Birmingham Commonwealth Games Bill [HL]

Report

Clause 1: Financial assistance: the Organising Committee

Amendment 1

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 6, at end insert— “( ) for the purpose of ensuring access for disabled people at all facilities and in the vicinity of all facilities at the Games, or”

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 1 and 6 on accessibility, standing in my name on the Marshalled List. I thank noble Lords from all sides of the House for signing these amendments. I will also address Amendment 5 in my name on the social charter and briefly speak to government Amendment 4 on reporting.

It may be helpful to your Lordships if I briefly update the House on progress made on the amendments I have tabled, not least because it could shorten matters and simplify the debate. I am conscious that I have asked for considerable detail on accessibility to be placed in the Bill; I will address this first. My objective is for the Government to take seriously all the issues raised so far on accessibility, both in Committee and at Second Reading before that. It has never been clear to me that, despite good words, previous Commonwealth Games have followed to the letter the modern-day accessibility norms that one would expect, particularly for disabled athletes and spectators, and I think we will hear more of that during the debate today.

If I can persuade the Minister that the issues I have raised can be referred back to the Games committee as part of the report that the Minister has brought into the legislation in a new government amendment, I hope I will be satisfied that that process is the best way forward. At the moment, unless we had a letter or some form of outline detail as to what the House was looking for, the amendment could be interpreted as a little thin and capable of not engendering the sort of detailed analysis that we in your Lordships’ House would be looking for.

This has been an important issue to me for many years. Indeed, back in 1988, as Minister for Sport, I convened a working party that published a report called Building on Ability. That was the first—albeit gradual—policy shift by the Sports Council towards the mainstreaming of disability sport. We are now nearly 30 years on from that. It should be at the heart of hosting any mega sporting event in this country that we put the interests of those with disabilities at the forefront of our thinking from the day we begin constructing the various facilities to the end of the closing ceremony.

I make reference in Amendment 6 to the International Paralympic Committee’s accessibility guide. It is regularly updated—it was updated for Sochi—and it is important to focus on what it seeks to achieve. The principles, the solutions and the practices used to make any host city and all Games-related infrastructure and services accessible and inclusive must create a culture of inclusion. That will then influence and change, in the long term, the way the public think and the way in which public facilities and services are designed, operated and delivered. We must strive for a world where universal accessibility is more than a goal—it must be the norm—and sport can have an important role in seeking to achieve that objective.

The key issues that I hope would be in any report presented by the organising committee under the Government’s proposed amendment include accessibility standards, Paralympic requirements and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and how those rights have been implemented at all stages of the organising committee’s work. If your Lordships’ House agrees with a report to Parliament that includes those items, I look forward to hearing from my noble friend the Minister whether that will ensure that the report will be both comprehensive and meet the objectives that I have set out in the early stages of the Bill and which other noble Lords will set out today.

I hope that we will also take into account Envision2030. The 17 goals embedded in Envision2030 to transform the world for persons with disabilities are a welcome step forward on the 17 sustainable development goals. While I think I am correct in saying from memory that disability is not expressly stated as a sustainable development goal, building on the principle of leaving no one behind would be a holistic approach to achieving sustainable development for all. I welcome the Envision2030 17 goals and I hope the organising committee will take them into account when it addresses its report to Parliament.

Turning to the rest of this full group of amendments—we will have done most of the work on this Bill by the time we have finished the first two groups —the charter for the Games, to which I have referred and spoken at length about, is in Amendment 5. I take the same approach to that as I have done with regard to the Minister’s amendment. That seeks to ensure that those writing the report from the organising committee take into account Commonwealth Games values. It is a generic and broad phrase and I hope that if the Minister accepts that comments made from all sides of the House that are more specific and relevant to a charter for the Games are reported on, we will have made considerable progress and I would support it.

The sport vision of these Games is, effectively, a Commonwealth Games Federation vision—that through sport we can create peaceful, sustainable and prosperous communities across the Commonwealth and that the Games are a catalyst for that action. Beneath that, there is a Commonwealth support impact framework. It established a number of aims: structuring; assessing; communicating; and ultimately driving the positive impact that the Games can have across diverse societies, economies and physical environments. I hope there will be a focus in that report on the work of the charter on sustainability and social, environmental and economic well-being. I shall not go through the details that were covered at greater length at earlier stages of the Bill, but I believe that it is inherently important in a social charter for the state to a have a duty to protect human rights, for there to be a corporate responsibility to respect human rights and for there to be access to remedy. All those are relevant to any mega sporting event which receives significant funding from government. They are values and goals. They are the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and we should be seeking to embed them in the preparation for the Games and in what I hope will be an outstanding Commonwealth Games.

I have one final point to make on the Government’s amendment on the report. One of the issues that came out of the London 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games—I declare an interest having been chairman of the British Olympic Association at that time and having worked with my noble friend Lord Coe on the London organising committee and the Olympic board—is that legacy does not just happen immediately after the Games. Legacy can take up to 10 years to reach fulfilment. The urban regeneration legacy, which is an important component part, can come into being much quicker than the sports legacy, which takes much longer.

The final report is being requested from the organising committee only a matter of months after the end of the Games. I would much prefer to learn more about the effectiveness of the legacy one year, or even five years, down the road. In the spirit of being extremely helpful, I know what officials will immediately say to the Minister—the organising committee will have been wound up, so who would do this work? However it is worth reflecting, if possible, that we should have an opportunity further down the road to look at these Games to see whether they have met the objectives on legacy, accessibility and all the detail covered in that report. A one-off Select Committee of your Lordships’ House did that for London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Should that trend continue, I hope the Birmingham Commonwealth Games would be a suitable subject for your Lordships’ House to study in detail.

When hosting a mega sporting event in this country it is as important to have a wonderful celebration of sport and recreation for able-bodied and disabled athletes as it is to have a legacy from all the investment that is made in the community in infrastructure, the redevelopment of run-down parts of our cities and the wider sporting benefit for the length and breadth of this country, not just in the immediate area of Birmingham. I look forward to hearing what other noble Lords have to say on this, and I beg to move.

My Lords, I have not spoken on the Bill before now, but it is not often that I gasp loudly enough from below Bar for colleagues to turn round to look at me. I was listening to the debate in Committee on the amendments on accessibility tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and he made a remark about specifically mentioning accessibility and disability rather than just scooping things up in “any other purpose”. In his reply, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton —I think he might have missed the point that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, was trying to make—said of disability and access:

“The trouble is that that might be what my noble friend—

the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan—

“thinks is the most important thing to sign but many other noble Lords might have other priorities. The whole point of including the words, ‘any other purpose connected to … the Games’, is that it covers everything and individuals’ personal priorities are not put on the face of the Bill”.—[Official Report, 9/7/19; col. 1742.]

I gasped because, of all the protected characteristics, disability has very special provisions under the Equality Act. That is because people with that protected characteristic—in this case, athletes, spectators or people trying to use services—have the most difficulty in accessing the sports that they want to take part in, in whatever form. The point that the Minister unwittingly made said to me that we needed something specific in the Bill for the exact reason that too many people assume that, if you mainstream it along with other protected characteristics, everybody knows what you mean.

I declare my interest as a former trustee of UNICEF. I was at the opening ceremony of the Glasgow Games and I have also been to a number of Soccer Aid games in recent years. At the Glasgow opening ceremony, Celtic Park met the accessible stadia requirements but was not accessible to this person, who was supposed to be a VIP hosting other guests, because there was no access to the VIP suite for people in wheelchairs. Worse than that, there were no wheelchair spaces in any of the directors’ boxes areas, so my daughter and I had to sit in a completely different area from the one used by the people we had come to host. That seems utterly ridiculous. The Glasgow Commonwealth Games did not quite meet the level of accessibility of the 2012 Games in many ways but it was considerably better than many others.

My Lords, that was a very valuable intervention by the noble Baroness. I hope that her speech and the Minister’s response will be communicated to the organising committee; clearly, if we are to make a success of these Games, we need to ensure that the sorts of risks identified by the noble Baroness for the city of Birmingham and from other Games are averted.

In supporting the noble Lord, I come back to the point that he raised about the Minister’s Amendment 4 on annual reporting. First, I welcome the amendment, which very much responds to the debate in Committee. Also, to pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, the last reporting period ends on 31 December 2022. There is a practical reason for that: I understand that the organising committee will not continue after that date. However, in relation to the legacy, as he pointed out, particularly in relation to sport, physical health and well-being, the work that has to be done will go on for a period of years after the Games. It seems sensible that—whether by invitation or the organising committee formally handing it over—the city council has a responsibility for ensuring that the legacy continues. I do not quite know how that should be done, but a statement from the Minister, today or at Third Reading, ensuring that the city council is expected to continue the work on legacy and to report on a regular basis, would be very helpful.