studied for both their intrinsic value and their ability to build confidence in essential skills, such as critical thinking, oracy, creative problem-solving and teamwork.

I will give just one example of the benefits. The Cultural Policy Unit, whose work in this area I commend, has written about the “superpower of looking”—that is, getting children to look at paintings and develop their critical thinking skills. At a time when children will increasingly encounter AI-generated images and information, the ability to look closely, interrogate what they see and exercise independent judgment is becoming an increasingly important skill. This shows how creative education is fundamentally civic education. You will find it harder to participate in democratic life and society more widely when you lack the skills that a creative education provides.

To that end, I very much welcome the creation by the Government of the National Centre for Arts and Music Education. It has a mandate to provide national leadership on arts education, a new continuing professional development offer for teachers, and better co-ordination between schools and cultural organisations, promoting routes into creative careers, and taking over oversight of music hubs from 2027. The centre was due to start this month, as already been mentioned in the debate. Can my noble friend the Minister update the House on how this is progressing, who the delivery partner is and when we will be able to see a detailed plan on what it will deliver and when; for example, on the core priorities of creating necessary partnerships between schools and cultural organisations, identifying areas with poor arts provision and preparing schools for the revised curriculum? Concern has been expressed about whether this will genuinely be an arts and music education centre that gives proper weight to drama, dance, art and design alongside music, rather than being led predominantly by its role in overseeing music hubs.

It would be wonderful to think that we do not need to legislate to ensure the level of arts and creative provision we want to see for our children. I look forward to my noble friend the Minister being able to reaffirm the Government’s commitment in that regard. I do not doubt that we have a Prime Minister and a Government who are champions of the creative industries. I hope my noble friend will understand that any anxiety that is being expressed, across the whole House, is because we want to pin down how the honourable intentions are being translated into practice, and that is motivated only by our ambition for our children and our creative industries. I look forward to supporting my noble friend the Minister to deliver on this vital work.

Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Doyle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to build on what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said in one specific regard. He is obviously right in what he says about London 2012, but I want to reflect that there was an initiative that attempted to deal with this—which I know very well because I worked for it at the time—called Join In Local Sport. Indeed, Members of this House kindly got involved in events that we held.

I shall focus on what we knew was a core challenge. The noble Lord, Lord Coe, spoke to us about this at the start of our initiative: after the 1984 Olympics, on going back to his sports club, he saw that there were queues of young people there who suddenly wanted to participate, but the key resource that they were missing was volunteers. We do not speak enough about the role of volunteers or the barriers that there are for people who want to be coaches and to support teams. Parents often get involved when it is their own child who wants to participate, but we need to keep them around and supported as volunteers for longer. As we look at participation in sport, I urge the Government to make sure that one of our key focuses is the pathways, incentives and encouragement that we can give to get more people to feel valued as volunteers within sport.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure the Government are going to accept these amendments as drafted, although I very much hope they will. For the record, it was the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, who chaired the parliamentary Select Committee that looked at the sports legacy from London 2012. We suggested in an earlier amendment that there should be frequent reviews—maybe after one year, after five years and after 10 years—of the sports legacy, the urban regeneration legacy and the social legacy of the significant investment that is put behind major sports events that are covered by the Bill.

It is wise and helpful to end my few remarks by saying that I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Doyle. We lost the opportunity after London 2012 to continue to encourage the many outstanding and wonderful volunteers who made the Games. It was the volunteers who made the Games, and they could so easily have been captivated by the atmosphere of a great sporting legacy and gone down to their clubs or initiatives such as the noble Lord’s excellent initiative and continued to be involved, but we lost those people.

I shall quote from the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, when we reported to the House on the sadness that the sports legacy had really not been delivered while so many other legacies had. The regeneration of the East End of London was outstanding, for example, and the Games themselves were historically wonderful in everyone’s memory, particularly the Paralympic Games, as well as the Olympic Games—they matched each other. This is what he said:

“How is it possible that the UK is world-leading in elite and professional sports, that 3 billion people across the world watch our Premier League matches in over 187 different countries and that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has consistently said, at Olympics after Olympics we are near the top of the league in terms of our elite activities, yet for decades we have failed at grass-roots level to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to be more active, despite all the investment that successive Governments have made?”

The point that he was really emphasising was that this was successive Governments; it was not a party-political point. He concluded:

“With one-third of the adult population at the moment getting less than 150 minutes of moderate activity each week; with schoolchildren doing consistently less activity both at school and at home; with PE marginalised in the school curriculum and no longer inspected by Ofsted while, as we heard in our evidence, many primary school teachers get less than three hours’ training in a three-year degree course, which is shameful, so physical literacy in most of our primary schools means nothing, frankly, because it does not appear on the league tables; with access to facilities ever more difficult; with local authorities closing swimming pools and leisure centres to save resources; and with transport non-existent for large parts of the day for large swathes of the community, we have become one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the … world. Those sections of the population with the poorest diets and the worst levels of deprivation are, not surprisingly, the least active, too, and of course the pandemic has disproportionately affected all the target groups”.—[Official Report, 4/2/22; col. 1208.]


That is the concern that many people on all sides of this Committee feel has been underestimated by successive Governments, and it is why the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has brought forward his amendment. The spirit of his amendment, and what he intends to do to remind us of these important facts, are vital. I welcome his work in that context. I hope the Minister is in a position to respond positively.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Yes, I am moving Amendment 83 and speaking to Amendment 86 from my noble friend Lady Sater.

As I was saying, there is real concern about the impact of the CQC regulations on these grass-roots sports. If my noble friend Lady Sater was here, she would freely admit that this has been somewhat shoehorned into this debate, but I know that the Minister will understand that, as she participated in the debate on the secondary legislation from the Department of Health and Social Care. There is a real concern that, if volunteers have to spend all this money, they simply will not turn up to events. They will not do them, and that will mean that we will lose a lot of youth football events, rugby tournaments, point-to-point racing and athletics. You name it—we will probably lose it in all this.

We have talked many times about the importance of creating a sporting legacy; that means making sure that these grass-roots events can run. That is why this amendment would require that, within one month of the Bill’s passage, the Secretary of State makes a statement on the impact of these proposals. Clearly, we are not expecting the Secretary of State to do this. This is a probing amendment, but one very much designed to keep this at the top of the agenda. Again, I know that the Minister absolutely understands that, because she participated in the earlier debate, but I am afraid that we—I am looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson—have been fairly disappointed about the CQC’s response to date, and I know that that is true of many of the sports organisations. This amendment is therefore designed to make sure that this is kept at the top of the agenda, because, if you speak to lots of sporting bodies, there is a concern that we are going to lose a lot of grass-roots events through the CQC’s actions.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. While I have not been able to speak to the amendments from my noble friends Lord Young and Lady Davies, and while they are not able to do so either, I am sure that they will be grateful if the Minister could include those amendments in her reply.

[Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 83. I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Markham, is not responsible for its content, but since he moved it, I feel obliged to put my objections to it, in the debate that we are having on this group, on record. I object not just to the specifics; this amendment goes against a core value of sport and the sporting events that we have been discussing very positively over the last couple of days of Committee: the power of sport to bring people together. It cannot be right, therefore, that the language of Amendment 83 states that it is only concerned with insults and abuse that “incite violence or disorder”. Surely that is not the bar that we want to set or the culture that we want sport to promote. After all, in recent years we have seen significant progress on the status of, and pay in, both women’s and disability sport. We have seen initiatives such as Kick It Out in football do great work to tackle discrimination in all forms. We now have a situation where there are more than 50 LGBT supporters’ groups within football through the Pride in Football network.

I mention football because, as in all sports, there is much more to do. However, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—I am sorry that he is not here to hear me say this—quoted some homophobic language on Second Reading that he thought we should all be relaxed about and not be concerned by, in the way that authorities are, or the way in which banning orders are a necessary tool within sport.

I simply urge the noble Lord to reflect on the real-world impact of chants from the stands or language down the pub. Why is it that in football, which was the example he cited, in the men’s game we have no out gay players and yet in the women’s game we do? Hosting events surely is about coming together, showcasing not just the best of sport but the best of us as a country, where nobody is intimidated out of taking part and all our citizens can enjoy watching it.