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Tom Brake: It's time to put Britain back in the swim
MY earliest memories of swimming – spirited doggy paddle really – are ploughing up and down a freezing cold outdoor school pool in Melton Mowbray, learning to swim with my father when I was about five-years-old.
I acquired crawl and breast-stroke techniques later with school swimming lessons in France as an eight-year-old.
The public swimming pool complex we went to for swimming was outstanding; an Olympic-size pool, with three and five metre diving boards, a training pool for lessons and an outside paddling pool and extensive grounds perfect for picnicking during the long summer months.
That was 38 years ago. Today, I have yet to come across facilities of a similar quality locally. And that is part of our national problem.
When it comes to swimming facilities, it is said that Paris has more 50 metre pools than the whole of the UK. We continue, as a nation, to under-invest in our sports facilities.
This is a false economy when we are trying to tackle rising obesity in young people and boost participation in exercise for our growing population of senior citizens.
The relative paucity of facilities isn't necessarily a bar to achieving outstanding results at an international level if promising athletes are identified early and relocated close to the small number of first-rate sports centres. Rebecca Adlington, our fantastic swimmer and double-gold Olympic medallist, has demonstrated that a champion with grit and determination can still triumph.
However, it does work against mass participation in sport or exercise.
The Government's free swimming initiative will make little difference to the shortage of first-class Olympic-sized pools. It allocates 60m for capital projects, 30m for free swimming for over 60s and 50m for free swimming for under 16s.
In a recent survey about the free swimming initiative conducted by the Liberal Democrats, only two councils were planning on opening new pools, while in the last three years, four pools had either been closed or closure was being considered in other council areas.
Other concerns identified by councils included the short-term nature of the funding which will leave local councils to pick up the costs of free swimming once government funding ceases or lead to the cancellation of free swimming schemes and the loss of revenue from existing swimmers – one council estimated that accepting Government funding could lead to a potential loss of over 700,000 per annum.
Another council estimated they were facing a shortfall of 110,000; the limited capital funding available (an average of 40,000 per authority); the age profile the funding is restricted to (the over 60s or under 16s) which does not allow the right group to be targeted in respect of obesity. Additional potential drawbacks highlighted during the survey were that very little thought had been given to providing free swimming lessons; limited plans were in place to publicise the free swimming and Primary Care Trust budgets risked being used to plug shortfalls in revenue created by making swimming free for people who were previously paying, thereby diverting money from other important health needs.
It is regrettable that prior to launching this initiative, very little consultation was carried out with local councils which are responsible for implementing the scheme. In London for instance, only one borough out of three was consulted. Nor was advice sought from the Swimming Teachers' Association – a strange omission given their key role in providing swimming lessons.
There may still be time to allow local authorities to put forward their own plans to secure the greatest increase in the number of swimmers and associated health benefits, allowing the decisions about how to spend resources most effectively to be taken by those who have the greatest understanding of local needs.
The local authorities will of course need to develop any proposals in consultation with all the partners involved in swimming, such as
local authorities, the Amateur Swimming Association, the Swimming Teachers' Association, the fitness industry, schools etc. They can then start to bring in new swimmers – this is surely the priority for any swimming initiative – giving non-swimmers the confidence to get into the water and make their first few strokes.
Building good quality sports infrastructure will take a lot longer, but if we start now, perhaps in 38 years time, my children will be teaching their children to swim in an Olympic sized pool just down the road from where they live. It will only have taken us 76 years to catch up with France.
Tom Brake MP is the Lib Dem Olympics spokesman.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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