London Olympics Bill

: I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak about the new clause and about the comments of the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson). As he knows, I have consistently taken a particular line on the raiding of other parts of the lottery, from the point of view of those of us who are interested in grass-roots sport, especially the ones that are not part of the Olympic games. There are many mass participation sports that are outside the Olympics, such as my own game, rugby union, and rugby league, as the hon. Gentleman noted. It is a great shame that the IOC has not taken the lead and included rugby sevens, which is included in the Commonwealth games. It would have been a fantastic opportunity for that to be part of the 2012 Olympic games. I have been quite closely involved in trying to assess what is required, particularly as regards the UK Sport bid for additional funding. Those of us who know the threesome—Bath, Sheffield and Loughborough—know what it will take to get an Olympic gold medallist in 2012. We know that the average age of a gold medallist in 2012 will be 26.2 years. That means that such a person will probably already be in a development squad at one of our leading centres, the English Institute of Sport, and we know from UK Sport’s work the attrition rate—the number of people who will drop out of those training programmes—and the size of the training programme that we need across the Olympic sports. I play quite a bit of volleyball, which will be an Olympic sport in 2012 because we are the host nation. We will be looking for a creditable performance, but even with all the lottery funding that we can muster, it is unrealistic to expect the UK team to pick up the gold medal—I sound like the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who has downgraded his aspirations for Scottish World cup wins. I do not want to be down on our fantastic volleyball players, who are based in my constituency, but they, too, are realistic about their chances of winning. It is too easy to sit on the Opposition Benches and say, ““We would like to spend an extra £300 million, and we have got a rough idea where it will come from.”” Only yesterday, Opposition Members criticised the so-called difficulties with the Budget, so it is strange that the Opposition parties are introducing a proposal to take another £300 million out of the figures in the pre-Budget report. I can see the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) distancing himself from the official Opposition on that particular matter.