It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) on securing such an important debate. We need to promote physical activity to people across the UK. The issue is important to me as a constituency MP in an area that has very low levels of physical activity. I am co-chair of the all-party group on women’s sport and fitness, and I encourage hon. Members to support that group. Last year, I was co-chair of the all-party commission on physical activity.
As an MP in the north-west of England, I am concerned that ours is one of two regions in the north with the highest levels of inactivity in the UK. In our region, 32% of the population is classified as inactive, which represents an inactivity level 5% higher than in the south-east. Reports demonstrate that deprived areas have higher levels of inactivity than the least deprived areas; the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) has referred to some of the reasons for that. The sheer cost of undertaking physical activity and classes sometimes gets in the way. My constituency is in the top 40 local authorities with the highest inactivity rates, and 33% of people are inactive. We need action locally to tackle the problems.
There are stark differences in inactivity rates not only between regions, but between men and women. There is a worrying gap between the rates of men and women who undertake exercise. The most recent figures from Women in Sport, which was formerly the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, show that only slightly more than 30% of women in England aged 16-plus take part in sport or fitness once a week, compared with more than 40% of men.
In Salford, the gap is even greater, with only 25% of women taking part in weekly exercise. Figures from Sport England demonstrate that more men take part in activity than women in every age group up to age 65. That is serious, because being physically inactive shortens a person’s life span by up to five years and is responsible for 17% of premature deaths in the UK. Indeed, if everyone in England were sufficiently active, an estimated 37,000 lives would be saved every year. We must take that seriously.
I find it interesting that inactivity is as dangerous to health as smoking. Because women are less active than men, women are subject to an increased risk of ill health and premature death. The reasons for the gender gap in inactivity rates are well established. Women and young girls either face, or feel that they face, many barriers when it comes to sports participation. Barriers exist at both grass-roots sport level and elite levels. In the all-party group on women’s sport, we work to identify those barriers and the actions needed to remove them.
The all-party group pressed the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to hold an inquiry into women in sport, which it did. The Committee’s report, which was released in July this year, contained some interesting recommendations and confirmed many of the reasons for the gender gap in activity. It is not that inactive women do not want to play sport or to be active; research from Women in Sport showed that 12 million women, more than half of whom are inactive, want to
play more sport. Many of the sports that are most popular with women, such as running and swimming, are done informally—that is an interesting clue—so they are outside the formal funding structures for sport.
Women make up 62% of participants in swimming, 42% of participants in tennis and 41% of participants in athletics, particularly running. I will come on to talk about running informally, because it is an attractive sport to women who have family responsibilities or other commitments that prevent them from taking part in team sports. There is also a clue in the figures for team sports. Only 7% of participants in football, 8% of participants in rugby union and 9% of participants in cricket are women. We can see a real trend there; women are tending to do informal sports such as running and swimming.
Many girls are put off exercise and sport at a young age, and too many girls end up thinking that sport is simply not for them. Sports such as football can seem entirely male, judging from the media coverage that they receive. Women’s sport accounts for only 0.5% of all commercial investment and only 7% of the media coverage of sport, which makes it even more difficult to encourage girls and women to participate.
In terms of financial reward, it is surprising that male footballers are paid millions of pounds every year, but women’s teams are nearly always amateur or semi-professional. Members of our England women’s football team are on contracts under which they are paid £20,000 a year—not £20,000 a day or a week, but £20,000 a year—and the England women’s rugby squad were not put on paid contracts at all until after they had won the rugby world cup. Every time I mention that, I get comments on Twitter stating that that is because of a lack of interest in women playing sport. I understand that 55,000 tickets have been sold for the England-Germany women’s football match at Wembley this Sunday, so perhaps that tide is turning.
Women’s and girls’ negative perceptions of sport often stem from negative experiences of physical education and sport at school. That point is supported by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee report. A survey carried out by Women in Sport found that 51% of girls felt deterred from physical activity by their experiences of school sport and PE. Many girls describe their experience negatively, citing a lack of choice, an overly competitive environment, a lack of confidence in their own ability and concerns about body image. It is essential that we change young girls’ perceptions of sport if we want them to be active for life. We must, as my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent said, create exercise classes and sporting activities that actually interest girls.
I look forward to the campaign being launched by Sport England, which aims to change our perception of girls and women doing sport. The campaign is called “This Girl Can”, and it will aim to see more women and girls exercising regularly or playing sport with less fear of judgment, more confidence and more enjoyment.
I will mention two very worthwhile initiatives of the sort that we see springing up now. “Fatty Must Run” is a social media advice and support initiative and Twitter account run by Julie Creffield, and it helps people who are overweight and starting to take exercise. Another great initiative is the “Couch to 5K” running group in Blackburn, where volunteers support free group running
sessions to encourage inactive people to run regularly. As part of our thinking about how to increase activity levels, we must look at similar wonderful, often voluntary, initiatives and find ways to support them.
It is time to focus on the scale of the problems we face with inactivity and health. I have mentioned that we could save 37,000 lives a year if everyone in the UK were sufficiently active. Women in the UK have the 10th highest rate in the world of cancers linked to physical inactivity. In 2012, there were nearly 79,000 deaths across the country from bowel, breast and womb cancers, of which an estimated 12,000 could have been prevented if women were more physically active. In Salford, the CAN-Move project aims to ensure that physical activity is part of the pathway for patients with breast, bowel or prostate cancers, and it offers those patients a 12-week physical activity programme. Such projects should be available more widely, but the most important thing is to focus on encouraging people to be physically active earlier, not simply when they already have a cancer.
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