Hansard

It is helpful that Tom McCabe lodged the motion. He has certainly explained about the Hamilton International Sports Trust, which I did not know about and which could be copied elsewhere. I am the honorary president of a couple of athletics clubs and the people who run those clubs have to waste a huge amount of their time trying to get low-grade sponsorship for their activities. If we got local business communities to co-ordinate and set up a fund that would help clubs and individuals, that would avoid there being a huge amount of wasted time.

I will talk about clubs, which other members have covered aspects of well. Local clubs are the basis of most of our sport, but we do not give them enough attention or financial support. In Denmark, instead of having one organisation, like our sportscotland, there are two separate organisations. One supports higher-level, professional or international sport and the other supports amateur and local sport. We could copy that structure. Too much effort goes into projects such as building Hampden park rather than supporting local sports clubs.

We could support clubs more—very small sums can help. Even £1,000 for a small athletic club to help pay for the buses to go to away tournaments in different parts of the country would be a huge benefit. We are not talking about big money, because well-directed small amounts would do a great deal of good.

We could do more to encourage people to qualify as coaches, because quite often there is considerable expense involved in attending residential courses. Coaches and officials are the key to many activities, but football officials get so much flak that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find referees and linesmen. We want to encourage people and ease the path for them to become coaches, club organisers or officials.

Brian Monteith referred to the relationship with local authorities. In my view some local authorities charge far too much for their facilities, which is a drain on clubs' resources. Councils are obviously under pressure to make as much money as possible, but we could do more to help the clubs by meeting those charges.

I urge the Executive to talk to sportscotland and local authorities to find ways of channelling money directly to clubs in order to add to whatever the local authority is doing and to offer recognition of the importance of clubs to the community. I am sure that a little bit of money could be taken from social inclusion budgets or other budgets of that sort.

Without the clubs, many of which are really struggling, we will not progress. We need to have a really strong foundation that will produce excellent athletes and sportsmen at the highest level. It is better that 1,000 people play sport than that one person plays it well.