minister for sport and the olympics Alex Broadway
We are a little concerned about what happens after 2012. Hockey will be getting considerably less cash won’t it? No. The deal we did at the Comprehensive Spending Review involved altering the amount of money sport gets through the National Lottery to favour sport. So, at the moment sport is getting about 13.7% of the Lottery take. It will get 20% from London 2012. So the amount of money UK Sport has to allocate after 2012 is exactly the same as it is this year. This means this will be the first home Olympics where there will be no post home-Olympics funding drop- off. So if hockey performs at London 2012, and can therefore justify the continued investment in performance terms to UK Sport, then that money is there to be invested.
Elite performance is one side of the picture, but the figures for community participation have not been as good as they might have been, have they? My feeling about hockey is that it is on an improving curve as a sport. Clearly we had a pretty rough time ten years or so ago. [But] there is new management at England Hockey and GB Hockey and everything inside the sport is picking up again. It looks very positive. They have a good plan inside something called the Whole Sport Plan, which is the mechanism that SportEngland agrees with the national governing bodies to allocate funds for community involvement. I have had a look at the hockey plan. It’s very good and they have set themselves sensible, realistic, incremental targets for increasing participation. I think everybody recognises that if the squads do really well in London 2012 then you have got the best possible chance of driving that, because there is no doubt there is a straightforward link between elite performance and people picking up a sport at the grassroots.
Hugh Robertson MP
The challenge that is really difficult for hockey is facility provision. I don’t have figures to back this up, but I suspect fewer people play hockey at school than did twenty years ago because of the facilities – if you want to get a top-
hugh robertson mp: factfile
DATE OF BIRTH: October 9 1962 EDUCATION: The King’s School Canterbury, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Reading University EMPLOYMENT: Retired from the Army as a Major in 1995 then worked for Schroders in the City.
POLITICS: Elected to Parliament as Conservative member for Faversham and Mid Kent in 2001, re-elected in May 2005 and June 2010. Promoted to the opposition front bench in November 2002 as a Conservative Whip.
Became shadow sports spokesman in September 2004, shadow minister for sport in February 2005, then shadow Olympics minister. Appointed Sports and Olympics Minister for the incoming Coalition Government in 2010.
quality hockey pitch the cost is so high. The challenge for the sport is finding some way of getting young people into hockey – against the challenges from other sports – when they are not going to be playing it day-in day-out at school.
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