Source · Select Committees · Women and Equalities Committee
Recommendation 17
17
Accepted
Require DCMS to publish detailed insights, next steps, and timetable for integrity in sport.
Recommendation
Issues of bullying, harassment, abuse, and discrimination are not limited to swimming, with issues emerging across several sports in recent years. We welcome the DCMS’s call for evidence on integrity in sport, which closed three months ago, and expect to see tangible actions as a result. In response to this Report, the DCMS should set out in detail: • insights from the call for evidence on integrity in sport; • the proposed the next steps in improving how concerns and grievances are dealt with in the sector; • its evaluation of the effectiveness of the Sport Integrity pilot; and • a timetable for further change in the sports sector. (Paragraph 104) Pregnancy and maternity
Government Response Summary
The government accepts the recommendation, stating it will publish insights from the integrity call for evidence and outline next steps, while noting the Sport Integrity service is increasingly used and its performance is being monitored by UK Sport.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The Government accepts this recommendation. Sport needs to be a welcoming, inclusive and fair environment that participants and their parents or guardians can have confidence in. We also want to ensure that we have the strongest possible systems for addressing sport integrity issues and that we remain at the forefront of global efforts around fairness and inclusion in sport. We intend to work alongside the sport and physical activity sector to identify the most pressing integrity challenges and potential improvements, including how processes around complaint handling and dispute resolution can be strengthened. In light of this, we ran a call for evidence over autumn 2023 to gather information and views on current experiences of how issues and concerns in sport across the UK are dealt with in the sector, and how these could be strengthened. Over 600 responses were received. We will set out the results of this exercise and an outline of our next steps in due course. Since its launch in May 2022, the number of individuals coming forward to use the Sport Integrity service has increased, and a high proportion of individuals are contacting the service directly rather than through referrals. This indicates that the service is increasingly viewed with confidence as a trusted space for investigating allegations of misconduct at the elite level of Olympic and Paralympic sport. UK Sport will continue to monitor the performance of the service to ensure it continues to provide access to effective, independent investigations.