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

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow my noble friend Lord Effingham in his maiden speech. It was an absolute model of its kind, and I think we were all very impressed by the way he put it. His commitment to supporting the lives of veterans is something I think we would all want to endorse. His speech was a masterclass in making the case for sports. I particularly enjoyed his reference to his forebear, William Howard, who was a Lord Chamberlain, a Lord Admiral, a diplomat and all-round British superhero, and who served Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth. You will remember that he was elevated to the peerage for taking on Wyatt’s rebellion at Ludgate in the City of London and turning around the rebel crowd. So when crowds next come braying at the gates of Parliament, we will know who to turn to when we want to send someone out to negotiate.

My noble friend Lord Moynihan is absolutely right, and I violently agree with him, that the question of sport in this country is 100% a health question. We are in desperate trouble in this country: our health outcomes have fallen back very severely. As a former Health Minister who was on the front line of the pandemic, I felt that very severely. It is absolutely right that this report puts health in the centre. In fact, I would be more ambitious than the report has spelled out; the ambition should be for Britain to become the healthiest country in the developed world. The failure to engage in that kind of mission, the failure to lift our eyes and truly believe with confidence that we can turn around the problems of the past few years and make Britain healthier, is at the root of failure to address illness. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, put it extremely well: we have to stop people falling ill, or we will have an NHS cost that explodes, a workforce that is unable to work and an economy that cannot pay for schools, pensions and illness.

However, we are going backwards at the moment, not forwards. The noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, put it extremely well: activity among young people aged 16 to 34 dropped from 72% to 66% from 2015 to 2022. That is a terrible statistic and a shocking state of affairs, so we have some really hard questions to ask.

I am afraid that I do not agree that we should somehow dump the responsibility for sport on the Department of Health and Social Care. Having been in that department, I can tell noble Lords that there is quite a lot going on already—it is pretty swamped trying to tackle waiting lists, build hospitals, sort out our catastrophic care service and prevent illness. I do not think that scapegoating the department by dumping the responsibility for sport on it is the silver bullet that anyone would hope for. I know that that is not exactly what my noble friend Lord Moynihan has in mind; I would just like to flag it to add a sense of proportion.

Responsibility for the health of the nation, and therefore for sport, needs to be spread much more broadly, rather than simply scapegoating the NHS or the Department of Health and Social Care. We need houses that have green spaces and access to sports facilities—access is very important. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out, schools are absolutely central to solving health and sport issues. We have sold off far too many sports grounds; sport is not taught properly and the risk-averse nature of the sports culture in schools means that not enough kids are doing it. The list is quite long, but it is critical that we sort it out.

In practical terms, I find the state of the swimming pool estate heartbreaking. I am utterly obsessed by swimming at the moment—I can tell noble Lords another time about my adventures in the outdoor and wild swimming game. Nearly half of our swimming pool estate is under threat of closure at the moment. Something needs to be done. The Government may be cash-strapped and their credit card may be maxed out, but, as my noble friend Lord Holmes said, it would be heartbreaking if more than half of kids in the next generation did not learn to swim, which is where we are heading at the moment.

The problem is not central control of sport; it is more about local authorities. I will not go through it in depth, but my experience as a Health Minister taught me that there has been a great hollowing out of the resources of local authorities, which is seen severely in the area of sport. There is not enough access or encouragement and the culture in many of our communities is simply not supported by the necessary resources to do it.

On big sporting events, I will throw in a note of challenge as a bit of a sceptic. I apologise to the amazing Olympians in our presence but, in terms of delivering actual activity, our big events have simply not encouraged our population to engage in sport. That is a big failure.

We need our sports clubs—we have fantastic football and rugby clubs—to do more than they do at the moment, and we need our employers to put sport at the centre of the workplace experience. We have 20 pubs, clubs and restaurants in this building and one very poky gym—I do not know whether anyone here has been to it, but it is not as good as many of the pubs and clubs. That culture really needs to change.

To conclude, the project of getting Britain healthier could not be more important. The role of sport is central to that. We need to change the environment in which people live and give them agency and the ability to address their behaviours. Sport is the one thing you can take on yourself that will really improve your health outcomes. That is why we need to support people to do sport: it will give them the opportunity to turn around their health outcomes. It is also why I would like to see this much more widely distributed across the responsibilities of government.