INTERVIEW
Chelsea FC’s Frank Lampard and Hugh Robertson launch the FA Tesco Skills programme. (Right) A Chance to Shine
staff employed by the SSPs and the vol- unteers that worked with them to deliver school sport, and that there is a very real danger that everything that has been achieved thus far will be lost.” Although he has sympathy with the
YST, Robertson says the fact now is that where the initiatives work, individual headteachers will have the power to fund them. “That’s where the judgement lies if we’re honest about it,” he says. “It’s a bit harsh but these initiatives must be judged absolutely by the headteachers on the re- sults that they achieve. It’s actually quite easy for headteachers in specialist sports colleges to make a pooled contribution to run the YST programmes – however, if they’re not prepared to do this then there will be a reason for it. We’ve done what headteachers wanted us to do; now it’s up to them to spend the money. If the YST wants this to work in its favour then perhaps it should ring round all the head- teachers and specialist colleges and ask if they’d be prepared to continue funding.”
Facility investment In view of the reduced budgets, there’s an even greater need to ensure that pub- lic funds are invested wisely – particularly when it comes to facility development that’s fit for purpose. Now that the NGBs often have a financial say in facility pro- curement, Robertson says that in the main he has confidence in their necessary expertise to do so effectively. “Sport England is responsible through
the Whole Sport Plans for setting targets for individual NGBs, and ensuring they meet them, if they don’t, they’ll have their funding cut,” he says. “If NGBs thought they were being encouraged to go for the cheaper, less good facilities because of
One of the challenges is to bring together a procurement policy to deliver the best facilities
budgetary pressures I can promise you that they would complain to me very quickly in- deed. I see NGBs every single week of the year and they would be straight in there to complain about this if it was happening – and not a single one has.” So are exceptional facilities held up as
models of best practice? “Interestingly enough that’s one of the challenges for us moving forward to see if we can sen- sibly bring together facility procurement policy to ensure that we can achieve economies of scale and deliver the best facilities at the end of it,” he explains “I have an intray full of issues, problems and worries of individual sports moan- ing about this or the other – actually the quality of facility development is not one of the issues at the moment.”
Olympic legacy So funding towards a successful Olym- pic Games is intact, support for elite athletes will continue towards 2016, the organisation of sporting bodies’ back of house operations will be streamlined for cost-effective efficiency and facility de- velopment is ticking the right boxes for
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both elite and community use. So how is he hoping to drive a lasting legacy of sport off the back of the Games? “I want and expect this country to host
a tapestry of major sports events after London 2012. In fact one of the things we did in the review was to use some of the extra money released by our Lot- tery reforms to beef up UK Sport’s Major Events budget from £1.5m to £5m to help back bids for major international events.” Looking forward, we may have lost the
bid to host the 2014 World Hockey Champi- onships but we’ve already secured the 2015 Rugby Word Cup and UK Athletics has now turned its attention from 2015 to hosting the 2017 World Athletics Championships. Right now, Robertson says that his cur-
rent priority is winning the bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. “We have the stadia built already, we have the fans that love football to fill the stands and because of the marketing that lies behind this coun- try’s bid, we could deliver a guaranteed financial return to FIFA and use the power of the Premier League to drive an interna- tional legacy. The challenge now is to win the football politics.” ●
Issue 4 2010 © cybertrek 2010
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