Lord Addington (LD)

My Lords, I feel rather sorry for the Minister, because this amendment is once again going back to lessons learned from previous sporting events, particularly from the London Olympics. Although it was a success in many ways, one thing it did not do was encourage more people to play sport. This is universally accepted. When the committee on which I served, as did the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan —he might have led it, I cannot remember: it is a long time ago now—looked at this to find out what happened, the idea that it is just a straightforward inspiration for sport does not work. You have to do a bit more to encourage people to play sport. There are good examples in world championships for rugby union and netball: there is argument about who devised the model first. You have a great spike in interest, but you must prepare the grass-roots clubs for people turning up who have not played. This is one of the cases when I found out just how old I am. Advertising for the Rugby World Cup totally missed me, because it was aimed at those aged 18 to 25. It was encouraging those with recent skills to get back to being involved in the game. But you had to make sure the clubs were ready for them. You have to have the grass roots ready to receive and you have to help them to do it. Big gestures from the boys at the top do not help with participation unless you have somewhere coming through where you can do it. As has been said, these are probing amendments, but the Government need ideas. What are we actually going to do? We have this big sporting event, and we can use the models that the sports themselves have devised and take them further. That might help. I am not saying how it should be done—it may be greater capacity for playing facilities, training or coaching—but we have to make sure that we get people playing the sports. That is what this is about. This is an accepted failure from something which, other than that, was a success. We just did not do that one thing. There is no point in someone watching something happen on television and saying, “Isn’t it marvellous?”, if we do not find out whether we have the capacity to do it, or even to start that process. We have to get them out and playing. That is what I would like, and it is what I am trying to get at: what is the Government’s thinking about getting a proper sporting legacy at grass-roots level that will give us the capacity to start finding champions? Unless we go down the route of testing everyone at the age of 14 to see who our champions are and saying, “The rest of you, just sit down and watch. There’s a box here. You press a button and watch other people”, because that is not what it is about, or it should not be. Amendments 74 and 75 merely follow on from the spirit of Amendment 69. Can the Government tell us their thinking about encouraging people to correct the one big failure of something that has changed our whole debate about this issue—that is, the Olympics—by getting people playing sport? I beg to move. Amendment 70 (to Amendment 69)