Sport, Health and Well-being National Plan (NPSRC Report)

Baroness Uddin Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is an absolute privilege to follow noble Lords on the committee who are our national heroes. The report is a powerful testimonial to the urgency of action needed for healthy communities and a healthy nation. The importance of sports and recreation to the well-being of young lives, with many people coping with multiple pressures resulting in mental health distress at a time of the cost of living emergency, cannot be oversimplified.

I wish to speak about the involvement of girls in sport. Although I am not a girl anymore, I grew up without any barriers to playing cricket, cycling, climbing trees, playing badminton, playing football or swimming. When I arrived in London, the only sporting field was our four walls, as it is for many children in this country. School was absolutely liberating and, after a little tough negotiation, I was allowed to wear trousers and play tennis and badminton briefly for my school team. It all seems so long ago.

School is the critical playground for encouraging girls to participate in sports. Muslim women and girls are playing football and cricket and participating in archery in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Egypt. Even in Saudi Arabia, women’s teams are making great strides in the international sporting arena. Therefore, I challenge the decades-old excuse that it is cultural barriers that prevent certain sections of our female population taking part in sporting activities. Certainly, this should not be the case at primary and secondary level.

From what I see, community activities and school sports and recreation are dominated by programmes for boys and young men, and, even within that setting, young men and boys of Bangladeshi heritage have not broken through the barrier to professional football or cricket, bar one or two players.

In my area, many council-run sports centres, where girls appear to be absolutely absent, have rundown facilities due to lack of funds. Inertia has set in; girls will not play, so why bother? Community buildings once used for youth and community services, with hubs for girls, have shut or been sold without adequate scrutiny or any impact assessment of the loss of services to the community, as my noble friend Lady Morris mentioned. There are also significant numbers of private clubs in all localities of an excellent standard and with excellent facilities, and I would like to see how they can be encouraged to do more to engage the communities they operate in. The report also highlights the profound impact of discrimination as a barrier to wider participation and engagement, no doubt compounded by years of chronic national and local underfunding of sports and recreation services.

A decade on from the fanfare of the national pride in our Olympic Games, my observation—I dissent from my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson here—is that the fundamental delivery promise of community empowerment has not taken place. The Olympic legacy promise was that it would revolutionise and reinvigorate communities and develop sustainable community sports and recreation facilities in all five boroughs, if not impact sports nationwide. Does the Minister agree that we have failed to honour that promise?

For a decade, young families put up with the health consequences of building the village, and frail children paid a heavy price with poor health and heightened childhood asthma and eczema. The Olympic promise was better housing, a family environment, and opportunities for sport and recreation facilities, but the outcome was inevitable, given that those involved in the design and implementation had little interest or stake in the local communities, and credible community experts were absent as decision-makers in the legacy delivery team.

A reflective workforce must include management at all levels. I am pleased to see that that is mentioned in the report. Will the Minister say whether there has been an analysis of the impact of the Olympic legacy on sports provision for all the boroughs surrounding the Olympic village? Is consideration given to why provision in these areas remains so poor?

I was recently informed that one of the legacies of the World Cup in Qatar is that a stadium has been designated to develop women’s sports and that it is led by a Minister for Women’s Sports Development. I do not know whether I have a created a rod for my own back by saying that, but the framework suggested on page 26 of the report would be extremely impactful, so long as it is inclusive and diverse throughout the structure.

The report is timely and thoughtful, and I am pleased to see references to safeguarding, given the current attention to online safety. An overwhelming impact of Covid isolation and lockdown was increased reliance on technology as the main source of recreation, and it is likely to become more prevalent and addictive as the new generation of games, virtual reality and augmented reality immerse us in the metaverse and Web3 transitional space. The Government should heed the recommendations in the report and take action and, as well as being answerable for delivery, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, said, be a catalyst for a national transformation.