Grassroots participation is the loser as Sport England props up GamesThe latest cut to the lottery distributor's budget will keep more people on the couch
Andrew Culf
Thursday March 22, 2007
Guardian
"It is like someone has taken my running shoes away from me at the start of the race," says Derek Mapp, who as the chairman of Sport England is charged with the target of getting two million more people active before the London 2012 Olympics. "It is like I have to do it barefoot."The Games were supposed to be a catalyst for grassroots and community sport, lifting an idle nation off the couch, and Lord Coe's rallying cry to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore that London would create a sporting legacy of participation for a new generation is credited with securing victory for the capital.
But last week Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, finally announced the true cost of the Olympics - and alongside the headline-grabbing £9.3bn bill, there in the small print was the cost to the National Lottery distributors, an additional £675m diverted away from their coffers.
Sport England's lottery income will be slashed by a further £55.9m in 2009, bringing its contribution to the massive project getting under way in Stratford to £395m. Its total annual income is about 265m.
Next week in a keynote speech marking his six months at the helm of the agency Mapp will outline his vision at a conference on the future of community sport. Although he was criticised as a "Labour crony" when he was appointed, he will make little effort to hide his dismay and frustration at the 8% budget cut, which will result in 186,000 fewer people being given the chance to participate in sport.
The salami-slicing of Sport England's budget has been dramatic. When London triumphed in Singapore in 2005, the agency was to contribute £295m of its lottery funding. By last November an extra £44m had been thrown into the pot, and then last week a further £55m.
But Mapp will tell conference delegates the impact is even worse because, for every £1 that Sport England invests at the moment, about £3 is levered in from local authorities and private investors. "What that really means is that £1.6bn is not going to community sport," he says. "That would buy the same number of coaches that there are in the whole of France."
Two days before Jowell's announcement in the Commons she took Mapp through the budget. "She said she had no option to bridge the gap other than by a significant take on the lottery," he says.
"The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has the smallest budget in government but this is the biggest infrastructure project anywhere. You cannot help being cynical - £1.8bn on regeneration of a polluted site in east London, £1bn on tax, excuse me, so the chancellor gives money to pay himself back. You have got to question some of those things."
Mapp aims to increase participation in sport by two million people by 2012, getting people to engage in - and progressively increase - a minimum of 30 minutes' sport once a week to two or three times. He accuses the government of failing to produce joined-up thinking or act "holistically". The £55m cut in his budget would represent merely a "rounding up" in the budget of a primary care trust, and the Treasury loses about £8.2bn a year because of Britain's obesity timebomb.
"We need to stop looking at sport for sport's sake," Mapp says. "Those who participate regularly in sport are healthier, there is less crime in the streets, there is less obesity, it creates better business leaders. The benefits of participation are rather more than finding another champion for the 400m. It is not just about getting a six-pack."
He says the latest cut will mean his target will automatically be cut by 186,000 people, based on the calculation that coaching and facilities to create an active lifestyle cost £300 per person. Such a drop is the equivalent of wiping out the regional ambition to increase participation among 185,000 people in Yorkshire and Humberside, or 188,000 in the south-west.
Even before last week's announcement Mapp's participation target was a tough one. It involved stopping the drop off at the age of 16. "Club nights become nightclubs when teenagers find a night in Yates is better than turning up to play football on Saturday mornings," he explains.
The former chairman of the East Midlands Development Agency believes Sport England is emerging from a period of upheaval, in which 250 jobs have gone in the past three years. Its Active Britain survey has given it the statistical firepower to measure, down to local postcode levels, its success in driving up participation, and Jennie Price, its new chief executive, joins next month. Mapp says: "We will be a formidable partnership and drive through the process of change."
His views will be unpalatable at the DCMS, where his friend of more than 20 years, Richard Caborn, the sports minister, insists grassroots sport investment has never been greater. Mapp disagrees but says there is mutual respect. The "Labour crony" jibes, which he says arose from his donation of a £3,000 printer to his local party, are disappearing amid his outspoken passion for his new job.
He admits he is an unlikely champion for sport. He was overweight, a type two diabetic who ate at McDonald's and never concentrated on his physical fitness. Now, with a small gym at home, he has shed 2½ stone and seems to be relishing his barefoot challenge.
