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Elite Sports

Mr. Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab): I apologise for not being present in the Chamber at the beginning of the debate. I was in Committee and had intended to attend the debate, but I was held up. I was sitting in my office watching this debate on the monitor, when I heard an exchange between the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), which encouraged me to get down to the Chamber toute de suite to pass comment.

The hon. Member for Bath mentioned judo. Today's debate is entitled "Elite Sports", rather than "Elite Athletes". To the hon. Gentleman's credit, he made that distinction. My hon. Friend pointed out that funding should follow success, and that there was success in certain sports at the previous couple of Olympics. If funding follows success, however, there is a tiny danger that we will, in the most benign way possible, create a conservative formula. Of all UK medallists at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, 80 per cent. had attended private schools. That statistic radically improved for the 2004 Athens Olympics, but it was still 40 per cent. If we do anything before 2012, and we could do many things, we should sort out the fact that such a low proportion of our Olympic medallists attend state schools.

There is a gamut of reasons why private schools do as well as they do. One could argue that they take sport much more seriously, that they have historically had more money to invest in sport, and that, as a consequence, many private schools have the most fantastic facilities. Arguably, the best example is Eton and its rowing facilities, which are absolutely marvellous, and it produces the most fantastic athletes.

I agree that there should be a link between the sports of Olympic gold-medal winning athletes and funding, but the link should not be absolute. There is a danger if funding follows medals. When gold is won by a rowing eight who are marvellously good-looking, super-athletic and hugely articulate young graduates, they are all over the television when they return to the UK and, needless to say, the size of rowing as a sport in Britain and the space that it takes up in our national consciousness becomes huge. Meanwhile, some judo man or woman who gets a bronze medal, who does not come from the same educational or social background and who is not as televisual does not have the same impact.

That is the only point that I want to make, but, as you would expect, Sir John, I should like to extend it. We ought to be very careful about the idea that funding should necessarily follow success. Between now and 2012, the Olympic agenda, as much as any other Government policy, should be a social agenda. There is a great deal on which we can all agree, such as how much we should increase spending on sport and how we can achieve enormous amounts as part of the richness of our national culture and in all sorts of other ways, but I say to Government Members in particular that we must remember that a social agenda permeates all our policy, and the Olympic agenda is part of it. That might sound like I am trying to create a gap in the all-party consensus, but I am not. I would be hugely disappointed if, as a consequence of how we fund sport through the Olympic lottery, the current lottery or Government funding, we were to celebrate a huge clutch of medals in 2012, but we were to miss the fact, as most people do, that people have a much greater chance of being successful in the Olympic games if they attend a private school. The reality is that the vast majority attend private schools.

I am in no sense being critical of private schools; in fact, in many ways the state school sector can learn a great deal from them. One of Scotland's finest Olympic gold medallists, Chris Hoy, attended a good private school in Scotland. If one has the talent, there is a natural inclination to do well, and one will attend a well funded private school where sport is taken seriously.

However, if funding simply follows success, and historically success correlates closely with social class, there is a grave danger that we will be justifying a sports funding programme that perpetuates the class divide.

To put my credentials on the line, I was never marvellous enough to be the best sportsman in England at any sport, but I was once the Scottish judo champion, admittedly not in the most shining year for Scottish judo. So, I have a sense of how hard sports people work.

Some sports are less celebrated. The idea of an elite sport may be vaguely acceptable as a technical category for accounting and funding, but the term "elite athletes", which my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) and the hon. Member for Bath used, makes more sense. People in minor sports face challenges that are often missed. For example, if someone declines in performance in a minor sport for a year or two, they are finished. They probably earned no money from the sport anyway. Someone who plays a team sport can move around the team and if they are hugely talented take part over many years in Olympic games. I think of rowers, many of whom are highly talented. They can sit in a four, an eight, a coxed two or a coxless two. There are many options. In minor sports—I call them that although it is a pejorative term, as it is the one by which they are normally referred to—that is not an option.

There is a correlation between social class background and the sports that people take part in, particularly for sports such as judo. The British Judo Association may pull me up for making this point, but judo is taken up primarily by people from working-class communities. I was the British student champion, so I know that there is a strong student base in the sport, but the great majority of people attending judo clubs throughout the country—and there are many of them—come from working-class backgrounds.

My single point, which I have greatly extended over five minutes and which I reiterate one final time for the Minister—he might want to say whether he agrees with it—is that the Government's social agenda extends to the Olympic games. When we consider funding formulas, be they using the Olympic lottery, the special lottery, the national lottery or other aspects of Government funding, we must take into account people's background. It affects which sports they take part in and the possibilities that they have to reach the Olympic games.