Lord Mann (Lab)

My Lords, I had the privilege and honour of serving in the Blair Government under Richard Caborn and Tessa Jowell for five years and being in the private discussions around the Olympic legacy and the Olympic Park. The one thing more than anything that I took from that was that the creation of a sports park was itself an economic generator. I do not think that we have learned the lessons from that for what it could mean now. I will take just one sport, but this could apply, albeit not in as big a way, to any sport and at any level. The financially and economically most successful part of UK sport is the English Premier League. According to the Forbes list, five of the top clubs in the world, in terms of wealth, are from the English Premier League, as well as 11 of the top 30. On Deloitte’s list of the most successful clubs financially, which is calculated on a different basis but using the same kinds of principles, six of the top 10 in the world are in English Premier League, as well as nine of the top 20 and 15 of the top 30. Interestingly, the clubs on the Forbes list and the Deloitte list do not totally overlap. If we take the Premier League clubs, as well as some clubs that aspire to it and those that are in and out of it, as business entities, we are talking about a huge amount of money within the transfer window. For the past two years, the Premier League won assets of £1.5 billion just on players. What we have not done is see this in the wider economic sphere, in which the stadia are a key part. I was over at the World Cup, seeing the way the Americans have configured this. I do not think that they have done it very cleverly, and I do not see what the community benefit is of their new stadiums. There is an economic regeneration model, but it is not a sports park model. There is a way we could have a sports park model in this country really effectively and quickly, and, in doing so, leverage in a huge amount of additional capital as investment into the country. Football is big money. Investors, through various different means, are keen on our football clubs and on investing. Getting money into the sport of football, particularly at the higher levels, has been relatively easy. Indeed, there are many people seeking to buy low-level clubs at the moment, and doing so with investments, often from overseas, that have the same aim. They think they can at least break even or perhaps make a bit of money. However, we are only getting in sports money. There are sports stadia that want and need to develop for the Premier League all over the country. I will take an example that I know the best: Leeds United Football Club. The investors there are also building a small amount of housing—well, 2,300 units is not that small—on the land in the development area that the club controls. Let us take the economy of the city and its potential and look at what was done, in a very different model, by the investors behind Manchester City and the City of Manchester stadium. It is a different model because the stadium was already there—the club inherited the Commonwealth sports park and then developed economically beyond it—but it is good synergy to compare it with the Olympic Park, which is also a sports park. There is no sports park proposed in Leeds, as the land is not sufficient, but the land between the city centre and the football stadium, as the major arena, which is going to be developed and increased in capacity by about one-third in the immediate future, is seen as a stadium development, with all the complexities of transport, et cetera, rather than a community development or a city development. A club such as that should have the option of having some kind of special enterprise zone status, in the way we have done elsewhere. I worked on deals in the past with Nissan and Komatsu, and we have done others for major industries elsewhere. Critically, we gave the master planning powers to the investors, in co-operation not least with mayors, to sign off the overall plan but then allow the detail to go through. If we did that, I think far more investment would go into those sports villages economically, in housing and industry, and in community and social benefit. It is the old Section 106 concept, but without building roundabouts. The ideal place to have community football facilities in the city of Leeds would be under the banner of Leeds United Football Club. That goes for all our big football clubs. We do not do that. The obvious place to have GP facilities would be precisely there, and we could build a health village as part of it. To get people in, in the way the Olympic sports village does, has been proven to work, so we are denying that capital possibility. If we put money into Leeds United, it is into the stadium and is on a restricted basis. That goes for most of our other clubs, even those that have managed deals. We should bear in mind that the clubs in Manchester and Birmingham, with large city councils, employ lots of planners and can afford to get the top planners. The capacity in planning around the rest of the country is far less, even in big cities such as Leeds. In Nottingham, again, it has taken seven years to get the stadium through. We hope it goes through this month, but then there will be further problems. There is no way of drawing in inward investment to one of the successful parts of our economy and building community assets alongside as part of the deal. Look at where the world is going and the Leeds example again. Take driverless cars and driverless multi-purpose vehicles. We want to move people to a large stadium, be it for football or concerts—a big venue in a big centre. Outside London, the way to do that in the future will include driverless vehicles moving large numbers of people. That cannot be done by the sports club owners because they do not have the economic powers. I put it to the Committee that there are many examples, from clubs the size of Leeds in cities the size of Leeds to clubs the size of Port Vale, with huge amounts of development land around the stadium, and much smaller, lower-level clubs such as Worksop Town, where this possibility would drive investment into the country and benefit the community and our sports clubs.