Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)

My Lords, I very much welcome the debate today and declare my interests: I chair Sport Wales and, with that, I sit on UK Sport; I am a member of the Government’s Soft Power Council, which looks at sport; and, in 2017, I authored the report, Duty of Care in Sport, for the then Sports Minister Tracey Crouch. I am also part of the Laureus World Sports Academy. Laureus is perhaps best known for hosting Nelson Mandela in 2000, when he gave a famous speech about how “Sport has the power to change the world”. The rest of Mr Mandela’s comments are also significant, because he talked about how sport can unite nations and bring people together. At its best, sport is incredible; however, there is a darker side, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, and his committee for the work that they have done on this important issue. I very much welcome this report, and it has also been welcomed by the wider sports industry and sports organisations, although it has taken us a little while to get there with the convention. Sports integrity is the very essence of fair competition, but we need to think about how we protect everyone who works in sport, not just the participants. There are huge sums of money won and lost, and lives are also destroyed. We have seen that in a number of sports—most notably, probably, tennis and football—but these issues are occurring in other sports. We also have to think about how we future-proof the world of sport and what that might look like in the next 20 or even 50 years, where the fan base, consumption and even what a popular sport might be could change. I was thinking about the development of e-sports, which have developed very rapidly and gained hugely in popularity. For a while, it felt like e-sports were moving closer to the Olympic movement—I am not sure that they are quite there yet—but they have a huge advantage: you do not have to build massive venues and you can sell literally millions of tickets, as long as you have decent internet. However, how the participants are protected, and the welfare of everyone who is in and around, are a really important part of that. I am glad to say that a lot of UK governing bodies have done work on the welfare, protection and education of everybody in sport, but there is clearly more that we need to do. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, when he said that people in the UK are passionate about sport, but competition manipulation presents a real risk to integrity. It is good to know that the Betting and Gaming Council does not think that there is a systematic problem in the UK, but we need to keep our eyes open to any future risk. I am pleased that ratifying the convention will give the Government representation on the convention’s follow-up committee. That is really important, as it provides an opportunity for the UK to influence Council of Europe decisions, policy development and future initiatives. If we look at this through a soft power lens, sport is a really important part of soft power, whether it is the British events that we host here that have worldwide significance or bringing major events to the UK, such as the Tour de France Grand Départ next year. It is really important that the UK has a seat at the table, especially if we are considering bidding for a future Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is not just the bid process; we do not just fling in a bid at the last minute. There are lots of things that the UK has to get right to make sure that we have a chance of a favourable outcome. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, might wish to expand on that, as he has a huge amount of experience in this space. It is not just the bid process; there is so much that we have to think about. As the first international treaty designed to prevent, detect and sanction match fixing, the convention responds to a sharp rise in manipulation linked to globalised sport betting markets, organised crime and the governance failures that happen in the wider world of sport. There are many threats through this, whether it is to sports ethics, to public trust and sponsor confidence—there have been quite a lot of major issues in sport over the years which have had a variable impact on sport—or to the economic sustainability of sport. Manipulation can also occur with or without betting involvement and with or without criminal activity at national but also, importantly, transnational levels. That escalation has grown since the early 2000s. As we see greater commercialisation of sport, higher financial stakes, the expansion of online and cross-border betting markets, the emergence of illegal betting markets with high payouts, involvement of organised crime groups using sport for fraud and money laundering, we have to be mindful that some of this takes place not just at major sporting level but in minor leagues across the world. I just wanted to spend a little bit of time exploring the wider issues of organised crime and its implications. There is a report by Dr Serhat Yilmaz from Loughborough University that was written in 2024 but launched in Parliament in July this year, which was supported by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. It looked at the issues around sport trafficking, which is not so much known about—this is about the trafficking of players of sport—and this lack of definition really hinders targeted inventions. However, this happens because of organised crime. In 2015, in a report titled “Chasing dreams: Young African footballers duped, dumped by traffickers”, Kieran Guilbert wrote that charity Foot Solidaire estimated that around 15,000 young players a year are trafficked from west Africa to play in leagues around the world. This is not monitored, so that figure could very easily be higher. They are sold into debt bondage and they have exploitative contracts. We can also look at major games. Building venues requires hundreds of thousands of workers in some cases, and organised crime can very easily play a part in that. The Clewer Initiative, which is a UK-based modern slavery group, has said: “Once sporting tournaments are underway, the big audiences and large numbers of tourists can create an environment in which modern slavery and exploitation thrives”. It says that, although it is quite hard to get official documentation on this, “many believe that the Super Bowl is the largest sex-trafficking event in the world”, and that the lead up to the Super Bowl resulted in 750 arrests. It notes that “Anecdotes from NGOs working to support victims of trafficking suggest that thousands of women” and in many cases, children, are brought into the area in the lead-up to events, in particular the Super Bowl, “and there is a significant increase in advertisements for sex, as this becomes part of the ‘tourism’ that fans seek out around the games”. In addition, “violence towards sex workers increases when there are significant losses as fans take out their frustration”— which we already know from domestic violence figures around matches that are won and lost. This week, I spoke to Kat Craig, an internationally renowned expert in safe sport, who said that when she was working with the IOC on the design and contextualisation of safe sport hubs in southern Africa, she found some frightening cases when she was working with local consortiums. She told me about a footballer who was found guilty of match fixing. He should have had a degree of responsibility, but he had come from an impoverished background, and all the way through primary school his parents and teachers encouraged him to cheat and lie, to pretend he was older so he would have more opportunity to be scouted. He said that he first realised this was happening when he was seven or eight years old. He was frequently told he needed to contribute to the needs of the family. He managed to move to Europe, but then his life and those of his family were threatened. When he arrived in Europe, he was taken to a dark room, a gun was put on the table, and he was told that if he did not involve himself in match fixing, he and his family would lose their lives. When he reported this to the police, he was punished, though that was not necessarily the case for the syndicate behind it. I am very keen that players who take part in this should be penalised, but we have to recognise there is physical, economic and psychological duress. It should be very much as we do in anti-doping, where we look at everybody who is involved. Athletes rarely do it on their own, so it is important that we target everybody who is involved in this. I am very excited about the rise of women’s sport—this is a really important moment for us—but there could be a greater risk for women who are poorly paid who work in sport. There are leagues that nobody pays attention to, and there is a huge increase in the online abuse of women who play in sport, so we need to make sure that we do everything that we can to future-proof this. The committee said that the convention is not a complete solution but is just one part of solving the puzzle, and I agree with that. While in the UK we have the Gambling Act 2005, the Fraud Act 2006, the Bribery Act 2010 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, we have to be mindful of what more we need to do. Sports organisations need to consider codes of conduct, educational awareness and fraud detection systems; sport betting operators need to monitor irregular betting patterns, prevent conflicts of interest and manage insider information; and the public authorities need to regulate betting markets, legislate and look at financial support and combat illegal betting. There is still much more that we need to do to protect sport, but I look forward to a future where we can protect everyone who is involved in and works in and around sport to make it fair and to keep its integrity. I hope that we can remember the words of Nelson Mandela that sport has the power to change the world for the better, if we allow it to.