Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in Amendments 91 and 92. I support his view on having free-to-air services for certain sports. My main reason is to expose those sports to the next generation—the youngers coming through. He mentioned rugby—which is not as available as it used to be, certainly not compared with when I was young—but this applies to other sports, including cricket specifically, as well as golf and boxing, which all now have very restricted free-to-air viewing. You wonder what that does to the current generation of children, who may want to be exposed to the sport, but cannot because their parents, for whatever reason, do not have subscriptions to the various channels. Of course, the regulator will not cover Scotland—perhaps it will have its own regulator following this—but, currently, the Scotland men’s national football matches are available only on YouTube. You could say that that is equivalent to free-to-air viewing, but it is not in any way how international football should be presented. The whole question of how sport is made available to future generations—although it is not really for our debate today—is one that we need to think about very seriously.