Employment, Training and Skills Legacy (Supplementary) [3]

Sorry, Manny, I do not mean to be rude, but I am on a time limit, and any answers you give also comes off my time, so I really want to talk about this. The two examples you have given, first of all about people who for generations have never worked and who are on benefit for whatever reason, the people who have never had opportunities, will want to volunteer for this programme. I hope you are right. I definitely know that sport is a tremendous catalyst, particularly in deprived communities, and I hope you are right. I am not convinced you are right, because I do not think you are talking to the people who are at that level of society. In fact, I know from that meeting that we had that you are not talking to them. Not because you do not want to but because you do not know who they are, and your officers were very interested to find out that they were a whole subgroup of people who you have never had any dealings with at all.

As for grants being available, and them being able to tap into schemes that you had, all the schemes sound absolutely great, but when I tell you that when somebody from your organisation said `and there are these grants that people in the audience can apply for', everyone said, `oh, wonderful, absolutely marvellous'. He then said, `well, hang on, hang on, it is closed at the moment'. They had no indication that these grants were available because, for some reason, you are not getting to those communities in most need. Your officers were shocked by this -- I know they were, they told me so -- What I wanted to know was, what have you done since then to address this and to make sure that you have changed the system that you had previously in place, so that you are getting to these really deprived communities?