It is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith), who made a very good, thoughtful speech on a very important topic. I have highlighted it a number of times previously in Westminster Hall and the main Chamber.
I am speaking partly as a vice-chair of the all-party group on heart disease, but also because of my own background. My school was bottom of the league tables in Kidderminster. My group of friends replicated whatever was on television, so predominantly we played football, but if Wimbledon was on, out came the tennis rackets; if the Tour de France was on, out came the bikes; and if the Ashes was on, out came the cricket bats. The importance of that was both that I was active and that I kept out of trouble. Two of my friends ended up spending time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but the rest of us did not follow that path, because frankly we were just too tired at the end of the day, although I remember that when I phoned my old headmaster to say that I had got into Parliament, he said, “You know, the last time someone from our school got into the press, it was because they had gone to prison, but I’m not sure which is worse.” We will all make a judgment on that.
The hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent made a very important point. This debate is not just about sport; it is about the opportunity to be active. That is the part that I want to concentrate on—that opportunity. Before I
became the MP for North Swindon, I represented for 10 years as a councillor a new build housing estate. It went from 1,800 to 10,000 houses. I was horrified once to be told that I was very lucky that my ward had the greatest proportion of open space of any ward in Swindon. I knew, as I lived there, that that was complete nonsense, so I did a bit of digging and it turned out that hedges, heritage sites and grass verges counted as open spaces. The last time I put down jumpers for goalposts to play football, none of those counted as usable open space, so it is a welcome move that the Government have removed the higher density rule, but I still think that more needs to be done in planning terms for new development to provide usable open space. That is incredibly important because garden space for one’s own home is now one third smaller than it was in the 1960s and front gardens for new builds are often just an aspiration rather than a reality.
We do not need premier league-standard open spaces for people to be active. When I used to play football during the whole of the summer holidays, we played on an almost vertical pitch, which was very handy, because Matthew and Paul Gilbert, the twins, were considerably better than me and my teammates. We got to kick downhill all day and they got to kick uphill—that was only fair.
We also need to look carefully at how we organise opportunities. I was a big fan of the school sports partnership. The Government looked at that when they first came to power, because there was the worry that in the previous years, even with £150 million being spent, only two out of five children ever took part in competitive sport.