Contribution
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for a first-class debate. I feel, as I always do when I am in my own committee, deeply humbled by the incredible level of expertise around me, supplemented so well by Olympians and other enthusiasts and knowledgeable individuals contributing to such an important issue. If I may, I add to the paeans of praise to the Minister. This is her first Grand Committee outing. I congratulate her on using wonderful legalese with the phrase, “consider carefully and respond accordingly”; she has already mastered the language of her department. But then she ruined it at the end, unfortunately, by giving a clear answer, telling us the very good news about ratification, the importance of which was raised, rightly, by the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Hannay, and my noble friends Lord Moynihan and Lord Parkinson. It has taken a very long time to get to this point, and I am extremely pleased that when this process concludes, we will ratify the treaty.
If I may, I will dwell on a small number of points, as it is important to give credit to noble Lords who have made such a contribution. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, raised a relevant point about the vulnerability of many sports people. He used the phrase, “on the way up and on the way down”. I was very touched by Moses Swaibu’s testimony to us in his witness evidence, in which he described a glittering career ahead of him, but he lost his position, started to be relegated and became vulnerable. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, gave us an illustration of sports trafficking at its most extreme, but Moses unfurled in his evidence the vulnerability of so many of these people, who are basically young kids. He was extremely young, not of huge education and very vulnerable. In his case, the thin end of the wedge process led him to ruin his life, in effect. I pay tribute to him for having got it back on track.
I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, raised the issues relating to the principle of the jurisdiction; I have raised them as well. This is a long-term issue that I am sure the Minister will continue to review and come back to us. I greatly appreciate my noble friend Lord Moynihan’s very sensible solutions to some of these problems. At the end of the day, we were surprised how significant this issue is and how it is continuing to grow far more rapidly than people realise, I think. One of my colleagues—perhaps it was the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, or my noble friend Lord Parkinson—pointed out that the $1 trillion, or €1 trillion, or whatever currency it is in, is a significantly large amount.
If this treaty is to be successfully applied, more money needs to be put into enforcement—it is really as simple as that—and there needs to be more co-ordination. We have to be realistic. This is not a party-political point; all Governments are going to have this issue, and we must ensure that if we are going to sign these treaties, we are quite vigorous in making sure that we have the money in order to deal with it.
This is very clearly a global issue. I know the issue of the Council of Europe is an important one, and I will not get into the debate on that now, but I will say that it has to be beyond simply the Council of Europe. This is a global problem. The countries that were alerted to us in our witness statements were not France, Belgium and the UK, although there is clearly match fixing there; the real issues come from crossing borders and from other nations, such as in Latin America, in particular, and Asia.
The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, raised an important point about other principals, such as e-sports and prediction markets. There is now so much more than simply placing a bet on a race with a bookmaker. This is highly complicated. In fact, someone suggested on the way up here that there should be a bet on the spread of who got here first, the Minister or the Opposition spokesperson. The point with e-sports and other types of sports betting is that the complexity has now multiplied on itself, so we call on the Government to make sure that we are not backward-looking but that we are thinking really innovatively about how to tackle these problems.
As the noble Lord, Lord German, rightly said, this committee will continue its dogged scrutiny and ensure that the CRaG process is a beacon of parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s ability to enter into agreements that will benefit us all, which we believe the Macolin convention will.