The Paralympic Games returned to its spiritual
home last night when London welcomed 4,280 of the world’s greatest
athletes to the biggest ever celebration of disability sport.
With 1.6 million disabled people playing sport
in this country every week, the Games gives us the opportunity to
highlight the amazing achievements of our Paralympic athletes and
inspire even more disabled and non-disabled people to get involved
in sport.
Through our investment in sport for disabled
people, we’re helping ensure sport is ready to deal with the influx
of interest the Games will bring. As well as our major
investment in 46 sports themselves, including four disability
sports, we’ve made sure every element of our £150 million
Places People Play legacy programme works for disabled
people.
Of the £150 million of Lottery funding, we
have also ring-fenced £8 million to improve the sport on offer for
disabled people. The Inclusive Sport fund will help
to tackle the opportunity gap that sees just one in six disabled
adults playing sport regularly compared to one in three
non-disabled adults.
Inclusive Sport will build on our
recent investments to improve the expertise offered by the
disability sport sector to other organisations that want to get
disabled people playing sport.
We’re also working with a number of partners
to make sure sport becomes a practical lifestyle choice for
disables people. Last year we directly funded seven
disability sports organisations for the first time to advise,
support and guide other sports governing bodies as they create
opportunities for participation by disabled people. British
Blind Sport, Cerebral Palsy Sport, Dwarf Sport Association UK,
Wheelpower, UK Deaf Sport and Mencap Sport/Special Olympics GB all
received a share of £1.3 million of National Lottery funding to
make this happen.
We’ve invested a further £1.5 million in the
English Federation of Disability Sport to help accelerate its
strategy to increase sports participation.
As the single largest funder of grassroots
sport in the country, we will be investing over £1 billion of
Lottery and Exchequer funding between 2012 and 2017 to help both
disabled and non-disabled people create a sporting habit for
life.
We’ve already seen the impact the Olympic
Games have had on driving up interest in sport and we’re committed
to using the inspirational power of the Paralympic Games to
get more disabled people playing sport – and to make grassroots
sport more inclusive.