Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give evidence to your Committee on Tuesday. Your Committee's Inquiry will help strengthen and improve our anti-doping programme, in this country and beyond, and I am grateful to you for that.

  As I said to the Committee, this is all the more important at the moment given the current review of the World Anti-Doping Code. I hope that the recommendations in your final report will help to shape the new World Anti-Doping Code, to be agreed at the World Conference on Doping in Sport in Madrid in November next year.

  I also wanted to take this opportunity to draw your attention to UK Sport's plans on the issue of research, about which I did not have time to talk through in detail during the session.

  UK Sport has been working closely in recent months with the research community to take forward its plans for a comprehensive research and development programme for high performance sport. These discussions are continuing but we have already seen some impressive results. For example, UK Sport has teamed up with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to seek out some of the brightest research talent in the quest to win medals In London 2012. Together, they held three "Achieving Gold" workshops with some of the best researchers from a variety of backgrounds to look at the application of science. engineering and technology to Olympic and Paralympic performance sport.

  We also want to see the commercial sector get involved in this important area of work. UK Sport is developing its links in this area, and I am committed to doing what I can to support them. That's why I am planning to convene a meeting in the new year with Qinetiq and BAE Systems to discuss how the best of British expertise in engineering and technology could be applied to benefit high performance sport.

  In addition UK Sport is in the process of establishing an anti-doping Research Steering Committee, made up of academics and practitioners from sport education and medical science to advise on and co-ordinate, research in the UK. As a minimum, I would hope that this Committee will be able to draw together research taking place across the UK to ensure that UK Sport and other sporting organisations have access to the latest cutting-edge research.

  Turning to another matter, the Committee was interested in the "conflict of interest" question between the anti-doping and performance sport function In UK Sport. I mentioned the independent PMP Report carried out in 2004 which found no evidence of this and which was corroborated by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee hearing into Drugs and Role Models later that year.

  In Implementing recommendations from the PMP Report UK Sport established an Independent Scrutiny Panel In September 2005, whose remit is to scrutinise the anti-doping function within UK Sport to identify actual or potential conflicts of interest.

  I am pleased to inform you that the Panel published its first annual report on 15 December on UK Sports website, and I enclose a copy with this letter (not published). I am also pleased that no obvious conflicts of interest have been identified in its first year, and that in setting out its work plan for 2006-07 the Panel has made clear it will take account of the perception of a conflict of interest when making any future recommendations.

December 2006