Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)

My Lords, Amendments 11 and 15 relate to sustainability—not the notion of sustainability that we have been addressing to date when considering this Bill but environmental sustainability. We seek here to get something on the record about how we feel the regulator should approach this issue. Every sector, every industry, should consider environmental sustainability and football should not be an exception. The Government, quite rightly, have commitments to achieve net zero on carbon emissions. It is impossible to divorce environmental issues from issues of financial sustainability and there are numerous ways in which one could substantiate that. It would be negligent to exclude environmental sustainability from the regulator’s remit. It is a moot question whether this needs to be in the Bill, but it should certainly be part of the regulator’s thinking. Existing regulation in the world of football has failed to change sufficiently the culture of professional and semi-professional clubs. With limited financial and staffing resources, nearly every club outside the Premier League has failed to make any notable progress on environmental considerations. There are some clubs, the first among them being Forest Green Rovers, which, notoriously, have a very good reputation in promoting sustainability. Others include Swansea City and Norwich City—which has recently been in the Premier League. It is the Premier League clubs—16 of them—that have, to their great credit, led the way in the football pyramid. We feel that it is necessary to encourage other clubs to do the same. Obviously, Premier League clubs have more resources than clubs lower down the pyramid, but they should not continue to be an outlier in promoting more sustainable environmental practices. To noble Lords who might question whether football should have a role in this, I simply say that the Financial Conduct Authority has regulatory principles which include minimising environmental impacts. There is an environmental policy statement and an environmental management statement, which complies with ISO 14001. It covers issues such as energy, emissions, water usage, minimising waste, recycling, paper use, methods of business travel, digital services and ICT. Football clubs and how they manage the resources that they have at their disposal have an impact on our nation’s desire to head towards net zero by 2050, and that is what the amendment speaks to. I hope that clubs adopt environmental good practices as Arsenal and Brighton & Hove Albion do, such as including free travel in their ticket pricing to encourage more people to get on to public transport. Clubs such as Tottenham, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Chelsea have similar strategies. This should be common practice across the football industry. Whether it is in the Bill or part of the regulator’s remit, the environment is simply too important for us to leave to chance. There is a role for football to play in leading the way, as it does in many other fields of social interaction, such as promoting good race relations, tackling misogyny and dealing with other social issues. I beg to move.