Speech by Richard Caborn - the longest serving continuous Sports Minister
5 February 2007
The Minister gave his thanks to David Collier for chairing the lecture. Mike Lee and the sportsthinktank.com for hosting the event and Denis Howell who set the precedent for what a sports Minister could achieve.
He also set out how he came to be offered the job and some anecdotes about his appointment.
Power of sport
On a more serious note, the phrase “the power of sport” will have been heard many times by the people in this room.
Not least from me and my colleague Tessa. In fact, there is a danger that in hearing it so much we forget what it really means.
Well one person that will never forget its meaning is David Lacey.
David used to sell cars and DJ part time in Newcastle. Then he started using drugs. He spent eight years as a heroin addict trying, and failing, to kick the habit.
On his last release from prison he enrolled in a rehabilitation project based on a football coaching scheme run by Sports Universities North East England.
He entered a tournament and played on the winning side. Within six weeks he'd kicked the habit and gone on to win a football tournament.
So, rather starting another stretch in prison, I can say now, he started a new job. One man, one life, fundamentally changed for the better thanks to sport.
This is not just a one off or something new. Sport has always been about more than just competition on the field of play.
We all remember what happened on December 25 1914, hundreds of men who had spent the year trying to kill each other suddenly stopped. And what did they do? They played the beautiful game of football.
Fast forward into the 21st century, the recent Asian Games produced one of the most remarkable situations in Iraq, where the nation came together momentarily to support the Iraqi football team in their pursuit of sporting excellence.
Even in politics, a few weeks before the last General Election, when the IOC Evaluation Team were assessing the progress of our Bid, and I would like to digress for a minute as IOC Vice-President Sam RamSammy, a dear friend of mine from South Afrcia is in the audience; Sam is a great friend of London and I would like to say thank you Sam for everything you did to support London 2012.
As I was saying I was sat in the Cabinet Room, alongside Tony Blair, Michael Howard, Charles Kennedy, Tessa Jowell and Ken Livingstone.
I reflected at the time ‘what else could bring all those leaders together before a general election? I hasten to add that hostilities broke out 10 minutes after the close of the meeting. But juts for that moment in time sport united all sides of the political divide.
But of all the words said on this subject, no one said it better than my and Sam’s friend and international statesman Nelson Mandela.
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“Sport has the power to change the world, the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else can.
“It speaks to people in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where there was once only despair.
“It is an instrument for peace, even more powerful than governments.
“It breaks down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all kinds of discrimination.
“The heroes sport creates are examples of this power. They are valiant, not only on the playing field but also in the community, spreading hope and inspiration to the world.”
Why we need a Sports Minister
It is for these reasons government has to harness this unique power. This is why we have a sports minister.
It my view the role can be summed up very simply; to be sports biggest advocate, but also it’s most critical friend.
Just one small but important example of these two core responsibilities came in 2005 when Cambridge United FC nearly went out of business.
A small club, but very important to their local community, they had become stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, unable to comply with both tax rules and league rules that gave priority treatment to football creditors.
I was asked to help and managed to broker a deal between the club and the Inland Revenue. This meant taking it to government and making the case to Treasury to give Cambridge some leeway.
The sports minister is in a unique position to fulfil this role. So, in the interests of the club, fans and very importantly the community it served, I did.
But at the same time, it was my responsibility to send a very clear message to the football league: the rules that had put Cambridge in that position simply had to change.
A sports minister can have an impact in many ways, not just through providing direction and sufficient funding, but also on how sport is perceived within Government.
Supporting sport for sport’s sake is a worthy end in itself – and one we sometimes forget – but sport can also be a powerful medium for delivering on a whole range of issues facing the country – from public health to crime prevention – which I will talk more about later.
It is sometimes said that sport should have a voice in Cabinet. It does: her name is Tessa Jowell.
But I do not subscribe to the view that sport needs a voice all to itself.
In fact I believe sports bargaining hand in Cabinet is strengthened by the fact that the Secretary of State representing sport has a wider portfolio of interests behind them.
Nevertheless I believe it was encouraging sign of Tony Blair’s commitment to sport that when I was given the job it was as a Minister of State and Privy Councillor, not a Parliamentary Under Secretary as most previous Ministers had been.
This helps give the post holder what you need; a Minister that has authority, commands respect and has a clear vision of what can be achieved.
My personal belief is that the Sports Minister’s position could be strengthened if they were to chair a Cabinet committee for Sport.
This would mean ministerial colleagues were constantly engaged in ensuring sport was actually delivering on their agendas.
Of course what a sports minister does with this authority and respect is even more important.
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My vision
Coming into the job, I drew from the experiences of a number of countries I had visited.
Three in particular came to mind as they all had one common theme.
The first was in Finland. Way back in the 1970s its Government realised that it had a major health time bomb on its hands.
It had the worst coronary heart disease rate in the world.
They took the decision to use sport and physical activity to address these issues.
Heart attack rates in Finland are now half of those in England.
The second was in France and in the early 1980s when the then President, Francois Mitterrand wanted a solution to address some of the major problems in the inner city areas, like Marseilles.
He used sport, particularly football, to tackle these issues. One of the best and most famous footballers in the world, Zidane, said that had it not been for that development, for that act of social inclusion, he would not have turned into one of the games greatest talents and a superstar.
Thirdly, it may be difficult to believe but in the Montreal Olympics Australia finished lower in the medal table in the Olympics than New Zealand. The nation was in near mourning.
So the Government decided to invest very heavily in the Australian Institute of Sport.
The transformation in Australian sporting fortune since speaks for itself – just ask David Collier.
The common theme that tied these three independent actions together was that government, or more precisely, a political decision, had fundamentally driven the change.
And in doing so it had empowered sport to be that agent for change.
But what also struck me was that no country had succeeded at putting those three disciplines together. Indeed looking back, Governments of all persuasion have tended to focus on one or perhaps two of those disciplines, but certainly not all.
My vision was clear then: we needed to create a system capable of delivering on participation, elite success and using sport for social change.
Within this we needed to:
• First of all, ensure PE and school sport was placed at the heart of school life and that this school sport was actually competitive – yes, we needed to bring competition back into schools;
• tackle the ‘post-16 drop off’, where levels of sports participation plummet as children become adults;
• ensure people had good quality facilities to play sport in and train for top level competition;
• ensure we had good people to work in these environments, in particular coaches;
• drive up participation in sport amongst priority groups, especially disability groups;
• create a clear pathway, from playground to the podium, for our elite athletes;
To achieve all this we needed to look at the organisation of sport. This included my department, where I insisted we put in a dedicated Director of Sport for the first time.
We also needed to look at the organisations funded directly by my Department and at the governing bodies, some of which had not quite entered the 20th century, let alone the 21st century.
We would have to dismantle the command and control mentality, so that change could be delivered regionally.
My experience with the Regional Development Agencies in the late 90s taught me that local problems needed local solutions. I was convinced the same principles applied to sport.
When I set up the RDAs, we brought together four cultures – private, public, academic and civil – to drive change leading to wealth creation in the regions, measured by GDP per capita.
I wanted to see a similar bringing together of different cultures in sport at the regional level, with increases in participation being the central driver.
Early days
The first changes involved getting our own house in order. This was reflected by the first difficult decision I needed to make; change at the top of the key delivery body, Sport England.
In excess of a £¼ billion of Lottery and Exchequer money was being distributed through Sport England.
What astonished me was that this money went through over fifty different funding streams - with very little evidence of impact. Despite an investment of about £2 billion in sports facilities from 1992, there was no increase in participation.
There was also a massive bureaucracy at the centre with a hopelessly underused and under-utilised regional structure which had very little authority and influence. New leadership was needed – and it was needed right away.
I then looked at sport and its governance and asked if it was “fit for purpose” in the other areas. The answer was a very clear ‘no’.
That prompted “Game Plan” the Government’s strategy for sport, which was published in December 2002. This document aimed to refine the Government’s objectives for sport and physical activity, and to identify ways of improving the delivery of Government support.
Game Plan in itself was a useful document, but it only gave part of the answer. Whilst a useful starting point, more work had to be done.
It also meant change, starting with areas where the Government has a direct influence – school sport, community sport through the work of Sport England and elite development through UK Sport, Sports Coach UK and the English Institute for Sport.
All of these bodies needed reform. Sometimes it meant a change of leadership, other times restructuring. There was, as the adage goes, no gain without pain.
The bottom line is that they are, and had to be, very different bodies now than they were five years ago.
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Getting sport to speak with one voice
But I think both Tessa and I agree that the most disappointing thing we inherited back in June 2001 was the infighting taking place across the sporting landscape.
I cannot be overestimatedhow corrosive this was. Sports fighting each other; no confidence between the governing bodies and Government; a poor relationship between UK Sport and Sport England.
Oh, and both of them arguing with my Department.
To say it was fractutious would be diplomatic. The truth is it resembled a school playground at times.
Perhaps what underlined that were the three projects that had, shall we say, gone slightly off the rails – Picketts Lock, Wembley and the Commonwealth Games.
Everybody involved had made mistakes in handling these; I don’t apportion blame. The challenge was not to compound those errors. It meant taking responsibility and hard decisions, something I think nobody could accuse Tessa Jowell or I have of shirking from.
Crucially a greater good came out of these costly errors. Lessons were learnt that were essential in winning the right to host a far bigger prize - the Olympics in 2012.
This would not have been possible unless the whole of sport and government had put their support behind the bid.
And of course Pickett’s Lock is now open and is an outstanding indoor and outdoor training venue.
And, without wishing to tempt providence, I’m hoping the FA will be announcing in the next few weeks that this year’s FA Cup Final will definitely be at Wembley. Yes, this year. And I would like to say that I am sure those who have visited Wembley and those of you who will in the coming weeks and months will agree with me that it’s a fantastic stadium, and will be considered one of the best in the world.
School sport
So what have we achieved?
Whether they are fond reflections of great victories or just praying that long cold cross country run would end, everyone in this room will have their own memory of school sport.
I’m sure some also still believe that it was better and more competitive back then.
Not so long ago this was probable true. But not now.
We have made school sport a key priority and we have delivered a massive change. The National School Sport Strategy went live on 1 April 2003. The target was to get more kids doing more high quality sport.
We had a long way to go – in 2001 under 2 million children did 2 hours PE a week.
Last year that figure reached 5 million.
That’s 6 million more hours a week. 6 million more hours a week of sport and physical activity in our schools, up and down the country.
I don’t believe any nation on earth have ever achieved such a shift in the physical activity levels of children.
It’s not just quantity. Competition is at the heart of it. 97% of schools now hold a sports day and 37% of pupils take part in inter-school sport.
All maintained schools in England are in one of the 450 live school sport partnerships. With over 3200 secondary co-ordinators and more than18,495 primary/special link teachers.
Medium term – by 2010 – the ambition is to offer all children at least 4 hours of sport a week.
These statistics haven’t always made the headlines of today, but the headlines of years to come will have been forged from these achievements.
At this point I have to give thanks in particular to the Youth Sport Trust and Sue Campbell and Steve Grainger who have drawn up and delivered this.
I would also like to put on record my thanks to Estelle Morris, who deserves a special mention. It was Estelle who, as Education Secretary, gave the school sport programme the firm foundation of Exchequer funding.
Indeed all Education ministers deserve credit for keeping this high up the agenda. Long may it remain so.
Coaching
Good quality sports facilities are the foundation on which any sporting infrastructure must be built. But good facilities alone are like a Formula 1 car without a driver.
Every successful athlete I meet puts coaching at the top of their agenda.
But I have a more ambitious vision for coaches in this country. They can do a lot more than just facilitate success on the pitch.
I want coaching to become a properly respected profession, integral to delivery across health, education and social inclusion agendas.
That’s why we have invested so much time and money into developing coaching here. When I came in we quickly established the Coaching Taskforce in 2001 and accepted all the recommendations.
We are now spending nearly £60 million between 2004 & 2008 on:
the creation of over 3,000 full and part-time Community Sports Coach (CSC) posts in England;
implementing a 5-level UK Coaching Certificate, which all Governing Bodies have bought into;
and;
the establishment of a network of Coach Development Officers, providing support and Continuing Professional Development to coaches.
Sports Coach UK have spent the majority of 2006 developing a UK Action Plan for coaching and this will deliver the Government’s objective of becoming the best coaching nation in the world by 2016.
Landscape changes
Last year we took a major step in reforming the sporting landscape.
The aim was to streamline the way sport is organised, clarify the responsibilities of sporting bodies and greatly improve the chances of Britain’s medal hopefuls for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Despite earlier changes, Sport England was still not delivering what we expected and needed.
Though the earlier reforms had reduced the size of the centre, but it still loomed too large over the delivery on the ground through the Regional Sports Boards.
And while the regions had been given greater autonomy, they had not been given a clear direction.
So while regions focused primarily on sport others saw driving up physical activity as their main objective. Using funds earmarked for sport to do this was not acceptable and indeed in my view had to change.
The decision last April gave Sport England a much sharper focus on increasing participation in community sport through its Regional Sports Boards.
It also gave UK Sport a clear remit for delivering success in high performance sport and developing elite athletes from the playground to the podium.
This meant responsibility for the World Class Potential Programmes for Olympic and Paralympic sports, the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme and the funding and directing of the work of the English Institute of Sport, all transferred across from Sport England to UK Sport.
This may have taken longer than we had hoped, but I am confident we now have both the leadership and the locally focussed structure to make a real difference.
National Governing Bodies
While putting our own house in order we also turned to another important part of the landscape - the governing bodies of sport.
These bodies are crucially important if we are to deliver wider participation and also to perform at the highest level internationally.
That is why so much investment goes into sport through the governing bodies.
A few exceptions aside, five years ago the landscape in this regard was patchy at best, unforgivable at worst.
Three of the governing bodies were on the edge of bankruptcy. Clearly the blazer mentality had to change.
And without doubt the commercialisation of sport had left some of its governing bodies trapped like a rabbit in the headlights.
Most if not all of you will have heard me arguing for governing body reform.
Indeed I have often been accused of overstepping the mark. But I have always been clear not just about the limits of my power and authority, but also my responsibility.
In some cases I have encouraged reform – as with the Football Association and indeed horseracing– and in other cases, like Basketball, I have been asked by the governing bodies themselves to act as a facilitator.
It is of course easier to talk about reform than deliver it. The FA is a very good example.
I do not apologise for persuading the FA to appoint someone from outside football to carry out a genuinely independent review – otherwise any review would not have had sufficient credibility.
In the end Terry Burns was appointed by the FA and he proved an excellent choice.
Terry delivered a very clear report with very clear recommendations that, if fully implemented, will modernise the FA’s governance.
That was only the beginning. Terry started work on his report over two years ago and produced it in August 2005.
Though the FA Council agreed most of the recommendations before the end of last year, we’re still awaiting final sign-off by the FA’s shareholders.
Though I am confident the shareholders will reach the right decision, I’m told it is by no means certain.
If nothing else, this lengthy, drawn out and cumbersome process highlights exactly why they need to reform.
How the national sport be governed effectively in this day and age with such a structure?
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Good intentions
I have no doubt that those running the FA at the time of Burns had good intentions.
Indeed when I came in policy was often being driven by genuinely good willed but outdated beliefs.
I will give you an even better example – playing fields. The sacred cow of grassroots sport.
Yes of course they are important, yes the Tories let the market rip and sold off many playing fields for pure financial gain.
And yes playing fields continued to decline under my Government in its first tenure. Only recently have we reversed that trend.
But to drive a comprehensive policy on sports facilities on the back of a single issue campaign clouded in misty eyed sentimentalism and picked up and promoted by the right wing popular press, leads you to make bad decisions.
Yes playing fields are important and yes we have turned round an unacceptable position. For the second year running, more playing fields have been created than lost.
But we have also developed alongside those playing fields artificial pitches which can be used 24/7, floodlit and fenced and require little or no maintenance.
In total, £387 million was invested in 636 new and improved indoor and outdoor sports facilities in 2004/05.
The Facilities strategy
At the last General Election we made a very ambitious commitment; by 2008 most people will live within 20 minutes travel time from a good multi-sports environment.
Our commitment to achieve this should not be questioned. By 2006, through Exchequer and Lottery funding, over £1 billion is being spent on targeted initiatives to develop new or refurbished sports facilities.
In total, over 4,000 new or refurbished sports facilities are being supported by funding programmes.
On top of this the Building Schools for the Future, a programme which will provide local education authorities with £6.5 billion over 2005-08 for investment in secondary schools, a good part of that will go towards sports facilities.
Building new facilities is vitally important, but so is strengthening the sports club structure.
Here government’s role must be to help them to help themselves. That’s why I have long been an advocate of tax relief and fiscal incentives.
We have had two major successes in this regard. First we ensured that through legislation, Community Amateur Sports Clubs (CASCs) could benefit from tax relief similar to those normally given to charities.
Over 4000 clubs were have benefited to the tune of in excess of £15 million from this to date.
We have also argued for and won, after 30 years of asking, mandatory rate relief for sports clubs, secured as a right.
A new approach
I believe that we can go far, far further on the facilities front if we bring together the potential of the public and private sector partnership together.
One of the major issues facing sport is not the capital cost for building facilities, but the running and maintenance costs of these facilities.
For example, a staggering 75% of swimming pools lose money.
I do not believe that simply to throwing more public money at the problem is the answer.
We need to be more innovative than that. We need to engage business, the private sector, in partnership.
With this in mind, I ask this question. What if Local Authorities were to donate land, with all the associated planning permission, to a sports trust who could then develop both private and public sport facilities on that land?
This wouldn’t mean only popular and commercially viable sport gets provided.
On the contrary – the revenue stream provided by the commercial facilities would be able to support local authority provided facilities on the same site.
Are there many local authorities with a vision for sites and land available to develop such complexes? Such sports villages? I think so.
Could this be achieved by 2012? Highly possible.
Has this been done before? In a way, yes it has.
For those of you old enough to remember, in every major town and city in the 60s, 70s and 80s major companies had sports and social clubs providing multi-sports facilities for their employees and families.
The principle here is similar, but placed into a modern setting. A centre of sports activity for the whole community.
And what a fantastic legacy this would be for 2012 benefiting, as it would, the whole country.
Challenges
I believe we now have in place most of the things we need to deliver a sustained increase in participation.
We now have three organisations directly funded by Government that have clear remits and responsibilities and under strong and effective leadership.
The Sport England Chair, Derek Mapp, recently drew an analogy of a relay race, albeit a three legged one.
The Youth Sport Trust would start it, focusing on increasing the quality and quantity of school sport.
It passes the baton to Sport England, which is primarily responsible for increasing and sustaining participation in community sport.
For a small number of talented individuals, Sport England then passes the baton on to UK Sport for the development and performance of world class elite athletes.
There are however still questions and issues to resolve:
• how we ensure that children get an extra two to three hours sport outside school hours;
• how we lock both further education and higher education into the “sports system” so that we ensure students stay in sport;
• maintaining the program of modernisation for governing bodies, in particular basketball, boxing and ice hockey
• how we get people to keep taking part in sport when they leave school, addressing the fall out rate.
Health and obesity
This is at the heart of one of the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a Government and globally in the Western world: rising obesity.
We have all read the constant stream of reports about the health of the nation. Everyone’s getting fatter it seems.
I passionately believe sport can play a central role in tackling this problem. Certainly a much bigger role than it plays at the moment.
We have made real progress in this area. Only last week the first ever sports doctors began work in the NHS. And I must pay tribute to Liz Nicholls from UK Sport and Peter Hamlyn from Queens Medical School. When Peter first came into my office we had a blazing row, but after he left I realised he had some real gems of an argument.
From prescribing sport to get people healthy to treating the injuries they might pick up on the way, this specialist expertise is a good example of how sport can be used to deliver on the health agenda.
It’s not just government that is embracing sport to improve health.
In recent discussions with Weightwatchers and Slimmers World, they have told me how they are changing their programme and concentrating not just on calories in but on calories outas well.
50% of their programmes are now about physical activity and not about diet; a significant change in focus. Given the role these programmes have in tackling obesity this is a very welcome development.
So sport can certainly play a huge role. But this must be alongside individuals taking responsibility for their own health seriously.
We, the government, can lead the horse to water. But we can’t make him drink.
I am also clear that funds for community sport are not unlimited, and sports bodies cannot be expected to deliver on the wider physical activity agenda.
Indeed, partly to help protect this distinction, but mainly to drive the physical activity agenda forward, I believe we should explore a radical structural change in the regions.
This would mean putting in place new regional activity boards alongside sports boards. Their clear focus would be to deliver a 1% increase in physical activity. A target never achieved year on year in any other nation, other Canada for a limited period.
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This has already happened in some areas, like Yorkshire, and I’d like it to be rolled out nationwide.
Why is all this important? It’s important because being healthy enhances the quality of your life. It also enhances the quality of others. The estimated costs of physical inactivity in England are £8.2 billion annually. And I say to employers as well that a healthy workforce is a productive workforce; sp there is an enlightened self-interest for all concerned.
Social inclusion
While the power of sport to deliver on the health agenda is widely recognised, if still underutilised, it can also be extremely effective in delivering on the social inclusion agenda.
We have begun the process of making it more central to government delivery. But we are not there yet.
Take the Positive Futures scheme, funded by the Home Office and managed by Crime Concern. Currently 123 projects across England and Wales are successfully using sport to tackle anti-social behaviour, youth crime and substance misuse.
To date more than 110,000 young people have taken part in activities.
I would like to see this program rolled out to every community in the country.
Indeed what if it was taken a step further and coaches were to play a role in rehabilitating offenders on probation? I have seen myself how this can operate successfully.
Indeed, why not have a compulsory 2-4 hours sport per week as a condition of every new ASBO order?
I believe using sport in this proactive way would help on two fronts.
First it would give people a new and acceptable form of excitement.
Many young offenders cite boredom as the reason they broke the law. Instead of running round a housing estate on a motorbike, get them running round a dirt track or scaling a mountainside.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it would introduce them into a different peer group and perhaps help break the link with those destructive influences acting as a catalyst for their bad behaviour.
It worked for David Lacey, and in my view these are the kind of proposals this sportsthinktank should be exploring and championing in the future.
Elite
It used to be the case that money was thrown at elite sport with no tangible accountability and poor results. Now UK Sport have a clear remit to deliver, and governing bodies now know what’s expected and that there must be a return on their investment.
If this system is to work it will sometimes mean UK Sport will have to take tough decisions, like cutting funding to governing bodies. But this is public money and it needs to be spent right. Because this system is in place, we received record investment in elite success from the Treasury - £200m plus a further £100m from private sponsorship. And make no mistake to secure that kind of money from the Treasury your arguments must be strong.
Just under £800m of public money will have been invested up to Beijing and London.
This money will go into supporting our most talented athletes, many of whom are already on our Talented Athletes Scholarship Scheme and TASS 2012 programs. Schemes we have devloeped over the recent past to ensure that athletes succeed by design and not chance.
Business and sport
As I have said already, sport is an asset that can deliver on many agendas. It is not just government that are seeking to harness this. Business and commerce are increasingly part of sport.
This commercialisation has had many benefits. The Premier League is the number one league in the world, attracting the world’s best talent. But this does now beg the question - is business now subservient to sport or is sport subservient to business?
In my view this commercialisation has outgrown the governance of some sports. Excesses have crept in that if not kept in check could ruin the reputation of the sport, or indeed make it unrecognisable to the fans who support it week in and week out.
I am not the first to pose this question. The International Olympic Committee had this very same debate after the Atlanta Games became known as the business games. Their conclusion was clear; sport must prevail.
They then chose to rebalance the role of business and sport as they approached the Sydney Games, which were to become known as the sporting games.
Later the Heads of Government of the European Union in 2000 gave a very clear indication that sport is more than just a business. They said it had a specific value on and above its commercial worth.
The two debates were developed in much more detail in the Independent European Sports Review which I initiated last year. Using football as a model, it provided a detailed analysis on the current balance between sport and commercialism in Europe.
Not everyone, including me, agrees with all the recommendations of the Review. But I believe it sets out a direction of travel for the governance of sport in Europe.
The central point it addresses is how important is how we protect the autonomy of sport in a world where global economic, political and media institutions wield so much influence.
To some the answer to this question is to preserve the status quo. Politicians shouldn’t interfere, they argue.
Those who say this are ignoring, perhaps deliberately, the facts. The rules of the game are being set not by politicians by the European courts right now, be it Bosman or the ongoing Charleroi case.
Others, including me, argue that the status quo is clearly now not an option.
To protect the autonomy of sport we can’t just sit back and cross our fingers.
We must be proactive and sport must engage with politicians and make the argument that European institutions should invest in sport the powers to determine their own agenda.
Of course the quid pro quo is that the governance of sport and business should also be fit for purpose. It should be inclusive, it should be democratic, and above all it should accountable.
Decisions should be taken at the nearest level to the action of the sport.
And sport should govern itself with the support of politicians, governments and institutions.
The European Union White Paper that is now being drafted on Sport is trying to give practical expression to these ideas. This can be seen as an opportunity, a challenge, or a threat. It’s up to sport to decide which it should be.
The stage has now been set both at national and European level where a constructive and I believe honest debate can take place.
I urge everyone in sport to take part and put across their points of view.
Conclusion
I have set out today the story of what we have achieved. Going back to that day in Downing Street, I think we have delivered much of what Tony Blair asked, when he said to me sport is an asset which is massively underutlised – we have started to address that.
We have put sport at the heart of the political agenda and have begun working together to maximise its potential. It is now up to all of us to go forward and deliver on all the challenges I’ve set out tonight.
Finally, I would like to say thank you to everyone who has worked with over the last 5 years and 9 months, especially my Private and Parliamentary offices and the staff at DCMS.
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