Sports Clubs: Special Enterprise Zone Status
Thursday, 17 September 2026
Contributions
Question for Short Debate
Asked by
Lord Mann
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the economic benefits of giving sports clubs special enterprise zone status.
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.
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mann, makes a very good case and I hope that what I say is interpreted as supportive of it. My support for Brighton and Hove Albion is well known, and I declare it as a relevant interest in this debate. In fact, I have often thought that I should see if it is possible to change my title to Lord Bassam of Brighton and Hove Albion—I think it would be a novel thing to do. However, there is a serious point behind all this. It is a delight that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, is replying to this short debate, because I know from our many conversations that she loves football like I do and is a big Stevenage FC fan. She understands the economic benefits that football clubs bring to an area. The noble Lord, Lord Mann, asks about recognising the economic benefits of sports clubs and linking them to enterprise zones. These, as we know, confer several advantages to the businesses which choose to operate within them, as do freeports and investment zones. Most of the advantages are related to tax and business costs, and it is possible to get 100% business rate relief. Other tax reliefs and easier and simplified planning permissions make a very strong case. Major beneficiaries of enterprise zones are usually SMEs, which make up some 99% of businesses generally and some 60% of the private sector workforce. There is some debate about the relative merits of enterprise zones, with some observers believing that the estimated number of jobs created by them is lower than was originally anticipated. However, in 2025 the Government claimed freeports and investment zones had attracted over £64 billion in private investment; in 2024 it was thought that some 100,000 jobs had come directly and indirectly from freeports and investment and enterprise zones. We know that Sport England believes that the combined social and economic benefits of sport and physical activity in England is valued somewhere in the region of £125 billion, and DCMS in 2024 also reported that sport contributed £20.6 billion to the economy and 0.8% of GVA. Taking the Premier League as a case study, it believes that the combined value of the clubs operating in that league was worth nearly £9 billion in 2023-24 and contributed over 100,000 jobs and £4.4 billion in tax benefits. The Government acknowledge this and have stated that they also deliver indirect economic benefits to the local communities that the clubs serve, attracting visitors and bringing increased footfall to the hospitality, retail and transport sectors. There are downsides, particularly if you are a football fan and have to suffer the benefits of losing and winning—mostly winning in my case, but there we are. The Brighton and Hove Albion case is an interesting one. Had the club lost its league status in the 1990s, the impact on the city would have been, in my view, catastrophic. As it was, we were able to rescue the club with the local authority, and I was happy to play a part in bringing the club back to Brighton from Gillingham and ultimately helping it secure its new home of Falmer. Rightly, the club has undertaken over the years economic impact studies on its impact on the city’s economy. After its first year in the Premier League, it was calculated to have brought an additional £20 million to the local economy and to have created 1,000 jobs directly and indirectly. That was back in 2018, and I have little doubt that if the study was repeated now, those figures would be bigger, not least because the club itself has invested heavily in training facilities, merchandising and hospitality. Now the figure would probably be closer to £500 million a year. When the club brings back the women’s team from Crawley to our new stadium, which is going to be designed with women in mind and for women alone, I think those figures will grow again. I am very much in favour of creating centres of sporting excellence and, so far, the city of Brighton and Hove has argued that there is potential to add that second women’s stadium adjacent to the Amex and alongside the successful Brighton Aldridge Cricket Academy on the other side of the stadium to the west. There is an opportunity in my city to create a sports zone along with the Falmer academic corridor. We already have a major sports centre there and the sort of benefits that the noble Lord, Lord Mann, talked about of bringing sports science and physical sciences in alongside of that would be tremendous. It begs the question: would they or could they benefit from being designated as an enterprise or investment zone? Clearly, they could, particularly if the planning process was speeded up—and no doubt, being the good entrepreneur he is, Tony Bloom would very much welcome a reduction in his business rates. I think that football clubs outside the Premier League and the Championship that are essentially SMEs, alongside rugby, rugby league and professional cricket clubs, and perhaps some of the other track and field sports discipline stadia would get considerable benefit too. I am tempted by the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and I can see a particular benefit to football clubs and other sporting institutions where the economic margins can be tighter. It would work well, particularly for those clubs in the leagues below the Championship and those in non-league football—the National League North, the National League South and so on. This idea is well worth exploring. The benefits that it would bring to many of our harder-pressed communities would be well worth having and could unlock substantial extra investment. As the noble Lord, Lord Mann, says, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and investors seeking now to invest in the lower league clubs, Wrexham being a particularly good example. That regenerative effect has a multiplier that benefits communities much more widely.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Grand Committee for allowing me to speak in the gap. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Mann, for this disappointingly short but important debate. It is important because it is clear how much sports clubs contribute to civil society, our health and our economy. The noble Lord mentioned the Premier League, and obviously it is my dearest hope that Wrexham will be promoted from the Championship to the Premier League soon. Thanks to the patronage of Ryan and Rob, the whole town has benefited from that regeneration and the money that they and football have brought into the town. In 2022, DCMS estimated that the sports sector contributed £18.1 billion to the UK economy, supporting 550,000 jobs and outpacing the growth of the national economy. The previous Government invested more than £1.5 billion in grass-roots, school and elite sports, as well as a sports survival package during the Covid-19 pandemic, which provided £600 million of emergency funding to sports clubs and organisations impacted by spectator restrictions. However, this Government have hammered businesses with higher business rates and higher employers’ national insurance. The Sport and Recreation Alliance, which represents more than 100 national governing bodies, has highlighted the damaging impact of business rates across the sector, both for grass-roots groups and larger facilities. The chair of the Culture, Media and Sports Committee in the other place has warned that business rate rises translates to rising participation fees, some by as much as 85%. Do the Government recognise that higher business rates are making sport less accessible to those who cannot afford these increases? We have consistently warned the Government about the negative impacts that their economic policies are having on the sports sector. During debates on the Sporting Events Bill, we highlighted the calls from stakeholders to address increasing employment costs and higher business rates. What impact has the Employment Rights Act had on sport where work is often seasonal and contracts need to be flexible? Can the Government give an explanation why they gave a 20% cut in business rates to pubs, clubs and live music venues but failed to include sports venues? What assessments were done to analyse the impacts? The noble Lords, Lord Bassam and Lord Mann, mentioned the enterprise zones. We currently have 48 such zones in England, which allows businesses to benefit from incentives such as business rate discounts. Furthermore, all business rates growth above an agreed baseline are retained by the local authority to be reinvested in the local area. The Chancellor has said the autumn Budget will introduce greater fiscal devolution with greater business rates retention for local councils and strategic authorities. Can the Minister provide any further detail on these plans? In addition, what plans do the Government have for any new and existing enterprise zones more broadly? Businesses benefit from certainty, and those in existing enterprise zones will want to know which benefits will continue or if there will be changes. We must all be on the side of businesses, including our sports clubs, large and small. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what action the Government are taking to support those clubs and what impact assessments have been taken of their economic policies so far.
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.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to respond to this QSD. I thank my noble friend Lord Mann for securing this debate and opening it—because it gives me an opportunity to talk about football, which is never a bad thing as far as I am concerned, but also because it is an important issue. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. My noble friend Lord Mann raises an interesting Question. Sports clubs have not been given special enterprise zone status. Enterprise zones were not designed as a designation for individual organisations; rather, they were place-based interventions, intended to support economic growth and regeneration within defined geographic areas. However, my noble friend’s Question raises a broader and important issue: the contribution that sporting institutions can make to economic growth, regeneration and community development, and I do not think we should ever underestimate that. According to DCMS’s Sport Satellite Account, published in September 2024, the sports sector contributed an estimated £53.6 billion direct to the UK economy in 2021, equivalent to 2.6% of total UK gross value added. That is a fantastic contribution which demonstrates the significance of the role that sport plays as an economic sector in its own right. Professional football has a particularly strong relationship with place. Unlike many other major economic sectors, football clubs and stadiums are distributed across cities and towns across the country. Clubs can support employment, local businesses, visitor spending and investment, while stadiums can provide a focal point for wider regeneration. That sits at the heart of what my noble friend Lord Mann is discussing. That important contribution is here, both for the opportunities it provides and for volunteering, participation and community cohesion. Sport makes that important contribution right across the United Kingdom. I have seen this close at hand in my own area. My noble friend Lord Bassam has already kindly mentioned my own football team. If he made himself Lord Bassam of Brighton and Hove Albion, that would be probably a first in your Lordships’ House. I am lucky enough that my team and my town share the same name, so I can have both designations in my title. My football club makes an enormous contribution to our community, across all ages, from youth football to walking football, and across our community, through social events. It has opened a nursery, and recently an all-weather training facility. During Covid, our club played an absolutely key role at the heart of our community. The first-team players took lunches to our older residents, which brightened people’s days so much. It plays a key role. The government position today is that sports clubs have an important role to play in supporting growth, but the most effective approach is to integrate sporting assets within broader plans for regeneration and local economic development. The Government are already acting on the opportunity presented by stadium-led regeneration. The Prime Minister has reaffirmed his commitment to a stadium regeneration accelerator, through which the Minister for Growth and the Minister for Sport will work with mayors to help major sports-led projects bring jobs, investment and housing to local areas. The accelerator is bringing together government departments, local leaders, sporting bodies and investors around viable projects, helping to identify and address barriers to delivery. It is not a capital fund for stadium construction; stadium redevelopment is led and funded by clubs and private investors, while the Government use their convening role to help realise the wider benefits for places. As the noble Lord, Lord Mann, pointed out, Leeds illustrates the scale of the opportunity here. The expansion of Elland Road is being taken forward by Leeds United, while the Government and local and regional partners are working to support the wider regeneration potential around the stadium. This approach recognises that major sporting assets can act as anchors for regeneration and place-making. It also reflects the Government’s wider local growth agenda, which seeks to empower local leaders and support regeneration that responds to the needs and ambitions of individual places. In some places, mayoral development corporations can complement this work by co-ordinating planning, land assembly and infrastructure delivery across complex regeneration areas. The appropriate model will depend on local circumstances and must support a broader plan for the place, rather than simply the commercial interests of an individual club. That does not mean that football clubs and other stakeholders are not key players with mayors and local councillors in driving that regeneration forward. Alongside support for regeneration and growth—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is particularly interested in grass-roots sport—the Government continue to invest in grass-roots sport and community facilities. At least £400 million will be invested in new and upgraded grass-roots sports facilities over the next four years, while Sport England invests more than £250 million each year through Exchequer and National Lottery funding to support participation and to tackle inactivity in communities across the country. There are also forms of support available to many community sports organisations through existing tax, business rates and funding arrangements. Community amateur sports clubs that meet the relevant eligibility criteria can benefit from charitable rate relief providing 80% relief on their business rates bill, and sports clubs may be eligible for the lower retail, hospitality and leisure multipliers where they are open to visiting members of the public—this probably answers the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield. I know that the noble Baroness will not expect me to comment specifically on any Budget proposals that are coming forward—she would not have done that when she was a Minister either—but we are already undertaking a lot to support sport, including the new, permanently lower multiplier for eligible retail, hospitality and leisure properties, and the wider support package with a budget of £4.3 million. The small business retail, hospitality and leisure multiplier is set at 38.2p in 2026 - 27, 5p below the national small business multiplier, and the standard RHL multiplier is set at 43p, 5p below the national standard multiplier. They are also eligible for the other benefits that I spoke about earlier. I also wish to challenge the issue around NICs again, as I have had to do many times. The NICs rise does not apply to young people. Businesses, whether sport businesses or others, do not need to pay the additional charges on NICs for young people who are employed. The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, and the noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Addington, referred to the lessons the Government have learned from previous enterprise zones and how these have informed current local growth policies. It is important to say that the experience of enterprise zones has directly informed what we are doing in government around newer special economic zone programmes. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, mentioned freeports and investment zones; they have all been informed by the enterprise zone experience. Officials identified five factors as critical to success in any such zone: a clear strategic sector focus; a compelling value proposition for investors, including infrastructure and skills; strong local governance; genuine integration with the surrounding local economy; and co-ordinated investment promotion. These were all built into the freeports model. To address displacement directly, freeport tax reliefs apply only to new investment, and business rates relief can be subject to a displacement test—a direct response to the evidence from enterprise zones. It was felt that enterprise zones were often just moving people locally, not bringing in investment from outside. Freeports and investment zones have been brought together as industrial strategy zones now, offering potential investors a more streamlined and coherent package. I hope that answers Members’ questions. Mayoral development corporations are developing all the time, and they can enable mayors to use significant private sector investment in world-class sports facilities to unlock that wider regeneration potential, including housing, jobs and facilities for local residents and communities, utilising powers such as planning, CPO and infrastructure provision. I probably should not mention Manchester at the moment—I think Manchester United is having a bit of a tough time, so I will not step on any toes there—but there is a big project in Manchester, and the Old Trafford Regeneration Mayoral Development Corporation is acting as a driving force. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, referred to planning. The steps we have taken both through the revised NPPF and the Planning and Infrastructure Act—which we recently took through the House to introduce a clearer, rules-based process for planning—will help with some of this regeneration, whether it is for football grounds or any other sports facility. In closing, I thank everyone in the Committee for their very important contributions to this debate. Our thinking is emerging on this, so I have listened with interest to what all noble Peers have had to say.
Sitting suspended.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5409270.