Lord Fuller (Con)

My Lords, nearly 100 years ago my grandfather was an Olympic athlete. In 1932, he asked for time off work to travel to New York and onwards to Los Angeles on the Olympic train alongside all the other European participants. He did not win a medal, but his performance was featured in the cover story of Track Stats magazine last March. Known as “Flying Fuller”, he was Britain’s fastest man. Back then, sport was the amateur game. When he was alive, he told me how Lord Burghley dropped the baton in the 4x100 relay. It was a shame, he told me, because they had practised the handover in the changing rooms beforehand. It was different times—the epoch of the gentleman amateur. I mention all this because sport is grounded in people, community clubs, the fellowship of teams and the tension of individual competition. It is the great leveller, and we can be proud that Britain has codified many of the great global sports. I know why this Bill is here. It is because the promoters of the truly global events have lobbied for it. I know because I have spoken to some of them. They have their sports rights to defend. They have signed up the big global brands. There are pallet-loads of merchandise to shift. They have told the Government that unless they pass this Bill, we will never get another sporting event in our nation. It is nonsense. That is what I would say if I was them, but we have been suckered by that. Money often follows sport, but sport cannot and should not be only about the money. This Bill makes sport all about the money, by law. It will be said that we have had similar Bills before for the Olympics. That is right, and a completely bespoke effort was needed and justified. But the Olympics in 2012 were the exception, not the rule, and this Bill will make the exception the rule, in an unwanted, unwarranted and unnecessary intrusion into our sporting and cultural life. Because each event is different, we will most likely need special purpose Bills for the crown jewel events anyway. I am not against these Bills. I welcome the Euro 28 tournament. There will be circumstances and scope that will need to be negotiated, and if this Bill pertained to Euro 28 alone it would have my full support. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said earlier in this debate, we do not need legislation for many of these events. In providing an evergreen framework, perversely, all the Bill does is give away any and all negotiating leverage that we may otherwise have. As the noble Baroness, Lady Davies—who is not in her place—observed, we could end up bidding against ourselves. It prompts promoters to ask for even more, and counterintuitively it weakens our ability to land these events, because game theory tells you that. It has been said that the Bill is just for a one-off such as the World Cup or the Euros, but that is not what the Bill provides for. As other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Wood—whose comments I associate myself with—said, it is all a bit woolly. The press notices talk about the big tournaments, but it could end up with international table tennis or where there is a fuzzy boundary between sport and entertainment; wrestling and boxing have been mentioned. These are all less lustrous than the crown jewels. If we pass the Bill unamended, the rugby internationals or the Ryder Cup mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Nye—who is not in her place either—will all clamour to be included. They are already asking; it is a slippery slope. That is where I have my problem with this Bill, but also with the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, who seeks to expand the scope still further. There is a mission creep here that trespasses on the grittiness, the sweat, the highs and lows, and the visceral untidiness of sport. I am concerned because there are powers to designate zones around stadiums, or other undefined places, where trading will be made illegal. I asked the promoter of one of these events how far that exclusion zone may extend. He said, “Well, certainly between the transport interchanges and the stadium”. That was his minimum expectation. Consider that 10-minute walk from Twickenham station to the Allianz Stadium down Whitton Road in south-west London. Every type of food from around the world is available, from licensed food vans and stalls set up in front gardens where enterprising home owners have demolished their garden walls. There are old boys selling memorabilia and tat, the little guy with his roadside kebab van and the youth club with its pop-up gazebo frying chicken wings for a couple of hours before the game. That is part of the grittiness. It adds to the day’s pleasure. Yet it is going to be made illegal on pain of a £50,000 fine, even if they have a licence—yes, a fine for the burger flippers from the Cubs and Scouts raising money for the jamboree, or for the home owner who is going to be doubly burdened by the mansion tax. Under this legislation, only expensive cardboard burgers, plastic tat and gassy lager sold in soulless, overpriced stadium concourse concessions will be permitted. There are other provisions in the Bill to prevent online trading by mobile phone or other internet devices at an event. It seems to me that this amounts to a ban on closing out a bet on a game in progress from your seat, in an affront to the fan who likes a flutter. As most apps are based in Gibraltar, I am not quite sure how it would be enforced anyway. But it gets worse, and I associate my comments with those of the noble Lord, Lord Wood. It will be illegal to pass on a ticket to a friend if your plan changes—say your Mum has fallen over at home or whatever. We all want to avoid the bots but, frankly, the ticket sellers and organisers have not worked hard enough to stop the scammers hoovering up all the tickets. Rather than sorting this omission at source, the Government are going to go after the little guy. If the Bill is passed, where will be the incentive to fix this problem? Instead, the fan is going to be forced to surrender tickets to the organisers, who can then resell them for whatever they like, as we have heard of in the FIFA World Cup, and by outlawing peer-to-peer platforms such as StubHub along the way. I have been told by an organiser of one of these crown jewels events that fans will be able to surrender their tickets as little as 30 minutes before the game. All that will do is encourage hopefuls to turn up at the turnstiles and then be disappointed when, 10 minutes before the game, there is no ticket to buy. You could not make it up. If organisers and ticket marketers tried harder on the initial ticketing, we would not need these provisions at all. I need to ask the fundamental question: what is so bad about “exposing for sale an event ticket”, in the words of the Bill, to your Facebook friends? How is that so bad that it justifies a £50,000 fine? I also want to know how this legislation will dovetail into the Government’s consultation on banning zero-hours. In Committee, I plan to introduce a carve-out for sporting events, because there are no guaranteed hours in sport; Fergie time tells you that. I am not going to go on about unauthorised association, but it is so loosely defined that it could affect a bed-and-breakfast operator who simply suggests that they are not far from the event, or the struggling pub running a tournament sweepstake. This Bill will sanitise sport, restrict choice, increase costs and damage the enjoyment of the day. Why can we not see that this harms, not strengthens, our negotiating power? Why have we got it in for the Scouts and Guides raising money for the jamboree, the bloke who prefers a cheap kebab to an overpriced burger and the bucket hat rather than the baseball cap, the fan who fancies ale rather than lager, or the geezer who just wants to place an in-game bet from the comfort of his seat in the middle of the game? Why are we on the wrong side of our sporting life? This Bill is unnecessary. Last week, the Financial Times asserted that the Premier League was a national asset. It was right, and it has become so without the unnecessary provisions in the Bill. It is a sledgehammer to miss a nut and will reduce the simple enjoyment of the small pleasures of going to the game. Now, I know that part of sport is knowing when you are beaten and I can tell from the House this evening that I am not going to win this one—but I have made my point. We must guide against mission creep. We must get the balance between the private interest and the public good right because, if we fail to do so, the fans at Old Trafford, Anfield and other places will, like the fans of Saudi Arabian golf, tell you the unintended consequences of putting the money first and the fans second.