HC Deb 01 June 1998 vol 313 cc6-7
6. Mr. Harold Best (Leeds, North-West)

If he will make a statement on the role of sport in combating social exclusion. [41991]

The Minister for Sport (Mr. Tony Banks)

We will never know the answer to your question now, will we, Madam Speaker?

I am convinced that sport can help to tackle the problems of social exclusion. I am encouraging the English Sports Council to direct more of its resources at that problem and to work closely with other agencies. My Department is working closely with the social exclusion unit in this area.

Mr. Best

Will the Minister confirm that the Government's national lottery policy will ensure that the Sports Council's money provides for disadvantaged areas such as the inner-city area of North-West Leeds? Will he also ensure that, when such funding goes to professional clubs—if it does—there is a guarantee that facilities will be made available to local schools and local community sport?

Mr. Banks

The priority areas initiative of the Sports Council for England allows up to 90 per cent. lottery funding—the usual being 65 per cent.—for sports projects designed to give special help to deprived areas. So far, it has supported more than 350 projects with awards totalling £186 million. The National Lottery Bill, once enacted, will enable the Sports Council to adopt a strategy that directs lottery funding to areas where there is an obvious lack of resources and where there is a great need for such projects.

Sport is one of the greatest ways of reaching young unemployed people who might otherwise be hanging around on street corners, expending their energy in non-constructive ways. Sport is a wonderful and imaginative way of organising young people and teaching them a great many things, including respect for themselves. I suspect that the new strategy of the English Sports Council will fully accord with the sort of views that my hon. Friend has just expressed.

Miss Anne McIntosh (Vale of York)

Will the Minister for Sport comment on the impact on the English football team of excluding Gazza from the squad?

Mr. Banks

That is a very ingenious interpretation of social exclusion, and I congratulate the hon. Lady on being the first to raise the matter in the House this afternoon. It is a subject of great national concern. I think that the national coach, Glenn Hoddle, is to be congratulated on his brave decision. Sport is even crueller than politics: if someone gets it wrong, retribution follows quickly. We must all keep our fingers crossed in the hope that the decision was the right one—my own feeling is that it was. I expect the English team to do even better now, despite the personal tragedy surrounding the footballing exclusion of that great character Gazza.

Mr. Bruce Grocott (Telford)

I know that my hon. Friend, like me, supports the widest possible dissemination of the benefits of sport, but does he agree that, when sport acquires large additional funds through sponsorship, television income or other commercial activity, it is desirable that the benefits of that additional income—I am thinking of football particularly—should be spread through the whole game? They should not result in an ever-widening divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Mr. Banks

My hon. Friend raises a point about which I know large numbers of ordinary football supporters feel strongly. I addressed a meeting of the Football Supporters Association in Wolverhampton on Saturday—the first sports Minister to do so, incidentally—where its members made the same point. Football must recognise that there may come an end to the enormous flow of money currently pouring into it. The game is fashionable at the moment; an awful lot of people who support football today may not do so in a few years' time. It is essential that resources are more evenly distributed throughout the game. Unless the grass roots are nourished there will ultimately be problems for the premier league. I hope that that message is taken seriously by the football authorities—I am always reminding them of it.