TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2001

__________

Members present:

Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair

Mr Chris Bryant

Mr Frank Doran

Michael Fabricant

Mr Adrian Flook

Alan Keen

Rosemary McKenna

Ms Debra Shipley

John Thurso

Derek Wyatt

__________

Memoranda submitted by English Heritage, Manchester Victoria Baths Trust,

Calder Street Baths Govanhill Glasgow, Haggerston Pool Action Group Hackney and Friends of Marshall Street Baths Soho

Examination of Witnesses

MR PAUL VELLUET, English Heritage, MS GILL WRIGHT, Manchester Victoria Baths Trust, MR SAVIO D=SOUZA, Calder Street Baths, Govanhill, Glasgow, MS CAROLYN CLARK, Haggerston Pool Action Group, Hackney and MS BARBARA CORR, Friends of Marshall Street Baths, Soho, examined.

Chairman: I should like to make two preliminary remarks before we start. The first is that I cannot remember any inquiry we have launched which has been greeted with such a huge amount of evidence submitted by public and organisations. I think that augers well for this session today. The second is that I ought to make a declaration of interest, namely that I have been involved in the campaign to bring Manchester Victoria Baths back into use and Gill Wright is a valued constituent of mine.

Derek Wyatt

1. Gill, can you quickly tell us whether you are open or closed? If you are closed, what is it that you really want to open again.

(Ms Wright) The swimming pool is closed; it has been closed since March 1993. We particularly want to open one of the swimming pools. It was built with three and it currently has two pools. We particularly want to open one of the swimming pools and the Turkish baths at Victoria Baths. There is scope for providing a lot of other community facilities within the building as well because it is a very large building.

2. What is the position of English Heritage with regard to these types of pools?

(Mr Velluet) In this context we are primarily involved with listed swimming pools, although I stress that we recognise there are many other pools up and down the country which are not listed but which may be of historical architectural interest and which are of course of major community interest and concern. We are seeking to work with local authorities and local communities in encouraging the effective use of listed swimming pools. In so far as we are able, we are seeking to work towards grant assistance for such projects which will bring pools back into use and working with the local authorities and the community in terms of planning and listed building scenarios which will affect their restoration and repair. We are not there as the primary focus of activity, we are there to assist and support within the parameters set by formal legislation and guidance from central government.

3. What relationship have you had with Gill then, in the nicest possible way?

(Mr Velluet) A modest one to date.

4. Is that a bone of contention or has it been helpful?

(Ms Wright) No, it is not; English Heritage are very supportive. They have recently awarded a grant of ,150,000 towards urgent works at Victoria Baths.

5. Is there a weakness in the law currently which would be relevant to all historical buildings but in particular to the baths situation?

(Mr Velluet) When you say weakness in the law, it is not so much the law as the structure under which we operate our grant regimes. Outside London our grant regimes are specifically targeted towards Grade I and Grade II* listed buildings and there are very few listed swimming pool buildings which are such high grading. The majority of listed swimming pools are in the Grade II category and our grants regime, as set by Government, by legislation, does not embrace our capacity to give money towards Grade IIs other than in the context of much broader area-based initiatives. In Greater London it is different because we inherited the powers and resources of the GLC and we do have a greater involvement with Grade II listed buildings within London. There is an anomalous situation between London and the rest of the country, where we are restricted is our inability to engage in Grade IIs outside London.

6. Is there anything the others would like to comment on either about heritage or about the local position in law?

(Mr D=Souza) Savio D=Souza from Govanhill Pool in Glasgow. The real problem is that the whole approach to swimming is very disjointed. Sport England and Sport Scotland have issued similar reports saying there is a big funding crisis after many years of neglect of these pools. A huge investment is needed in order to look after these pools. What we are trying to do is encourage some community involvement as it is a community resource and give them an opportunity to be involved in that discussion to save these pools. That applies across the country. These are valuable resources of the local community and a framework needs to be set up.

7. Trevor Brooking said to us in evidence when we were talking about Picketts Lock that he thought an investment was required of ,5.4 billion to repair and just keep the current swimming pools. Forgive me, but that is a huge amount of money, so it is unlikely it is going to come. I cannot work out how the swimming will get funded in the future. I think that is the crisis we have.

(Ms Clark) There are several areas which draw attention to the English heritage. Most of those pools are in areas of high poverty, where they are often the only amenity and often much larger than the swimming pool alone, therefore could do a lot more for the community. The size of the building does mean that usually after about 100 years of neglect they do need quite a big investment by the local authority. In Hackney we estimate it will only be about ,3.5 million to bring it back into modern use with a long-term life. The other problem we find is that the pools are a public amenity. They should be seen in the same light as libraries, etcetera. For example, eight of our local schools have taken swimming off the curriculum since the closure of the pool. However, it has also been seen, certainly in local authorities, more and more as something which ought to be making a profit. That is a key tension between the amenity aspects as a community resource and the income generation aspect of pools. We would really stress looking at the pools in the context of the overall community rather than just as a swimming pool. Picketts Lock is some way outside London. A lot of these in central London are not actually that level of investment.

(Ms Corr) Barbara Corr from Marshall Street Baths, Soho. In Marshall Street which is owned by Westminster City Council a private sector leisure operator was prepared to put in ,5 million of the ,7.1 million needed to refurbish them and bring the pool back into use. There was a shortfall of ,2 million which Westminster City Council were not prepared to spend. It was ,2 million and it is in a very densely populated area. Those people do not have a pool for lack of ,2 million.

Michael Fabricant

8. I am very pleased to hear Paul Velluet say that he sees the role of English Heritage as being one to assist and support those organisations trying to restore pools. Could you give us a little more insight into what work you have actually undertaken?

(Mr Velluet) Within the London context it is a very close relationship, working with London=s local planning authorities in seeking to encourage them to have regard to the obligations of looking after their listed buildings, pools included, to look into ways of effecting repair and bringing back into use where they have ceased use or disposing of them in an appropriate way which keeps the use and the building. We have a very, very limited allocation of grant funding available from central government. It is spread very, very thinly across the country and certainly in London. If I might just refer to the level of funding related to the burden, if it seems a burden, of listed buildings in their care, in London there are something like 35,000 listed buildings and our expenditure was limited last financial year to ,3.6 million. Nationally we had secular grant of ,8.6 million available last financial year. Relate that to the numbers of listed buildings in the country, which is something approaching half a million. We can offer a very, very thin spread of grant assistance to building owners, including local authorities. We seek to channel what limited funds we have into projects which will lever in other support. Certainly in deprived areas, areas of significant stress and building decay, we would hope the local authority had the capacity to lever in other major sources of both grant and private sector funding to which we can contribute.

9. I just want to explore another area. I am going to be honest with you. My experience with English Heritage has not been a happy one. I represent Lichfield and there have been instances where for example English Heritage say white gloss must be used but it must be linseed oil based paint. It looks the same as any other paint, except it costs eight times as much, lasts a quarter of the time and is highly inflammable. There are other examples of where building materials are having to be used which are not as robust and yet are more expensive. Over the last year or two I have had a long history regarding the restoration of church bells where there was a Millennium Lottery grant for this and English Heritage seemed to prevent nearly every church from having this done. I just want to look to some of the other witnesses. Have you had any problems? Maybe swimming pools are modern enough for English Heritage not to prevent you from getting on with the work of restoration that you want, or maybe what they ask of you is not too costly.

(Mr D=Souza) From the Scottish perspective, part of the problem is how to apply for such grants. There is not a great deal of support on how to apply for these grants, what funding is available, what criteria there are for the different sources of funding and that is part of the problem we have experienced.

10. Has anyone had money and English Heritage has come along and said you cannot do it like that, you have to use these materials.

(Ms Wright) Our experience to date is that English Heritage have been incredibly supportive and they are the one body which is saying to Manchester as a city, not just as a local authority, that this is not just an old swimming pool, this is a national asset and it has to be protected. We shall have to make some intervention into the structure of Victoria Baths if they are going to have a long-term future, but to date English Heritage have been very practical and pragmatic in their approach. I have every confidence that they will let us make the few changes we have to make if we are going to bring Victoria Baths back into full use.

11. I am pleased to hear that.

(Ms Corr) I would agree that English Heritage have been very helpful in trying to put pressure on Westminster City Council to re-open this pool rather than leave it lying empty.

(Ms Clark) From the Haggerston point of view we should like more pressure because the building is visibly deteriorating. Windows were left open, despite the fact that it was meant to be boarded up, which have allowed rot to get in. We think there is an issue about the inspections. Having said that, they have inspected and they have demanded that works be carried out which were carried out, but it was minimal maintenance and the building is still deteriorating.

(Mr Velluet) I am sorry about your difficulties on what I assume is a highly graded listed building. I can think of very, very few examples of the thousands of buildings my team deals with each year in Central and West London where there has been a concern about the exact kind of paint being used. I suspect it must have been a grant issue. The fact is that the decisions on works to listed buildings are not made by English Heritage. They are made either by the local planning authority or by the Secretary of State whom we seek to advise. In London there is a greater power inherited by the GLC, but the decisions are not ours, they are for the local authorities. On grant issues, certainly if public money is being spent on an important listed building, then we follow Government advice, set out in PPG15, that the right standards and materials, details and professional supervision apply. I shall happily take back your concern and ask my regional colleagues to look into it.

Michael Fabricant: They know; they know.

Ms Shipley

12. I have a past relationship with English Heritage in that I once wrote a book for English Heritage on its lesser known sites. I also swim three times a week roughly. What I am going to say might upset the people here quite a lot. Tell me why these baths should be saved? I know many of them are delicious pieces of architecture. I know that and I did post-graduate work on architecture. I know about the architecture; super. As a real, real community resource, I am not convinced by what you have said so far. Somebody like me can go in and I am quite well off and I enjoy my swimming and I swim up and down and think this is nice, swim, swim, swim, this is lovely and out I get again. What I am really interested in is disability access, children having access - my child would not like those big pools, thank you very much, she needs a slope going into it - people learning to swim, having all the right access to pools with things to get them in and out of pools, all these sorts of things. So the huge amount of money the upkeep of these delicious building would take when we have resources not going in to the Ame-too@ campaign for all those who desperately need it and all the serious swimmers who want to put in the miles.

(Ms Wright) You might assume that a modern swimming pool was better adapted, for example for disabled access and I would argue with that in a lot of cases. Victoria Baths, like a lot of pools of the period, were built with steps going down into the water rather than ladders. Although it does not have beach access as some fun pools have, it actually has very good access for disabled people and people who might not label themselves disabled but who are nervous about entering the water down a ladder, turning backwards or jumping into the pool. A young woman lives in the council houses just adjoining Victoria Baths joined our campaign recently. She is in her mid-20s, she is partially sighted and epileptic. We came down to look at pools in London, comparable healthy living centres. That was the first time she had swum since Victoria Baths had closed because she could not walk to a pool and she could not go down steps, so she would not access alternative facilities in Manchester. The biggest issue was transport. We have a wonderful new Commonwealth pool near the centre of Manchester, but it is full of students, it is full of people who can drive to the multi-storey car park, it is full of people who happen to be on the right bus route in and out of town. The bus routes in and out of Manchester are great but if you try to cross the city you can be left for three quarters of an hour or an hour with wet hair and hungry children. You do not do that more than once. The biggest, biggest issue is transport. You admitted you drive to a pool, but not everyone can drive to a pool.

13. I did not say that. I walk to my pool.

(Ms Wright) I beg your pardon. I thought you mentioned driving at some point in your submission. Some people can drive to pools. Better off people will access centralised facilities but they also over-face nervous swimmers and people who do not currently swim. I really, really have to take objection to the facilities planning model which has been put forward by Sport England. It is based on current participation levels. We could do much, much better than that. There are loads of people who want to swim, who are not swimming now. The waiting list at the local swimming club where I teach proves that. We have a waiting list which is 50 per cent of the capacity of our club. Those people are not going to the new pool, because it is twice as expensive, it is a car journey or two bus rides away. They are not swimming; their children are not swimming. Local facilities are important and also the wealth of history which is in them. Yes, they are beautiful buildings but it is not just about the architecture, it is about the social history which is in that building. Victoria Baths represents a big rich slice of Manchester=s social history. If it does not come back into use as a swimming pool, you are turning your back on that big slice of history and saying that ordinary Manchester=s history is not important, but it is.

(Ms Clark) Very few of us are there just for the heritage. They are a local community resource in the very nature of the areas. Sixty-two per cent of our residents are living in high rises in Shoreditch. Car ownership is 32 per cent. To get to a local baths means, if you cannot walk to it, ,2 for the average family to get to their local swimming pool. It is not only the swimming for local people. For example there is a mental health unit which used it for swimming therapy and can no longer afford to do so. There is a local boat club based in our community on the canal which used it for training local kids to start using the canal. They have now had to close their books last summer and it has added additional costs for them to use other pools. We have three Olympic hopefuls and we have the names and details of those Olympic hopefuls. They are now severely restricted in their access to other pools. It is a community flagship in an area which has very, very few local amenities. Yes, it is a good building and that adds to the flagship quality, but it is the pool and the therapy of the water in our local community which really counts.

Ms Shipley: I actually agree with you.

Mr Bryant

14. I do not. I used to be Vice Chair of Arts and Leisure on Hackney Council. I have just been listing the pools which are within striking distance. There is the Lido at Hackney, there is the Ironmonger Row Baths, the Hockston Sports Centre, there is the Michael Sobell Centre, the Holloway Baths, York Hall, the old Golden Lane. There are many swimming pools within striking distance of Haggerston.

(Ms Clark) The Lido has closed. The Britannia is one of those leisure pools and you cannot use it for proper swimming. It is also not suitable for a number of local people for a variety of reasons. The other pools are some distance.

15. There is a brand new pool.

(Ms Clark) Clissold Park Pool is not yet open but from some parts of Shoreditch that would require three buses to reach and the cost of those buses.

16. It is within two miles; it is within a half-hour walk.

(Ms Clark) Even if it is two miles, it is along very busy roads and I think you will find that a family of four walking there and then back is not something which is likely to happen.

17. As I understand it, you are talking about ,3.5 million being spent and that seems to me to be a considerable amount of money, not a small amount of money, for baths which were used by how many people every year?

(Ms Clark) The details are in the business plan which you have all received. I could look it up but the critical issue is that it was being run down anyway, it was not properly heated, etcetera. It was being run down at the time those figures relate to. I would also add that the cost of the swimming pool at Clissold is ,20 million. We are talking about ,3.5 million which is not just the pool, is also the local amenity and the healthy living centre aspects which will match the swimming in importance.

18. I am sorry to be a bit obsessed about Haggerston. Having swum in it many times and having used the gym there for a couple of years, I can see the architectural merits of the building and indeed it was used for several pop videos, was it not?

(Ms Clark) There is a lot of interest from our point of view.

19. It probably earned more money from pop videos than people swimming there. It is a genuine question: is it a really good use of taxpayers= money or Lottery money, which is taxpayers= money in a different guise, to fork out another ,3.5 million for yet another building, when there are plenty of other facilities for swimming in the area?

(Ms Clark) If you ask local people, and indeed the Haggerston Pool Action Group which I am representing here has had massive support from a whole range of local people, including local schools, local facilities such as the mental health centre I have referred to, they do see it as a unique resource. Yes, there are other pools, there are other pools people could get to. The whole point in a rundown community like Haggerston is that it is one of the few assets they have. It is very well loved. It had been run down and one of the questions is why had it been run down over the years? It had been run down which meant it was not promoted as much, it was not as user-friendly as it might have been. Nonetheless the support from the local community shows that it is a flagship project that people want. Our business plan around the investment - and I believe you have had information circulated about our proposal about integrating it into local housing schemes - shows it is a real runner as a community resource to bring it back into the heart of the community.

Rosemary McKenna

20. It may surprise Mr D=Souza to learn that I actually swam competitively in Govanhill Pool as a teenager. I took two buses or walked six miles to swim there, so I do know the area and I do know the history of the area. I also know that the new pool is less than a mile from Govanhill Pool and the provision of smaller leisure facilities is the policy of the council. They will not agree with your submission today. A couple of points in your submission are worth exploring. You talk about a healthy living centre, what would your role be in a healthy living centre?

(Mr D=Souza) In the context of swimming part of the problem has been that it is swimming in isolation. I have just come back from Australia where there is a more holistic approach to swimming pools and the facilities of swimming pools and with healthy living centres it has been shown, certainly in Australia where it has worked, that there is a variety of different uses, whether it be Internet cafes C

21. No, I asked what your role would be.

(Mr D=Souza) I am an osteopath and in the healthy living centre you could have complementary medicine facilities to enhance people=s health. That is an important context; in swimming health is an important aspect.

22. It appears from what you are saying that you moved to Glasgow just in the summer of this year, is that correct?

(Mr D=Souza) Since November, but I have been travelling a lot. I have been permanently in Glasgow since April.

23. Is this your report or is it the report of the group or the campaigners? Is it your report or is it the campaign=s report?

(Mr D=Souza) It is both. There is a saveourpool.co.uk website which has more details.

24. You say that ethnic females for religious reasons are not able to be in open public areas; that is well known. Is there nowhere else in the vicinity where members of the ethnic community can swim?

(Mr D=Souza) That has been the problem with new pools. They are glass fronted buildings, they do cost more to heat and there are no other facilities for ethnic minorities. I understand ethnic women cannot swim in public areas like the new pools.

25. Are there no other facilities within this area?

(Mr D=Souza) This is why we are surprised they closed the pool without creating any such provision for such ethnic minorities as Govanhill Pool was very popular for use by ethnic minorities.

26. I know that the City Council did say in their response during the campaign that a lot of consultation had taken place. Obviously they are not here to answer the charges you make in your submission. Is that not the case that consultation took place?

(Mr D=Souza) The public rhetoric from the Council has been that there has been public consultation. However, there has been no effective public consultation. They have appointed someone to carry out a feasibility study, to undertake public consultation, but frankly anything which involves are-using the three pools is not in their remit for consideration therefore they have not been willing to consider any submissions for that. That has been part of the problem. There has not been proper discussion with the local community or in general about the swimming provision and the actual usage of these pools. That is an important part of the problem and across the board there needs to be a proper consultation with the community before closure so that we can work out C

27. Are you saying Glasgow City did not?

(Mr D=Souza) It has not consulted at all with the local community about closure.

Alan Keen

28. Everyone is giving their qualifications for asking questions. I learned to swim when I was ten, swam one length and never attained that feat ever again. I find water still gets up my nose. Is it possible to generalise? How do the costs compare between using the beautiful old buildings for other leisure purposes and building a new pool on another site? We do not want to lose the buildings, but it is usually very expensive to keep the water from draining away.

(Mr Velluet) I do not want to seem evasive, but it is very difficult making generalised comments about comparability of repairing an old building, which has been kept in very good condition by its owner over the years and in use, with an historical building lacking in maintenance investment and which is in disrepair or disused and comparing that in turn with the cost of a new build on a new site, site acquisition and all the rest of it. It is very difficult to make comparisons other than looking case by case and doing it very, very carefully. I would accept that in many cases to repair a one-hundred-year-old building could cost more per square metre than the repair of a more modern building or the maintenance cost may be higher but one cannot set that down as an absolute. The listed building issue is one which in terms of the agenda for grant assistance and in terms of what can change, how it can be adapted, that agenda is set by government in a document called PPG15. It is about retaining, preserving listed buildings a basic presumption to preserve them, but also to invest in them and adapt them. Just looking at the flexibility on adaptation for example, in the London context 95 per cent of all listed building consent applications made to London boroughs are approved and about 2.5 to 5 per cent are refused; others disappear off the edge. The vast bulk of proposals for changes to listed buildings nationally are approved by local authorities generally with our support. It depends on who advises, what the resource is from the partners, the owner, and it may well be that the way forward on a 100-year-old listed swimming pool building may be a partnership arrangement between the local authority and a private concern. We have seen that in the case of the Richmond pools in Richmond-upon-Thames in London, which were under threat and where there was a very, very positive coming together of private sector and the local authority to sort that one out. That was a 1960s building interestingly and quite often 1960s buildings can have a far better maintenance burden and repair burden than Victorian buildings. Every case must be looked at separately, but the grants regime we operate outside London regrettably is targeted primarily at Grade Is and Grade II*s which are the fewer. That is intended channelling of government money towards the extra burden element which may run with the repair of a listed building. One cannot make the simple equation that an old building or a listed building is necessarily more expensive at all times to keep in good condition than a modern building. Much depends on the level of investment which has been given over the years to that building.

29. Have any of you thought or is it possible that the building could be converted to an alternative use more cheaply than a pool being built somewhere else with financial help from elsewhere?

(Ms Corr) In the case of Marshall Street, swimming is the most popular use for that building. It was immensely popular. It was immensely popular because it is in the centre of dense population where loads of people live and work. It could not be replaced by a pool somewhere else, because it is where the people are and that is probably true of quite a lot of these inner city pools. Also the money needed after the contribution of the private sector was ,2 million. I do not know what sort of new pool you could build for ,2 million. It has two pools, one of which has been out of use for a long time. We looked with a group of students at how it could be made to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act. It was quite easy to convert the second pool into a warmer accessible pool with a ramp so that it could be used for children and for disabled people. Marshall Street actually only has one shallow step at the entrance, otherwise it is all on one level and a changing room which would be very easy to convert for disabled users.

(Ms Clark) May I refer you to the handouts you have all received which show the Shoreditch Our Way which used to be Shoreditch New Deal Trust proposal which is to use the site very flexibly including housing development, GP development and a healthy living centre to provide a ,2 million cross-subsidy to are-open the baths and a central source of revenue to subsidise it. Those proposals have been worked up and are going to be put to Hackney, but that is a way of getting the pool back into use, retaining the heritage features of it and retaining a lot of the community aspects of it while bringing it into the modern era.

30. I used to visit a mill regularly in Hollingsworth in Oldham and we used to go to Chariton Swimming Baths at lunch times. Do they still exist or not?

(Ms Wright) You have me there. I am afraid I do not know. We have looked at various options for Victoria Baths too and our intention is to use some of the space for other developments. There is a golden opportunity in bringing the pools back into use. Three out of four of us come from very, very deprived wards, Ardwick where Manchester Victoria Baths are situated is the twenty-ninth most deprived ward in the country, very high levels of deprivation. You have evidence before you of how the achievement of the target for swimming in Key Stage 2 is much lower when you have a high rate of free school meals. Poorer children do not learn to swim and richer children do. It is obvious why: their parents can take them to swimming lessons. If you are relying on the provision within schools, within Manchester you have one year provision in schools and our children are taught in a class of 30. One swimming teacher for 30 children is about one minute of time for the teacher each lesson for one year. It is not surprising that a lot of them do not learn to swim when that is the level of provision they are relying on in schools. If the local facilities are not there, that could be all they get. Coming back to the issue of transport, if you want to keep swimming where it is now or continue to go backwards, which we are, and restrict swimming to richer families, to able bodied people, to people who can travel, then fine. Go for big fancy new centralised facilities, but you are restricting it, there is no doubt about that. You are depriving poorer families, you are depriving disabled people and older people of access to an activity which could have massive benefits for their health. I want to say in terms of neighbourhood regeneration that many of us here are from very deprived wards. I would argue that in terms of neighbourhood regeneration one of the biggest resources is the people who live there. We are all here because we believe passionately that there is an opportunity to lead regeneration through our swimming pools. We are not being allowed to do that at the moment. If we do not do that a golden opportunity has been lost.

(Ms Clark) May I quote one of our local schools, when we closed the head teacher said they used to go swimming once a week as part of the national curriculum and asked where they were supposed to go now. They used to take children swimming, they would walk to the pool. Britannia is 25 minutes walk away which is too far. They also used to hold galas and lifesaving classes at Haggerston. That is repeated in school after school and I cannot stress the impact of taking it off the curriculum. They cannot afford the coaches to go to the pools, albeit two miles away. It has a devastating effect on our children.

Mr Doran

(Mr Velluet) We are undertaking a pilot study in the North West Region about a whole range of sporting facilities and the heritage and the interconnection between the two and a great deal might be learned from that which has application across all the nine regions. The challenge is linking recognition of individual buildings, not necessarily listed buildings because there are only 79 which are listed in England, but all those municipal buildings which have a continuing community need and function and how they are to be effectively conserved and invested in by their local communities, local authorities and grants and other sources of funding tapped most effectively. For instance on heritage type building, including listed buildings one would need to look at the extent and scope of our grants regime, look at the extent to which the Heritage Lottery Fund may take a leading role and see how that partnering could be best effected, together with SRB money, central government funding and other funding available to local authorities plus the private sector. Within each local authority area there needs to be some kind of bringing together first of all of recognition that that community facility matters, not simply as a listed building for which government urges us to have regard to and preserve, but as a community facility and to keep it in use. The chances are, in terms of real money, it is far better using an existing building and repairing that than trying to find a new site and building a new building, probably on a smaller scale than that which presently exists and looking at ways of tapping each of those other sources of funding in a way which levers maximum benefit, in a way which gets the greatest benefit from each of the authorities. HLF and Sport Council need to be talking to each other. In the arts field we still have very few projects which are a fusion of Arts Council funding and Heritage Lottery Funding. Similarly in the sports field there is scope to look at the joint funding of those two bodies together where appropriate, where they are able under legislation, to contribute H funding. It is about co-ordination on a regional basis and a local basis and I hope our study in the North West on this whole connection between sport and heritage can contribute to that. Those issues are just one part of it; the bigger issue is that of linking it through to community need.

(Mr D=Souza) We need an holistic approach to swimming and that is part of the problem; it has been very fragmented and disjointed. You will see a picture on the front of my report. That is one of the swimming groups which has been moved to a swimming pool five miles away and only half the group is now actually swimming. Swimming is one of the most popular sports in the country and it is something which is very valued in communities that people have access to. Certainly learning from Australia which I have recently visited, there is support all the way through, not only for swimming clubs but right up to Olympic athletes. Swimming is at a crisis stage after years of neglect but if we do not invest now we shall be looking in 50 years= time like we are with tennis at the moment and saying ADo you remember the days when we used to win medals at swimming?@. We do not really want to reach that stage. We want to do something about it now.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Two things at least have emerged from this. One is the high passions which are raised by public feelings about these building. The second is that Gill Wright has referred to maintaining and restoring these buildings as, among other things, urban regeneration. There is also the opposite aspect, namely urban degeneration when these buildings are lost, not only historic buildings of the kind we have been discussing today but I might as well say Gorton Tub at the other end of my constituency which the council wantonly closed down, where the only disabled facility of its type in the whole city was lost and where the disabled were told if they did not like it they could travel four miles to another local authority for the facilities. Thank you very much indeed.

Memoranda submitted by the Amateur Swimming Association, Sport England and the Institute of Sport and Recreation Management

Examination of Witnesses

MR DAVID SPARKES, Chief Executive, MR NOEL WINTER, Facilities Officer and MR KELVIN JUBA, the Amateur Swimming Association, MR DAVID CARPENTER, Director, Lottery Co-ordination and More Medals and MR DAVID PAYNE, Director More Places Directorate, Sport England and MR RALPH RILEY, Chief Executive, the Institute of Sport and Recreation Management, examined.

Chairman: Gentlemen, I should like to welcome you here this morning. We shall go straight into questioning.

Derek Wyatt

32. May I ask David Sparkes a question? We did not do brilliantly well at the Olympics in swimming. What do you put that down to?

(Mr Sparkes) A number of things. I should like to make the point that it would be true to say that this was our most disappointing Olympics for some time. You will find that since 1936, this nation has come back from every Olympic Games with a medal in the swimming pool. Perhaps I might remind the Committee that 50 per cent of all Paralympic medals came from the swimming pool. As a governing body we are totally committed to working with the Paralympic movement as well. In a sense you are right, the Olympics were a disappointment. There were several factors which I would ask the Committee to bear in mind. We have only had significant lottery funding for a short period of time. We always said that it would take us a long time to get there. There are several factors. Obviously we need talented athletes and the Committee will meet some of our past talented athletes today. We need talented coaches and our coaches have been starved of cash and starved of opportunity. We need facilities we can access at the right time and the right cost, 50-metre facilities, so that we can take on the world. Perhaps it might surprise this Committee to know that there are 170 nations which seriously swim. To get a medal in the Olympic swimming pool, particularly when you are in Sydney, in Australia, where swimming is a religion - I say that in the nicest possible way ... I sat and watched the Paralympics with 17,000 crazy Australians cheering Paralympic swimmers. It was a moving experience. I saw the Olympics as well and it was just as moving but it was difficult to get medals. We recognise it was a disappointment but we have turned the corner. We went to Fukuoka and we came back with seven medals; in fact I believe it was our best World Championship since 1975 or 1976. It was a good turning point. We have a new head coach. He is Australian. He has started to change the way we think and we believe we are on the turn.

33. I want more medals. I am greedy.

(Mr Sparkes) So do I.

34. If you look at the base, we had a discussion about athletes, as you may know and have had it several times over the last couple of years. What is it that you want to create even more medals? How many centres of excellence, how do you get them funded, have you been asked by the Sports Minister how much you really want so you can for ever have a rolling medal stream?

(Mr Sparkes) The honest answer to that is that what we want is access to swimming pools which is affordable and at the right time and I do not mean just for the elite. For us to be successful, we have to consider the youngsters who are in every swimming club and there are around 2,000 swimming clubs up and down this country, who are doing an excellent job with volunteers. They have to get into that water as well and work effectively. We are fighting all the time to get access to public facilities at affordable prices. What we have to do is to connect the good work of the swimming clubs right the way through to the elite end. Yes, we need more 50-metre swimming pools. As a nation we are absolutely starved of 50-metre swimming pools.

35. How many do we have?

(Mr Sparkes) By the end of 2002 we shall have 19, which is about the same as they have in Greater Paris.

36. Do they not have 750 in Australia?

(Mr Sparkes) They have an awful lot but some of them are outdoors. By direct comparison, indoor to indoor, we are as a nation under-provided for with 50-metre pools. It is not just having the pool, it is having the ability to access that pool.

37. In my slightly wider community a blind swimmer got a bronze medal. I think he lived in Dover but he had to find a public school in Brentwood to get swimming. He left at four in the morning, his girlfriend drove him across the bridge, it was ridiculous. He got a bronze and it is amazing but that is just not on, is it?

(Mr Sparkes) No. All you have done is demonstrate that it is about accessing the facility at affordable prices at the right time of day.

38. Then able-bodied swimmers say to me that they cannot get in to swim at the right time because it is not their pool, it is the local authority=s.

(Mr Sparkes) Correct.

39. How do we break this?

(Mr Sparkes) We have to create a culture where the elite can survive alongside the community. It is about having a swimming strategy.

40. Do we have one?

(Mr Sparkes) I have to say that the previous speakers demonstrated this particularly. The local authority has to have a strategy which says swimming is a popular sport. There are 11.9 million people who swim regularly in this country. That is an awful lot of people. It is the most popular sport with young people. It is number one with young ladies. It is number two with boys; I will not give any prizes for guessing what is number one. At the end of the day they want to swim and the local authority have to provide a strategy which says, this is about how we are going to do parent and children classes, this is how we are going to deliver swimming for schools, this is how we are going to help the clubs, the voluntary sector, this is how we are going to help the elite.

Chairman

41. What about social exclusion as well? Could you say something about that?

(Mr Sparkes) I believe swimming is ideally suited to deal with issues of social exclusion because it is relatively speaking - relatively - a cheap sport. You do not need an awful lot of equipment. Clubs are essentially voluntary units and we believe that we are ideally suited to bringing the socially excluded into pools. We know that where we operate in inner city areas where there are high ethnic communities, they come in to learn to swim to some degree. What we have not yet done is got them to connect with the elite end of the sport and that is a challenge on us, which we are working on.

Derek Wyatt

42. How many local authorities do not have a swimming strategy?

(Mr Sparkes) Quite a lot of local authorities do not have a swimming strategy. One of the first local authorities which developed a swimming strategy was Leeds. It would not be a surprise that Leeds has produced a number of interesting and exciting swimmers, Adrian Moorhouse is probably the most well-known example. Leeds had a total strategy. What we are now trying to do is to encourage more and more local authorities to have this strategy so that they actually see how they are going to deliver swimming. It also demonstrates what their facility requirements are. Do they need more community pools? Do they need a 50-metre pool? How are they going to meet the needs of their community?

43. On the Isle of Sheppey where I am, which is an island - I know we are an island nation - we have a pool which is just falling to pieces. It leaks, it has concrete fatigue, the local authority cannot afford to rebuild it or replace it so we shall not have a swimming pool for 35,000 people which at the weekend doubles to 70,000 people because we have a lot of caravan sites and the Eastenders come down to their caravans. We will not have a swimming pool on the island. Should there not just be a strategy that per head of population, like France does with its tennis and athletics and its swimming, there should be a certain type of pool which should be available for which the state should pay.

(Mr Sparkes) I would agree with you that there should be a swimming pool on the island because there should be local community pools which people can access. They should be basic 25-metre pools to suit the needs of the community and to accommodate swimming in schools through the education programme. That is why we believe it should be a total strategy, not one which sits here for the local authority and here for education, but they should be locked together.

44. I thought the Government published a sports strategy two years ago? Where was swimming in that?

(Mr Sparkes) Swimming was addressed within the sports strategy but not specifically addressed because it was a general sports strategy.

45. Is there a strategy at all then?

(Mr Sparkes) If you read our facility strategy, which we worked on with Sport England, that says develop a strategy for swimming, see what the needs of your community are, from that strategy will evolve your facility requirements. I believe that is what we can have.

Chairman: This has been a very useful Socratic dialogue but we do have six witnesses and we should like to hear from all of them.

Alan Keen

46. We have become experts here on the national football and athletics stadium. I did hear a couple of years ago that you were really looking for a national swimming centre, which you do not really have, do you? Would that help?

(Mr Juba) One of the reasons I am here today is because I am carrying out research into swimmers right across the country and that partly includes provision for school swimming. What school swimming is showing us at the moment is that fewer children are having the opportunity to go swimming, particularly those children who cannot afford to go swimming. Moreover, one of the things I am noticing on visiting the pools is the degree to which ethnic groups are not present in these pools and do not have the opportunity to swim. This is a real problem that swimming and swimming pool operators are going to have to address in the future. I reckon at this stage that probably less than two per cent of people who are swimming are from ethnic groups around the country which is a really very small percentage. There are many other issues at the moment over swimming pools which are being driven by the new commercially operated nature of pools in terms of privatisation, for instance. It is extremely difficult. I believe children are being marginalised in swimming pools because per square foot they are not worth as much as adults. Therefore, there is a continued movement towards adult lane swimming and fitness which is highly desirable but what it does is decreases the opportunity for children to swim across widths. There is more adult swimming during the day. These are some of the issues which need to be considered, particularly with school swimming. Many school pools are closing because schools just cannot afford to keep them up, the local management of schools has made it increasingly difficult for schools to deliver on Key Stage 2. Underneath the kind of competitive area of swimming there is a whole raft of difficulties for swimming as an activity which will impact eventually on our international performance. Another example is the increased number of drownings which were seen between 1998 and 1999: 54 per cent in people under the age of 14 or 15; I am not quite sure of the year. While we stand up quite well compared with other EC countries, this is obviously something which needs to be considered. We need to look at ways in which we can give children the maximum opportunity to swim, the opportunity to enter the sport of swimming to enjoy it, but above all to be safe in it. These are all issues which need to be addressed by swimming pool operators or perhaps people who are delivering the contracts to swimming pool operators. With the greater drive to commercialisation, it does not make sense for a swimming pool operator to spend more time servicing a low value customer which generally is a child.

(Mr Payne) May I respond to the question of what needs to be done and address what is the single biggest issue about swimming pool facilities. Mr Wyatt has commented on the provision of the pool on the Isle of Sheppey. The single biggest issue we have in swimming pool facilities is the modernisation of existing pools. I think it was Mr Wyatt who mentioned the figure of ,5 billion. The survey work we did in Sport England identified that the cost of bringing the existing 1960s and 1970s stock of swimming pools, which was the building boom for swimming pools, is around ,2 billion to modernise that stock of facilities. To put that into context, Sport England, through the Lottery Fund, is currently funding 121 swimming pool projects. It is the single biggest sport in which we have invested the most money in terms of the Lottery. We have invested ,220 million and that has created additional funding of ,160 million. Collectively with partners we have put in ,380 million. That sits against a demand and need to modernise that 1960s and 1970s stock at a cost of ,2 billion. The initiative Sport England took earlier this year as part of the Treasury=s capital modernisation fund was to put in a bid to the capital modernisation fund for a specific programme which is about modernisation of these community facilities. Unfortunately we have heard in the last few days that that bid has been rejected by Treasury. We feel we are doing quite a lot with the resources we have within the Lottery to address this issue. We consider that the scale of the problem and the scale of the need is far greater and that is why we took the initiative with Treasury through the capital modernisation programme. We would suggest that is the single biggest issue in pool provision we are facing as a country.

Chairman: So that is ,220 million for all those swimming pools as against ,120 million for Wembley Stadium which has not been built.

Mr Flook

48. I note that the USA is one of the world=s leading swimming nations, primarily because their strength is built around swimming teams based at universities. One of the most impressive and thought out submissions we have received - I have certainly seen anyway - was that from Northampton who are looking at putting together a new swimming centre around University College in Northampton, so bringing together sports education, competition at top level and exercise swimming. My point is that seemed like very good value for ,7.5 million. Would you believe that is good value?

(Mr Winter) Yes, the scheme which is being talked about at Northampton is good value for money at ,7.5million. It provides a 50-metre pool, which is of a flexible design. It has movable floors, it has a bulkhead which can separate the 50-metre pool into two 25-metre pools. By doing that you can actually begin to accommodate the needs of the whole of the community. You can have your elite swimmers using it as a 50-metre pool early in the morning with four or five of those eight lanes, which Northampton is, being used by elite swimmers and four or five of those lanes in the early morning being used by the members of the public who want to do lane swimming for fitness purposes. Later on in the day you can then split that pool into two 25-metre pools and then you can have community swimming taking place in one part of the pool, in one 25-metre pool and in the other part of the pool you can have elite swimming again training. What it will do is provide elite swimmers with training at the times they require. If you train in the morning at six o=clock, then you cannot be training at nine or ten o=clock at night; you have to train at four or five o=clock at night. It gives the elite swimmers the opportunity to train twice a day, once in the 50-metre lanes, which is what we require, and once in 25-metre lanes which is the supplementary to training in the 50-metre lanes. Yes it is a good scheme. What I have to say is that we cannot necessarily compare ourselves completely with the United States. Our swimming is based upon the club situation. It is the small clubs around the universities and around those 50-metre pools which do the basic work with the swimmers and bring them up to a certain standard before they can get to the elite. This is what David said before.

49. So that as a template still works, because I am told Northampton swimming club is very well organised.

(Mr Winter) Yes, it will work.

50. How many other Northamptons could there be?

(Mr Winter) There could be a lot of Northamptons. What I would go back and say is that you have to remember that Northampton University are looking at it as all the swimming in Northamptonshire, not just the city of Northampton but the whole of Northamptonshire. You have to be careful if you go down the road of putting all your 50-metre pools into universities that they do not become for university and student use only, but are still there so that they can begin to cope with the needs of the local swimming clubs and the general community needs.

51. A large element of the submission from Northampton is that it is not going to be used for the university but actually for the town and the hinterland around the town.

(Mr Winter) Yes, that is correct in Northampton and it is a template for that sort of development.

Michael Fabricant

52. I have been looking at the submission which was made by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and there are a couple of interesting passages. They say that prior to Sydney swimming was classified as a priority one sport by UK Sport for the purposes of funding. Following the disappointing results of the 2000 Olympics, where Britain failed to win a medal, swimming became a priority two sport and its level of funding was cut. They went on to say that in fact the swimming events in Sydney were the toughest that had happened anywhere with 15 world records being broken. It was a pretty tough competition. It strikes me as being a bit odd that if we are going to put any money into a sport, when we do not do so well, we then put less money into it. I should have thought it would be more logical to put more money into it. Perhaps Mr Carpenter would like to comment on that.

(Mr Carpenter) It is a question of the funding we have available. UK Sport looked at the priorities relating to both the Olympic medals which were won in Sydney and the likelihood of medal success in the future. What was decided was that there would be four level one sports, another four at level two. Swimming was originally classified at level one, but because of the results in Sydney and the expectation of future C

53. You have given up on them.

(Mr Carpenter) No, not at all, far from it; in fact completely the opposite. Swimming against the other sports and against the current medal potential, was assessed to be a level two sport. That said, there is still very, very significant investment going into swimming, in fact if anything the performance programmes have been enhanced since Sydney with the introduction of the world class potential and the world class start programmes which we are funding quite significantly. Whereas prior to Sydney there was probably something of the order of ,1.5 million going into the performance programme, the figure now is up near the ,3.5 to ,4 million mark if you take the other programmes which have come on stream into account. We are far from dismissing swimming as being one of the priorities. Swimming is one of the fundamentals of the Olympic Games in particular and we shall continue and indeed UK Sport will continue to support them heavily.

54. I am still not quite sure. Are you saying that the fact they have become a level two funded sport has nothing to do with the results at the Olympics?

(Mr Carpenter) No, it does have a bearing in terms of the results from Sydney, but also in the immediate post-Olympic period after Sydney we and UK Sport carried out a very, very detailed survey of prospects for the future and indeed looking at the performances and the positions where the particular programmes were across each sport, a very, very detailed monitoring and evaluation study. The decisions which were reached were based on medal prospects for the immediate future and indeed medal prospects for the long-term future. Our feeling was with UK Sport that there were some other sports such as rowing and sailing for example which were probably likely to be medal heavier in the immediate future; swimming perhaps was one which was going to come through in the longer term. There is no reduction in commitment.

55. Is there a correlation between the amount of money invested and the amount - to use your English, which is rather nice - of Amedaling@ which can come about?

(Mr Carpenter) There is a correlation in terms of funding, but it has to be backed by the right performance programmes, the right performance director, the right coaches, the right support services in terms of pools and indeed backed by the athletes themselves.

56. Are you saying if you put more money in they would not know what to do with it?

(Mr Carpenter) No; not necessarily. There is no question that if further funding were made available, swimming would be able to make good use of it. We have to make decisions based on the priorities and the likelihood of individual sports winning medals. That is the decision-making process. We do not have a never ending trough of funding, as you are well aware, in terms of the Lottery money coming down, both on the capital and revenue side, so we had to look at the priorities and we are funding swimming at a level which we feel is sufficient for them to continue development.

57. Mr Payne said that he thought the biggest need is to refurbish existing facilities and I suspect he is right. Also in this DCMS report it says that the Government believes it is for local authorities to ensure that spatial development plans - whatever that means - and local sports development policies reflect the importance of swimming and set aside sufficient investment to improve or if necessary replace existing facilities which was the point Mr Payne was making. Do you think local authorities have the money to do this?

(Mr Payne) I would suggest that they very much have the money to do the strategies. Only around 30 per cent of local authorities in England have produced sport and recreation strategies, probably an even smaller number have produced swimming strategies. I cannot consider that there is insufficient funding to do the strategies to identify the need which must be the first step. I would agree that there is insufficient funding to look at the new provision requirements arising from that strategy and also to look at modernising the community aspect angles of local pools being very much a community resource. There is insufficient funding. What I would say is that in terms of the Lottery investment, swimming has been the sport which has benefited most in terms of total capital investment.

Mr Bryant

58. I am amused by some of your titles. I like the More Places Directorate and the More Medals Directorate. These are lovely titles; very Orwellian. It seems to me that swimming is a sport where there are more conflicts between the different kinds of swimming people engage in than in any other sport available, whether it is leisure swimming because people want to go down flumes, or it is lane swimming where you want to kill any child who gets anywhere near you or swimming in front of you and where one day you are going to have to develop a code of conduct for swimming in lanes.

(Mr Riley) We have one.

Mr Bryant: Excellent. Aquaslides, the problems ethnic minorities have in terms of making sure that the Hasidic Jewish community can have access to swimming pools and so on, all of these things.

Chairman: Particularly ethnic minority women.

Mr Bryant

59. Indeed. We have not mentioned water polo and diving yet either. How does one resolve all those conflicts in swimming today?

(Mr Riley) Pool managers try to do that by programming. We programme our pools more today than we ever have in the past. By programming, we look at what the needs are, we look at trying to meet those needs and programme the pool in terms of time slots to accommodate the needs. It is always going to be a compromise. The sad fact is that we do not have sufficient water space, we have insufficient pools. I take Mr Wyatt=s point earlier on: we ought to have invested a lot more money in the infrastructure of pools in this country a long time ago. If we had more pools, then all those tensions you are talking about would not be present.

60. As far as I can see in London water polo can probably only use two pools regularly, which is why we hardly have water polo teams in London. Would that be fair?

(Mr Winter) Yes, there are two pools which provide deep water pitches; one is Gurnell pool at Ealing and the other is Crystal Palace, yet Gurnell pool does not provide an international sized water polo pitch. This is why, when we advise local authorities on the design of swimming pools, we ask them to be as flexible as possible in the design, which is the use of movable floors so you can actually get deep water in the same pool as can also be used for mothers and toddler classes as well. A prime example would be the diving pool in the Manchester Aquatic Centre, which has a movable floor so that it is available for 10-metre diving, it is used for water polo on a regular basis because it provides deep water and it is also used for the teaching of swimming as well. Cambridge have a similar pool and so do Southampton. We advocate pools which can be used flexibly so they can help with the programming which Mr Riley has just been talking about. That way you can almost get a quart into a pint pot.

61. Archimedes springs to mind. Then it seems to me the difficulty is that for many local authorities who primarily want to be able to provide a local swimming alternative for families, the flume option became the thing of the 1980s and 1990s which in many cases does not allow for lane swimming at all and I think it is true that Swiss Cottage was deliberately built one inch short so that it could not be used for competitive swimming.

(Mr Winter) I do not think that is quite correct.

62. That is what they maintain.

(Mr Winter) That is a claim wherever you are. I remember when I worked in Manchester that the Withenshawe pool in Manchester was said to be slightly short for international events. In fact it was something like 14 metres short for international events.

63. Indeed the swimming pool in High Wycombe was built as a 50-metre pool, but then the council decided to put a wall up half way down it because all the parents wanted to have a special area for kids and that wall is meant to be movable, but it has never moved.

(Mr Riley) Not to deride the aspect of leisure pools, leisure pools have a place, particularly in introducing children to swimming and to water so they can enjoy it, they can get fun from it and from that they can then progress to competitive swimming.

64. I notice that in the Sport England memorandum it says that there are currently in excess of 3,000 swimming pools in England alone. I am a Welsh MP, so I do not know how many there are in Wales as well. Then in the DCMS report it says that there are currently around 1,400 public swimming and leisure pools in England, which means that more than 50 per cent of the swimming pools in Britain are not public ones. Is there any way in which local authorities or government could make sure that all these new swimming pools which are being built by David Lloyd and the private sector could have times of the day when they are available to swimming clubs and things? A private/public partnership.

65. From the evidence we have heard both now and earlier this morning and indeed from my own experience running a leisure company in a past life, it seems there are very different requirements by very different groups of people which we have just been talking about. There is the leisure side, which requires a different shape of pool, a completely different way of running it, the health side is quite different when you are into water therapy, thalassotherapy, whatever it may be and of course the one you are perhaps most interested in, which is the dedicated sport side. The word Mr Riley used was that it has to be a compromise. My question is: does it have to be a compromise at all? Should we not in fact be looking at a national strategy rather than lots of local strategies, which actually says the elite does not have to operate with everybody else. If we want an elite we have to create facilities for an elite. In that regard, if you agree - maybe you do not - who should be responsible for that strategy, which also begs the question: what is the role of government in all this?

(Mr Sparkes) We have developed a national facility strategy and we have worked on it with Sport England. What we have done is identified the need for competition facilities, for example, we have identified the need for training facilities, we have identified the need for eight-lane 25-metre facilities in every county, in every large urban area. At the end of the day, when it comes down to it and you look at a specific area to meet the community needs, it has to be a community based decision because you have to look at transport, you have to look at where the community now sits. There are many swimming pools and some of them might be in the wrong place now in terms of where the communities are they serve, in terms of where the transportation runs. Those are the issues which have to be developed locally. From our point of view we can say to you that yes, there is a need for more 50-metre pools, yes there is a need for more eight-lane 25-metre pools in counties and in large conurbations. We can tell you that now and that is in a document we can provide you with. The important point there is what we cannot do is make decisions about local community needs. All we can do is say these are the issues that local community needs to consider in deciding what its facility requirements are.

66. Is that not precisely the compromise which is that you say here is a need, but by the way we cannot do anything about it, we have to hand it over to somebody else which will inevitably compromise it?

(Mr Sparkes) We do help and that is what my colleague Noel Winter does. He is working all the time with local authorities, helping and guiding them into deciding what facilities they need to meet their local requirements, very often helping them through that thought process.

(Mr Winter) I get asked by local authorities to talk to them about Lottery bids or new swimming developments. The first question I ask the local authority is who they want to use the facility, who is going to use the facility. Quite often they do not have an idea. They say they want a 25-metre six-lane pool for whatever it is and I have to go back and ask them how they are going to use it, how it meets the general needs of the community, where their swimming strategy is. Then we start talking to them about developing swimming strategies and look at what they have already and see how the new facilities are going to complement what they have already. It seems wrong to me that if you look at large city, every swimming pool should be a rectangular pool where people can swim up and down. There is a need for leisure facilities and we do not argue against leisure facilities. What we believe is that they should complement the existing facilities so that within large areas or even in small areas there is something which can meet all the needs.

67. Forgive me, what I am driving at is something which is slightly different which is the point that if you want to win medals and gold medals regularly at Olympic Games, you need dedicated facilities which actually do not have anybody else coming into them. If you are going to do that you cannot go and talk to local authorities because no local authority, with the possible exception of London, is capable either of wanting it or delivering it. Therefore you are outside local authorities and you are talking to national government.

(Mr Sparkes) We are with you now. I am sorry we probably did misunderstand the question. You are absolutely right that in terms of training facilities for what we need it has to be a national strategy. We have tried to identify that we need a network of 50-metre pools - and I come back to the point where I started - that we can access at the right time at affordable prices. If we were in Australia, it would probably be free because there is a culture of wanting to provide that facility. The one issue which was interesting was that when we talked about our Lottery grant it was very hard to compare our Lottery grant with other sports because we commit such a significant proportion of our Lottery grant to hiring facilities to perform our sport. That is an issue. I agree with Mr Fabricant. It is perverse that because we do not do well, you cut our grant. That is absolutely perverse. If anything it should have been increased. Be assured I told them that. If you were doing that same assessment today, given the performance of athletics at Edmonton and the performance at Fukuoka it would be the other way round. We are making short-term decisions which are just daft. It is typical of what we do. Instead of saying this is going to take a long time, because as a nation we have under-invested in sport, because we are a long way behind the rest of the world, we have to make a long-term commitment and investment. We have to do it and stay with it and stick with it. If we want to win medals at the Olympics, it is not a quick fix, it is a long-term investment. Yes, we do want facilities we can get into. There are facilities out there now, 50-metre pools, which we cannot afford to access. Aldershot is a facility which was partly funded by the Ministry of Defence. We cannot afford to access it. The University of East Anglia, we cannot afford to access it.

68. Why?

(Mr Sparkes) Because the cost of hiring is too high.

Ms Shipley

69. It seems very clear to me that the swimming strategy will be something which will feature in our report, so much has been brought up: health, social inclusion, leisure, national, international excellence. So much of this has revolved around having more money, except for the contribution by Mr Juba who said the privatisation of pools and the delivering of the contracts and who is setting up those contracts is having a significant effect on children=s ability to get what they need out of the pools.

(Mr Juba) And adults.

70. I should like you to expand on that.

(Mr Juba) Some of the issues as I have been going round the country are that certainly swimming clubs are finding it extremely difficult to pay their way, increasingly so. Anita Lonsbrough alluded to this in the paper she put forward. It is also worth noting that the price of pool entry in the period between 1998 and 2001 has increased about ,1.30 and ,2.30 on average, depending on which part of the country you are in and which local authority you are in. This is bound to have an impact on those who cannot afford to go in. We are back to these issues of social exclusion and the difficulties for ethnic groups and the whole area. The funnel of swimmers is much smaller than it possibly might be.

71. Who is responsible for these contracts at the moment?

(Mr Riley) The local authority.

(Mr Juba) Yes.

72. So you are saying that the local authority is not paying enough attention to those who cannot afford to come in and therefore the privatised companies in these leisure facilities are targeting the richest groups of people, basically working adults.

(Mr Riley) It is the financial pressure the local authorities are under to meet a bottom line. It started with competitive tendering. That drove interest towards the financial bottom line. Although competitive tendering has gone away we now have best value but those financial restrictions are still there on local authorities and they have to try to make as much money as they can from those services whilst still providing a community need. That is part of that compromise again.

73. So the bottom line is exactly what I have just said. By the contracts they are writing, they are actually, by default if you like, targeting working adults.

(Mr Riley) Apart from a few local authorities which these days are giving free swimming to local children.

(Mr Juba) It is a natural dichotomy.

74. It is a disgrace, is it not, that working adults who could probably pay to go privately cannot actually access the so-called community based ones or they are getting squeezed out of them? If you are poorer, lower income, child, teenager what have you, you are being squeezed out because of the way these contracts are being necessarily written.

(Mr Juba) Indeed many of the adults who do go to public pools also go to private pools, which is what my study is showing.

Mr Doran

75. An observation. Until this Committee established their inquiry to be honest swimming had not figured on my radar, apart from my own interest in sports and the fact that I occasionally go swimming. I had not really thought about structures. Reading through the evidence has been fascinating and I now see just how important it is at a whole range of levels. It did worry me when reading the reports and hearing the evidence today, particularly from the ASA. There are lots of interesting things in here but I could not work out whether this was a strategy or a wish list. As a politician we go back to basics and the fact that I had not really seen swimming on my radar suggests to me a lack of campaigning zeal which has me a little worried about the question of whether there is a strategy and how you go about selling that strategy. As a fairly active politician, I am not aware of it, or at least I was not until this inquiry was established. I should like to hear a little more about how you press your case, particularly with government and just who the evangelists are in the sport.

(Mr Sparkes) I suppose really the bulk of our work is done at local authority level because at the end of the day they are the providers. We have a team of ten regional development officers, apart from the advice from Sport England, and their job is to work with local authorities to develop swimming strategies. That includes making sure that there are links between the education programme and our voluntary club programme and a link towards the elite end of the sport and that every aspect of the sport is catered for. We find that by working with people in that way we can develop our strong strategies with them locally, which they then buy into. In terms of our strategy at the top level, which is our requirement for competition pools, our requirement for training facilities, that is very much done with Sport England by talking to them. Again, an essential ingredient in that is a partner, a local authority, prepared to commit to that facility expenditure and Sport England are in a sense funders of that through the Lottery if they see that as a step in our strategic plan.

(Mr Riley) To put that into context, local authorities put in over ,0.5 billion every year to operate. Really I should say the champions are the local authorities and the commitments and the belief that they show in providing and operating those facilities for the communities they serve. It costs an awful lot of money but local authorities recognise the benefits they bring to the societies they serve.

(Mr Sparkes) There is one particular area of the country which has a particular problem and that is London. The particular problem of London is that because London tends to work through its various boroughs, which are themselves relatively small and have in some cases big areas of deprivation within them, although London is perceived to be wealthy there is a lot of deprivation. They are finding it very difficult now. If you look at London and compare it to Paris where there are 21 50-metre pools and you look at London with Ealing and Crystal Palace, it demonstrates that there is a need in London itself for a wholly fresh, new approach and a strategic approach to say London needs to have a proper swimming strategy. We have approached the GLA who have a few other problems on their plate like an Underground to sort out. The point is that there is a need there in a particular case. I thought I should mention that because it is a very specific problem.

76. You heard the evidence earlier that all over the country there are historic pools in difficulty. We shall be hearing later from some of the people who were the superstars of your sport. I am still not conscious of any national strategy developed by yourselves to raise the profile of your sport to get the national attention you clearly need, if the major projects you have all talked about in your evidence are ever going to be delivered. How often do you knock on the Sports Minister=s door for example?

(Mr Sparkes) With the previous Sports Minister quite often, but I have yet to meet the new one.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We are most grateful to you, gentlemen. We shall now move on to our final group of witnesses.

Memorandum submitted by Ms Anita Lonsbrough

Examination of Witnesses

MS ANITA LONSBROUGH, MBE, MS SHARRON DAVIES, MBE, MR DUNCAN GOODHEW, MBE, examined.

Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to welcome you this morning and say what a particular pleasure it is to have you here as witnesses today.

Rosemary McKenna

77. Anita commented and Sharron and Duncan both swam in the Cumbernauld International Swim Meet in the late 1980s and early 1990s and it was a great pleasure to see you there. It seems to me that is a very good example of how things have deteriorated in the sport. The local authority at that time put a small but significant amount of funding into that opportunity. The reorganisation of local government and all that has gone with that has meant that the authorities do not have the will or do not have the cash to pump prime those kinds of events. You will not be surprised that I asked Danny McGowan to make a submission to the Committee because of his involvement in swimming in the UK. I am going to base my questions on the very report I asked him to do. Danny, as you know, was both a Scottish and UK coach and team manager. His first point is that he feels that we have addressed the issue in UK terms in terms of junior and senior elite athletes, that the Lottery funding has enabled that area to be supported in a much better way than it has been in the past. Would you agree with that?

(Ms Lonsbrough) Yes, particularly with the starting potential, that is going to help our youngsters coming through tremendously. Lottery funding has been supporting our juniors and seniors for some time now and it has enabled them to get more competition and more training when it is needed and the right facilities with the top coaches.

(Mr Goodhew) I have to take you back because you are looking at a very complex thing in a very short period of time. First of all you have to look at probability. Winning gold medals is about probability. You have to get as many people taking part as possible. In this country we are very firmly placed in schools on the three Rs from the age of four. Research shows that it should be six or seven. We are concentrating on intellectual skills rather than physical bases for those to be built on. There is significant evidence to show that the cognitive skill process is better developed by physical exercise than classroom. That is in tandem with the fact that you can reduce school time, academic time by 26 per cent and as long as physical exercise is put in place in that 26 per cent, there is no change latitudinally or longitudinally to school results. The current success of specialist sports colleges shows that properly managed exercise enhances the quality of academic work. Small wonder: we are not designed to polish chairs. The physiology of children certainly does not encourage that. I chair a cross-governmental group and quite soon there will be an announcement from government research showing that specific exercise at specific times during the day has a massive impact on a child=s ability to learn. Quite frankly, there is a huge learning curve academically for us to go through in this country with regard to sport in general. Swimming is a very specialist case because of its safety issue, but also because of its particular nature. I shall just tell a little anecdote here. My daughter is doing her first 25 metres, she is sinking, every parent knows the feeling, nose just above the surface, she sinks a bit further, periscope comes up and a snorkel, I am stripping off ready to jump in and save here and somehow she gets to the end, smiles from ear to ear and says AFrance at last@. There is such a sense of achievement given to children in facing their fears and facing the change in environment because swimming assaults the senses in a way that no other sport does. It has particular lessons to be learned. The school has defined 25 metres as swimming. If there had been a ripple on the pool my daughter would have been at the bottom. If the pool had been ten degrees colder, she would have been on the bottom. If there had been a current she would never have reached the end. I do not know any sensible person who could sit down for very long and define 25 metres as learning how to swim. If you start that as our broad-based pyramid, then children are dumped in the pool and one private company offers a school that they will teach the children to swim 25 metres or their money back. You think of the incentive for that provider to sign the certificate to say the child has swum the 25 metres. It is outrageous. Quite apart from that, honourable Members, I learned survival skills. Thirty-four years later I was glad to help one of your members, Lord Sheldon, when he had a heart attack and I managed to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation and bring him back to life. Other skills are learned through swimming. Basically you have a major problem in changing the attitude of schools towards physical exercise and in particular swimming which we are debating here. You have discussed clubs. Clubs are about empowerment, empowering those coaches to do their jobs. At the moment you have a publicly owned facility usually run by a private contractor who will go for the profit. The child in the swimming club is pressed out to the edge, the profitable Learn to Swim scheme is poached from the club by the private contractor because it makes money. Therefore the clubs= earnings are squeezed to the point where it becomes like a mill. You have 25 kids in each lane, if a kid drops out of the top lane, they shunt them all up as quickly as possible, even though developmentally they may not be ready. You have a nightmare at clubs at the moment. Sport England - we talked about the environment - say we have enough pools. I run Swimathon, in which over 13 years we have had half a million people taking part. Let me tell you that there are about 1,200 publicly open pools which are open for lap swimming in this country; 1,200. That is all for a population of 60 million. I cannot even believe it. Their attitude is that there are enough pools out there at the moment. Are there enough pools out there at the moment? Maybe. I remember down in Kent that there were floods in 1968 and the water board said they had enough reservoirs for the country and it would be okay. When things improve and you do not have to walk through the urinals to get to the swimming pool and 50 per cent of the pools are like that, decaying and seedy, perhaps a lot more people may want to use them. I suggest that there will be a huge growth in swimming. Leadership. The Amateur Swimming Association have a great history. They are dedicated people, lots of wonderful people out there, but some of the members here have said, AAmateur Swimming Association? Who are you? Have you lobbied? No? Have you led? No@. They are not ready structurally to run a modernised sport. If you look at Australia for instance, when they did not bring back a gold medal in 1976 it became a political agenda to win gold medals. They went around modernising sport and making it more executive with responsibilities to perform and get there. To sum up. At the moment, we have excellence, as a director of a pharmaceutical company said to me, like the Battle of the Somme. It is not the talented, the courageous, the gifted who are left standing at the end. The ones who are left standing at the end just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It is all left to chance at the moment. What frustrates me the most is that the goal of winning gold medals is absolutely in step with every other element you have talked about within swimming. If you understand talent development fully, you understand that a parent who swims is more likely to have a child who swims. It is in our best interest as a sporting nation to get everybody swimming if gold medals are a goal. If one were out in space and looked down on this country with a dispassionate, objective view, you would look at our heritage - and if you have watched Walking with Dinosaurs and the like - this physical being which has managed to make it through all the obstacles, yet some of the physically gifted young children are pushed to train in a pool before anybody gets up and then if you come back in the evening, they will be swimming while every other child is in bed. That is the way we are treating our gifted young people in this country, which is slightly embarrassing to say the least as a nation. Swimming is the best all round sport for our health. It is the least discriminating, certainly in age and ability and it has the highest appeal in the nation. Some honourable Member here mentioned that we cannot afford to do it. Well, we are not a third rate country, we are not a third world country, we are the third largest economy in the world and we should darn well afford it.

Chairman

81. That sounds like the last sentence of our report actually.

(Mr Goodhew) I thought it was better said than written.

Derek Wyatt

82. Well said; very well said. What three things would you three want us to do for swimming? We have never had a report on swimming ever. This is the first to be done.

(Ms Davies) I was out commentating in Sydney, so I tend to get it from both sides, because I was disappointed for the swimmers, because I know how hard they work. Every single one of those swimmers was still swimming six hours a day, getting up at five o=clock and getting to bed at eleven. They did not want to go out there and not perform. We do need 50-metre pools; we do. We cannot expect them to race over 50-metres and we do not have that. When you compare us to other European nations and America and Australia the facilities we have in this country are pathetic.

83. That is one wish. What are the other two?

(Ms Davies) One other is that we have a better system in place to take young talent and to develop it, to point it in the right direction. We lose it. We find talent, people who can swim and then they get lost in the system somewhere because there is no system. The other is just to be pleased about excellence. We seem to put it down. We do not seem to want to be the best. We want to be mediocre.

(Ms Lonsbrough) It took Australia 25 years to become the world=s leading nation so things are not going to happen overnight. It is going to be long term. We need more facilities. We need better coaches and more money.

84. Duncan, you have said it all, but you can say it again if you like.

(Mr Goodhew) There is certainly a whole bunch more. That was just the opening. Seriously that is it. It is a very, very complex issue. I set up the Youth Sports Trust with ,1 million from John Beckwith and ,1 million from a sponsor and it has taken us since 1993 to get to the point where we have changed the first introduction to every child in primary schools. Those kids are now five years= old and it is another 15 years before they come onto the sporting horizon we are now talking about, gold medals. It takes a very, very long time. What I should like to see is a proper defined strategy at local levels, to understand. There is a lot of waste and duplication of resources. You have two clubs swimming in and fighting over the same water. You do not have a defined strategy of swimming at the local level. Really we have to trace the young person. We have to look to see what they need. Quite often these gifted individuals are good at many different sports, so that whole process needs managing. We have effectively to get local people who are very skilled at managing talent and that means that at the moment you can have a talented swimmer who can swim for the school and maybe play soccer for the school or something else. They swim for the local club, they swim for the county, they swim for the district and they might swim for England in the meantime. The parents are pulling out their hair going AHelp. How do I cope with all of this?@. It is a very difficult process to manage because everybody wants a divvy. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan. Everybody wants a part of that and that really does need sorting out. At the moment the sport is also a middle class sport and that is hurting our potential as a nation and it is not doing justice to the young people. That needs to be changed. Unless you have two cars, swimming is almost impossible.

85. Is it your perception after six years of the Lottery that we rely on the Lottery in sport rather than fighting the Treasury for funding for sport itself.

(Ms Davies) We have to realise that swimming is an expensive sport because of the cost of running the facility; not doing the sport but just giving us the facilities. Whereas with a football field, they can put on a pair of boots and just go out and play, that is not the case with swimming and you have to have these facilities. The difficulty is that the councils try to run a swimming pool and provide that facility at the same time as these other sports which are much cheaper to run, yet there are all these people who do want to swim. We have to accept that and that is something we have not done in the past. The other difficulty is about where the money comes from and it comes from this middle group of people who want to go to swim in their lunchtime. Unless the facility is good enough from the local council, they are not, they are going to go down the road and go to Cannon=s. The money is not going to come back into the public sector, it is going to go elsewhere. You have to make sure that our public facilities are good, because it is not going to create the turnover otherwise.

Ms Shipley

86. I want to take up what you were saying about the contracts. Previous evidence demonstrated that we have a real problem with the contracts by the sound of it, this squeezing out young people for financial gains. You touched on it as well more or less accusing - and I want you to clarify this - the private contractors to some schools shall we say, certainly not all, of being less than honest with their results.

(Mr Goodhew) I just said there would be an awful temptation just to make the last few yards. I did not level it as an accusation, I was just saying it was a profit motivation to sign a certificate.

87. I would assume from that, that in your experience you have noted that this is potentially happening or is happening.

(Mr Goodhew) There is a noticeable difference; the core skills are not laid down like they used to be, whether it is in water safety or swimming itself. Swimming is a skilled sport, it is more like tennis than any other sport, because you have to feel the water, you have to use the water, you have to develop skills within it. Learn to Swim in this country now is just getting through 25 metres and ticking the box. That is not investing in a life-long love of a sport and a concern for your own health and safety.

88. I must say I agree. This tick-box mentality without monitoring what it means is something which really concerns me. This whole thing about how we are getting good quality teaching to the children via these contracts and who is monitoring them and all of that is turning out to be a very, very dodgy area.

(Mr Goodhew) When Swim for Life was put forward - and it was an Amateur Swimming Association initiative so well done to them on that - and won, somewhere or other somebody had to define what swimming was. Unfortunately of course, not only did they say 25 metres, but some people, through disablement or whatever, for instance my son does not have ear drums so he cannot swim, so it cannot be put down in the statute book and they use the word Ashould@ so people can find ways out of it.

89. It has been suggested to us that maybe the American model of excellence being linked to universities, locating a 50-metre pool in a university and that sort of thing would be a good way.

(Mr Goodhew) I went to an American university. They are fantastic. They are like Hoovers, they suck up talent. The reason they do is in the culture of America; certainly in men=s sport, the place to be is at university on full scholarship. That is a great thing to happen and in fact they brought in women=s sport as well. The funding comes through American football. The American Football League recruits out of university, not out of primary school. The leading players are cultivated within university and my team for instance had an average gate of 48,000 people and that football revenue funded all the other sports.

90. How would you see disadvantaged youngsters, perhaps of not academic ability, finding their way up through that route?

(Mr Goodhew) In America it is a treadmill. They really pull the kids through and the university happens to be the level where they do that.

91. Do you think it is transferrable?

(Ms Davies) It is happening to a degree in Bath. We already have Bath as a very successful centre and we are talking about Loughborough which is also attached to the university. Maybe we do not need to attach them quite so closely only to universities; possibly they could be centres of excellence which are spread around the country so that you do not have to travel. I spent all of my youth training in a 33a-metre pool in Plymouth and my closest 50-metre pool was four hours away. We need to look at the country and work out where these centres should be so that youngsters can gravitate towards them. It does not have to be university based, or it does not have to be so that you can only use it if you are of university age. You can be at a very high level from very young. I went to my first Olympics at 13. I was not at university at that age. You still have to have those facilities.

(Mr Goodhew) The model which has been worked up for sport at the moment but it is in its infancy is that you take sports colleges, which are the technical colleges, secondary school age, and they form a cluster of secondary schools and within that they work through the cluster of primary feeder schools and they work out who does what within that arena. Those specialist sports colleges are linked to HE and FE colleges. There is a kind of seed of an idea of how we could make that work in this country. It is early days yet and it has lots of holes in, but we have funding for 250 sports colleges in England. That is only five per cent of schools in England. Quite clearly a lot of people will be left out of that process and it will not catch all the talent in this country.

(Ms Davies) What works well in Bath is not just swimming. We need to look at sport as a whole, not just swimming from the elite point of view. In Bath the pentathletes help each other, people involved in winter sports are there. They have the background and the physiological background is there for them as well. When you start looking at elite sport you can group sports together very well.

(Ms Lonsbrough) All this depends on funding of course. Water space is very, very expensive. We build a lot of nice 50-metre pools, but then it costs the swimmers an awful lot to go there. As far as the university system is concerned, it is improving. The universities have just had their most successful championships and we have Bath, Loughborough, Coventry and Stirling who are the leaders now in swimming. We do have to be careful that we do not set up too many centres which we cannot fund properly. It is not just about swimming in water, it is about all the other things, the medical, the diet and everything else which goes with sport in general now.

Mr Bryant

92. That is partly my worry. In my constituency, I have five swimming pools, two 20-metre ones, two 25-metre ones and one leisure pool. If anything, we probably have too many. There is a danger that we are spreading ourselves too thin and then not having the money to be able to keep them properly.

(Mr Goodhew) May I take issue with that? I was a Director of the Barbican Health and Fitness Centre. One of the things we did was spend a lot of money on promotion. The trouble is that you have a facility and you do not market it. All of us know we should exercise on a regular basis, you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. That is our bodies. However, we have to be encouraged, because it is hard work and the benefits are very gradual. Our public facilities are not marketed and not promoted to the community in the way they could be. I would wager that with effort you could make those work in a much more efficient way.

93. It is a Welsh local authority so it is not the business of here but it may be true that it has been spending most of its time marketing dryside activities rather than wet side. There maybe is a problem and you may want to comment on marketing generally but if you had ,1 billion to spend suddenly on swimming, how would you allocate it between 50-metre pools, heritage pools such as the ones we heard about earlier and leisure pools? You have one billion.

(Ms Lonsbrough) We have to be careful not to do away with old pools and replace them with smaller facilities. If I take my own city of Wolverhampton, they are currently proposing to close a 25-yard pool and a 33a-metre pool and build a leisure pool. We have to make sure there are the facilities for our swimmers to learn to swim and to progress, not just into the competitive side of swimming but leisure, fitness, all these other things. It is a good sport for all ages. We have to cater for that and then we have to make sure that there are the development pools building up to the 50-metre pools. If we do not have the pools where we teach our swimmers to swim, we are not building the base and therefore our pyramid will never get any higher.

(Ms Davies) As I said, four hours away from a 50-metre pool, hardly ever swam in one and still managed to do it. As long as you have water and you have access to it you can do but you do need the access to the water. We need to have a look at the country and work out a strategy and work out this big pyramid and enable people to go from one level to the next level without losing them on the way. I have seen so much talent over the years which has just not found its way through, usually because of lack of money, but lack of facilities as well. The Lottery has made a massive difference to the top in the fact that people can stay in the sport instead of getting to 18 and having nowhere to go unless they go to university which is what Duncan did.

(Mr Goodhew) Going back to your question, it depends on your political agenda. If winning gold medals is the agenda, then you knock down those pools because we used to fly across the Atlantic in Sunderland Flying Boats on PanAm. We now fly across in Jumbo jets. There have been developments in swimming pools. There is deck level, there is filtration, there are new materials which the old-fashioned pools are not very well suited for and quite frankly we live in a different century. There may be very good cases for one or two of those pools to exist from a heritage point of view, but from a swimming point of view, there is very little argument for them at all. It is all passionate, it is all Wembley based. We have this pool which should be here and you have been through that already.

94. You mentioned Wembley and Australia has been mentioned a lot today. One of the big differences between Australia and here is the weather which presumably affects whether people choose to go swimming or not.

(Ms Davies) It is their attitude as well. They are brought up on water.

95. Indeed and they are very strange people. We were talking in our last report about the prospects of Olympic bids and how Australia had decided when they did particularly badly in the 1976 Olympics that right, their aim was now not to put in an Olympic bid but spend all their money on grassroot sport. Which way do you think Britain should go now?

(Mr Goodhew) That was not quite what happened. They built the Institute of Sport, spent a whole lot of money on it and then turned round and said only 500 people can go through the door, which 500? It was as though they had bought a gigantic star for the Christmas tree and then wondered what Christmas tree to put underneath it, Christmas tree being the sports development. Having such a big star they had to put up a big Christmas tree as well. They invested after that in the sports development. They started with the idea of making something at the top and then figured out that unless you get the probability right at the bottom, it is good for nothing.

96. In terms of our strategy for the next few years, lots of people in Britain would like us to be putting in an Olympic bid to host the Olympics in the next few years. Do you think that is a waste of time and effort at this particular stage?

(Mr Goodhew) Not really. At the moment we are going to have to repair an awful lot of damage done by Picketts Lock. You have to realise that it is an international community which demands respect. Going back and saying we cannot afford to have a stadium, or whatever the political row was behind it, and asking to move it to Sheffield, is hardly building confidence in the international community about our ability to deliver the Olympic Games.

Mr Doran

97. There is the impression in this country now that we are not doing so well at sports and that is a whole range of sports, not just swimming. I am a Scot, so it is even harder for me. You have all been extremely successful in your field and you have played on the world stage, been champions on the world stage. What is different? What has changed since you were young and aspiring?

(Ms Davies) Partly the world has caught up with us, if we are really honest.

98. Or overtaken us.