Community Amateur Sports Clubs (Support) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, thank my colleague and noble friend Lord Addington for bringing forward the Bill. Sport matters for many people. It is not just an optional extra to their lives; it is the most important thing in their lives. That is particularly true for many children and young people. For many such people who do not find life easy and who are not necessarily good at school, sport gives a guiding purpose to their lives. I speak as a father with two sons. I remember very well when my younger son, aged about 10, was first picked to play in a cricket team in a match starting at 2 pm. Habitually, he did not necessarily get up desperately early but at 10 am he was down in the kitchen in his cricket whites, desperate to play cricket because it mattered to him more than how he did in his maths test or in any of his academic subjects. Therefore, for many children and young people sport is crucial. How they are able to play sport matters very much to them. Sport teaches many of the disciplines which as parents and teachers we try to instil in our children, and which are much more easily instilled very often on a sports field than in a classroom—things such as teamwork, communication skills and leadership. These happen naturally within a sporting context much more easily than in many others. It is not just as a child or young person that sport matters. A very interesting recent survey by the Isle of Man Government about motivation and business leadership found that, among our top business leaders, more were successful at sport at school than were academically. Clearly, sport at a crucial time in those people's young lives played an important role in channelling their energies and giving them disciplines that they were able to use as adults to make a success of their lives. I declare an interest as chair of sport at the Prince's Trust, where we use sport and the relationship with sporting clubs as a way to help motivate children and young people who are failing at school or are unemployed. Arguably, sport is more important now than ever. We face an obesity crisis in the country, which the Government have failed to stem; I do not blame them, but they have not succeeded. The situation is getting significantly worse. Clearly sport—not least local sport run by amateur sports clubs—is going to play a major part in addressing that issue, arguably when many school leavers are not going to get jobs immediately and unemployment is rising very quickly. The ability of those people, who may not have anything else much to do, to spend some of their time in local sports clubs doing something positive, which helps motivate them and helps retain a sense of self-esteem, is extremely important. To deliver sport to most people most of the time, community amateur sports clubs are going to be the delivery mechanism. We all have dealings in various ways with such bodies, I suspect. I have two little anecdotes. First, I recently visited my mother in Yorkshire. On getting a cab from Wakefield station to Rothwell, where she lives, the cab driver, who was of Pakistani origin, started telling me about his role as secretary of a local cricket club. He was immensely proud of this role and, indeed, of his club, which was doing quite well. His only concern was that if it was promoted it would have to follow further regulations in terms of the quality of the pitch and various other issues, which he was beginning to worry about. The problem was that when I got to my mother's house he would not let me out of the cab because he insisted on showing me, with huge pride, his club in a thick directory of cricket clubs in one of the West Yorkshire leagues. For him, as a useful member of society, that amateur sports club was playing an inordinately important role; more importantly, he was engaging with many people in his community in doing positive things around, in that case, cricket. I give my second example. I suppose I declare an interest: my wife is a vicar just across the river—not at a cathedral, and the roof of her church is extremely modest compared with that of the right reverend Prelate. She has established an after-school club. The bit of the club, into which huge effort has been put, which has really flourished is the football. Other elements have been tried and, if they have not failed, they have been hard going. However, football has worked. In terms of the church playing a role in inner cities, perhaps slightly surprisingly, sport plays a major part. As the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, set out, amateur sports clubs are facing threats, partly due to the recession and partly due to some of the issues covered by the Bill. He referred to the fact that the recent CCPR report said that up to 4 per cent of sports clubs might fail during the recession, which does not necessarily sound a huge number. However, 4 per cent equates to 6,000 sports clubs, which amounts to several hundred thousand people playing sport. Therefore, this is a big threat when we should be looking to increase the number of sports clubs rather than reduce it. The Bill deals with a number of real practical issues which have caused problems for sports clubs largely by mistake. I cannot believe that policy-makers intended that sports clubs would be faced with these huge additional water rates or electricity bills, or that they intended that they would be excluded from the apprenticeship scheme, but they are. These measures seek to deal with these intensely practical and sensible points. I do not intend to go through the Bill. From my own experience I would just like to give one example, which would be remedied at least in part by the Bill as it deals with the situation related to nuisance caused by lights and floodlights. I know an amateur sports club in south London with tennis courts, which was seeking to enhance itself by having floodlights. These were not floodlights like those in a huge ground or that were going to be on every hour of the day and night, but local residents objected to very modest suggestions that these floodlights should be erected. The councillors took fright and they were not erected, which meant that the tennis courts have virtually no community use during the winter except at weekends; they could not be used during the week. The Bill would help deal with that kind of nonsense. It would also deal with many other kinds of nonsense. Therefore, I am very happy to support my noble friend.