Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Moynihan and Lord Doyle

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.