Golden promises of London 2012’s legacy turn out to be idle boasts

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Johnny Rotten’s words as he departed the stage for the last time as a Sex Pistol seem strangely appropriate as we approach the 10th anniversary of Seb Coe’s spine-tingling speech in Singapore that won the 2012 Olympic Games for London.

The promise was that hosting the Games would not only deliver a glittering bank of memories but, for the first time, deliver a fitter population in a country that took sport seriously for all that it could do in terms of its health, education, wealth, happiness and social mobility.

In short, we would all become a bit more Scandinavian in our attitude to knitting sport into the everyday life of the whole population and a bit more Dutch, German or French in our attitude to the municipal funding of communal facilities.

The seductive vision was that £9.3bn invested in hosting the Games would not only hasten the regeneration of a neglected corner of east London and unlock a host of other benefits, but would act as a corrective in Whitehall to the attitude of politicians towards sport.

No longer would it be left at the back of the policy queue when it came to funding discussions. Instead it would be incorporated into policies on fighting obesity, tackling crime, boosting educational achievement and bringing communities together.

Fast forward to February and, with the general election in May looming, the sports minister, the Conservative Helen Grant, and her two shadows, Clive Efford (Labour) and John Leech (Liberal Democrat), gathered in a half-empty committee room in Westminster to go through the motions in a depressingly dreary debate about sports policy.

It was as though the Games had never happened, such was the paucity of ambition on display. It was also abundantly clear that while Grant, in post for the past 18 months, was doing her best to make progress on one or two issues, she had little commitment from her bosses or sway with the Treasury.

 If pushed, those around the cabinet table will pay lip service to the positive power of sport. They may even turn up to the odd photo opportunity from time to time if a new 3G pitch is being opened in their constituency. But a properly integrated, properly funded, cross-departmental plan for sport and wellbeing remains as frustratingly elusive as ever.

Meanwhile childhood obesity rates continue to rise, PE in schools continues to decline, provision of facilities remains frustratingly patchy and participation figures suggest a widening gap between the sporting haves and have nots.

A year into his job, the culture secretary, Sajid Javid, finally gave his first speech on sport on Wednesday . He spoke with some conviction about sport’s role in changing lives and using data more effectively to enable sport governing bodies to better husband their resources. But with parliament due to be dissolved on 30 March, it was little more than hot air. More ominous still were hints about further funding cuts to come.

Nowhere in the glossy brochure produced by the government on Wednesday entitled A Living Legacy does it mention the deep, damaging cuts to local authority budgets that have disproportionately affected sport and recreation. Across the country, facilities have been closed or hived off into private hands and schemes designed to reach those poorer communities have been cut.

Nor does it mention the fact that in the past year the number of people playing sport for at least half an hour a week has decreased by 125,100 as a result of a decline in the number of those swimming regularly. Or, even more disturbingly, that the decline among those in the lowest socio‑economic groups was more than 470,000.

Far from turning us into a sporting nation, we are in danger of turning into a two tier one. Those sports that continue to increase their participation figures should, in theory, be the most accessible. Cycling and running are by their nature democratic, open to almost anyone.

But all the signs are that even in those sports the main growth is coming from those who have the time, the money and the opportunity to buy the kit, enter mass participation events and buy the expensive GPS sports watch.

The debates are the same ones we have been having for a decade. How to better unlock facilities in private clubs and schools for the use of the wider community? How to develop and deliver more coaches who can engage properly? How to foster basic physical literacy and a love of sport in primary school age children?

Sir Robin Wales, the Mayor of Newham, can be an acquired taste and as a Labour loyalist is fiercely partisan. But given that his council is one of those at the sharp end of the cuts and the closest to the Olympic Park, he is worth listening to on the impact of cuts to school sport and local authorities in the wake of the Games.

“What did government do? It cut funding to school sport straightaway. Then it cut massively to local government. Who does sport? We do. And schools do. So if you cut them both, of course sport is going to slip down the agenda. The truth is that this government doesn’t care. It mouths those platitudes but it doesn’t care.”

Minutes after the culture secretary had left the estimable Michael de Giorgio, founder of grassroots sports body Greenhouse, spoke.

His complaints are familiar: not enough good coaches are being produced who can properly engage; too much money is being poured into getting the middle aged and middle class to do more sport and too little into reaching disadvantaged groups.

“There are no more people playing sport today than three or four years ago. There is 50% of the population who are active and 50% who aren’t. We should be spending the money on people who don’t play sport,” he said.

Sport England chief executive, Jennie Price, insists she is working on a plan to reach those disadvantaged communities, having spent a decade focusing on driving up numbers.

Coe has done his best to clear up the mess, helping to repair some of the vandalism wrought by Michael Gove when he tore up the successful network of School Sports Partnerships and took away their ring-fenced funding.

After a brutal battle, the government agreed to a £150m primary school sport premium. Yet primary schools are not getting enough help or advice in how to spend that money. A recent report from the Youth Sport Trust painted a “bleak and worrying” picture of declining levels of PE in schools.

There are, of course, spots of encouragement. Some of those listening to Javid on Wednesday represented the sort of grassroots and doorstep sport bodies that deserve a bigger chunk of government funding. But even if their enthusiasm is heartening they are kicking against the prevailing tide rather than swimming with it.

The wider argument about the extent to which hosting a major sporting event can produce wider lasting benefits will go on and deserves more space than can be afforded here. In his new book Circus Maximus, the academic Andrew Zimbalist calmly and persuasively debunks many of the overblown legacy claims made by host cities and the International Olympic Committee.

Of those, the promise that London would become the first Olympic host to use the Games to produce a healthier nation is in danger of being shown up as nothing more than an idle boast. If that is to change the next government, however it is formed, will need to show more application and appetite than the current one.