Lord Addington (LD)

My Lords, when I first saw the title of this debate, I immediately asked myself, which sports clubs? My reflex was to think of small amateur sports clubs, which are the backbone of many a social structure. They are microstructures for employment and so on. Then, after two seconds I thought that we must be looking at senior sports clubs. Then I remembered those heady and wonderful days in Committee and Report on the Football Governance Bill and said, “This man will definitely be talking about professional football”. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Mann, did—and I should have remembered it was Leeds that had the special place in his heart. Having done that quick bounce-around, which I am afraid took me all of about two or three minutes, I started thinking about what this actually means. It is undoubtedly true that professional sports clubs have an inherent advantage, in that they have a core of people who feel attracted to them. That is true of virtually all professional sports clubs that attract any form of regular audience—you have your fan base and people who associate with it. In the case of football, and possibly rugby league in the right parts of the north of England, you have guaranteed support. Even rugby union has started to develop that—as a professional game it is not that old, and it has taken time to develop that crowd, but it is there. It applies to cricket as well, to an extent. So they have the potential to do things. However, my mind kept being drawn back to some of the discussions we had on the football regulation Bill. Our clubs tend to be built in specific areas in inner cities and fans do not like them being moved. Classically, clubs can be walked to in an urban environment, and they do not like moving. Indeed, there are many cases going back many years of people trying to do a deal to get a bit of ground for redevelopment and fans resisting. There are pressures around economic development, but the history of these clubs, which are so important, must be remembered in any project. Whether or not the enterprise zone is a thing of yesterday shall be confirmed later, but are we going to adapt the idea of using these very good brands for developing business and social impact? Everybody agrees that we should, it is just that the environments are so varied that you probably will not have one model. Devolution—whatever it means—may be an opportunity to go through this. I found myself taking part in discussions about the proposed tourist levy and tying this in. How do you work these things in together? How do they work properly? How do they come together? Can there be exemptions? It is not an easy, one-size-fits-all project because all the people and institutions involved have individual stories to tell. For instance, what Manchester City did with the Commonwealth Games legacy or what West Ham did with the Olympic stadium should probably be considered for some form of zoning—it does not really matter what you call it. But they are specific examples. Most of the clubs we have do not fit this model, but they are trying to do something with it. I was brought up in Norwich. As I have said, I am not a great football fan, but the club manages to have a very successful hotel stuck at the back of the stands. You can do it. There is opportunity here, and you can do stuff like this, but it is a case of how you encourage it without overburdening or impinging on the traditions that make something attractive. That is the great challenge to everybody. Let us face it, the primary objective of a football club is to win matches and provide entertainment, or at least try to and give the promise of it. In our system, we have embraced the fact that you can lose your status and be demoted, and that is all part of the drama we have accepted as being intrinsic to most of our sporting traditions, even if it is incredibly inconvenient and certain sporting bodies try to get out of it—I would talk about rugby union, for a start. If you have all this going on, how you work it all in together is an interesting idea. Where could it work? Does the enterprise zone have to be attached to the actual playing zone? It would be better if it was, but it may well have to be removed. To declare an interest, I remember being taken to Brighton & Hove Football Club last time the Liberal Democrats were at our conference down there a couple of years ago—I am afraid I will not be there this year—and being told that we had to get on a bus to go and see it. There is, I believe, a long story, which I got halfway through before the dessert arrived, about the history of why it ended up out there. It is probably not ideal. How do you create a model that gets the best out of this? Have the Government given it any thought? That is what we can try to get out of this today. It is about recognising the fact that there will be so many different stories, and that you will have to have a flexible structure—it will not always be football in all places—around how you are going to work through this and encourage it. In addition, are we going to encourage people to play sport in these structures and environments? That means bringing in smaller clubs without taking away their identity. Maybe it is, shall we say, a legal nicety, with a linkage which means you do not have to sell up your ground—which in many places people have actually bought over the years and is a genuine asset to that group and that community; it may be several miles away but the club takes some benefit from it. These are things which we must always think about. If we do not, we are in danger of causing damage to at least some of them. This is a complicated situation which has many threads pulling across, and sometimes against each other. How do the Government propose—if indeed they have given any thought to it—to get the economic benefit out of something with the great brand awareness and status of a big sporting club? It is something which everybody has had a look at and had great ideas about but then backed away from. That is my experience, having covered this for several decades now. Nobody quite knows how to do it. If the current Government have some ideas on this, I, for one, would be very interested to hear them.