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Lord Cobbold: My Lords, we have had a fascinating debate, and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part. Many said that it was timely to have a discussion on these problems. We all generally back the Government in their decision to move ahead over the next two days to opening formal negotiations with Turkey.
As many speakers said, Turkey has done an enormous amount to prepare itself for possible accession to the Union, but we all agree that there is still quite a way to go, so it will be a few years before the final terms and conditions of Turkey's membership can be agreed. However, it is clearly a country with huge potential and is an important ally. Creating a prosperous secular and democratic country where Turkey is located is of enormous importance, and of economic benefit both to Turkey and to the rest of Europe.
The absorption of Turkey into the European Union is a bigger morsel than the Union has had to face until now. It may require one or two changes, but I hope
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that it all goes well and does not in any sense, in the long term, destabilise the existing and important progress that has been made in Europe. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
Football
Lord Faulkner of Worcester rose to call attention to the state of English football; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is the first debate on football that we have held in the House since the Unstarred Question asked by my noble friend Lord Clark of Windermere on the ownership of Football League clubs in July 2002. Many of the structural weaknesses in the English game identified in that debate by my noble friend and other speakers remain, but a number of positive points about the state of football today are worth making at the outset.
First, on the playing side, we can take pride in the fact that no fewer than four English clubs have progressed to the knockout stage of the UEFA championship. Despite the disappointments of Euro 2004 in Portugal, the England national side seems to be on track, for the moment at least, for qualification in the 2006 World Cup.
Linked to that, the reputation of England fans abroad has improved considerably and the incidence of disorder at domestic matches is now relatively rare. To a great extent, this is due to the success of the banning order measures in the Football (Disorder) Act 2000 and the subsequent amendment Act of 2002. An example of how crowd behaviour has improved is the almost universal abhorrence of racism in the sport. On the few occasions that it does occur, as happened at Blackburn recently, it is dealt with firmly and effectively—with those guilty held to account and banned from the game. Would that foreign football associations were as conscientious as ours are! The treatment of black English players in club matches and internationals in certain parts of Europe remains a disgrace.
One significant problem remains at home—the serious under-representation of ethnic minorities in the management and administration of the game. There are few in club management and none on the FA Council. In that context, I pay tribute to the work of the Independent Football Commission, whose work in this area has led to the publication of a 10 point plan on tackling diversity in football, enlisting the help of the Commission for Racial Equality in the process. We are light years away from where we were in March 1998, when the Football Task Force, on which I served as vice-chairman, published its first report on Eliminating racism from football, which successive Ministers for Sport endorsed wholeheartedly and whose recommendations the game, to its credit, has largely adopted.
There has also been significant progress in implementing the recommendations in the task force's second report on disabled access and
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involvement in football—another positive tick in the box. The Supporters Trust movement continues to grow. According to the excellent paper, published on 25 November, by the Football Governance Research Centre at Birkbeck, there are now 70 trusts in the Premier League, the Football League and the football Conference; and a quarter of the clubs have a supporter representative on their boards. Here the Government deserve a pat on the back, because that movement would never have taken off had they not taken seriously and implemented the policy recommended by the task force.
There are three further positives which I will mention before I turn to the problems. The first is the decision by the football authorities to extend the life of the Independent Football Commission indefinitely. Unfortunately, they have not yet agreed to review its terms of reference or extend its investigatory powers. But given the reluctance to set up the commission in the first place and the obstacles that were placed in its path in the early days, the football authorities' decision marks a step forward. I was told last week by the IFC chairman, Professor Derek Fraser, that between two-thirds and three-quarters of its 57 recommendations have been accepted. One of the most important was the "fit and proper person" test for directors—now, at last, accepted by the FA, the Premier League and the Football League. This recommendation was also contained in the report of the All-Party Group on Football on English football and its finances, published in February.
The Football League has made real progress over the past year on a range of other governance issues, which I welcome. These include sporting sanctions—deductions of points—from clubs entering administration, a wage cap on clubs in the two lower divisions, the registration and publication of fees paid by clubs to agents and improvements to the corporate governance of the Football League board. This concentration on better governance has taken place under Sir Brian Mawhinney's chairmanship of the Football League, and I congratulate him for what he has achieved thus far.
The Football Association has also made some progress in these areas. Its Financial Advisory Unit is up and running, and the Financial Advisory Committee to which it reports has at last been established, under the independent chairmanship of Kate Barker. The FA Annual Review tells us that it has an extensive work programme for the coming year, covering a range of issues similar to those already addressed by the Football League, including a code of corporate governance and good practice, on which all directors must report and research into a domestic licensing system.
The Football League has also proposed new safeguards regarding clubs' security of tenure at their home grounds and rules to prevent a repetition of the scandalous decision by the owners of Wimbledon Football Club to abandon the community in south-west London which had supported the club for over 100 years and move to a hockey stadium in Milton Keynes. As a former director of that club, I feel
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particularly bitter about that; however, I rejoice in the success of the new club—AFC Wimbledon—started and owned by the supporters, which is now making its way up the pyramid of non-league football. On 13 November, AFC Wimbledon broke the English league record by remaining unbeaten in 76 consecutive league matches. They are five points clear at the top of the Ryman League Division One and it will not be long before AFC Wimbledon on the way up pass Milton Keynes Dons on the way down.
The FA is also calling for greater transparency in the role of agents and their relationships with managers and coaching staff. This cannot come a moment too soon. We can glimpse at the scale of the problem following Manchester United's decision to reveal that it paid £5.5 million to agents last year; £1.2 million of that went to Ruud van Nistelrooy's agent, Rodger Linse, for negotiating his new five-year contract and was on top of the £468,000 the club still owes him for doing the last one.
It is an extraordinary business: agents are paid for bringing a player to a club and then are paid again for negotiating the terms of his contract. As David Conn, the respected writer on the Independent, in his column on 2 October this year, stated:
"Football agents are paid mighty commissions on huge sums of money, often earned as middle men, because chairmen won't, or don't, talk to each other. Players' agents are paid by clubs simply for agreeing to sit down and extract millions from them, then paid for that too".
It is a scandal—one that the FA and the Premier League must tackle in the way the Football League has done.
Payments to agents, the inflated transfer market, and the excessive wages paid to some Premiership players, and indeed club directors, are examples of how too much of the extra money that has come into the game, principally from satellite television deals, is being creamed off at the top, with insufficient distributed to football at lower levels. The All-Party Group on Football proposed a doubling from 5 to 10 per cent of the Premiership's total broadcasting revenue to be redistributed to clubs in the Football League and the football Conference.
There are other consequences of so much wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the Premiership elite. One of these is the growth in the number of non-British players in Premiership teams, because it reduces the opportunity for home-grown players to come through from the ranks of the lower leagues. As an article in the Times on 6 December pointed out, of the players who have played in the Premiership this season, only 38.6 per cent are English. Compare that with Serie A, where the number of Italians is 68.5 per cent, or the 70.4 per cent who are Spanish in la Liga.
As anyone who reads the back pages of our newspapers knows very well—and sometimes the front and inside pages too—the Football Association has had a torrid time this year. I wish the new chief executive, Brian Barwick, every success when he starts
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in the new year. However, it is worrying that the structural review of the FA that was promised in the summer is still not underway.
The most important area that needs to be looked at is the corporate governance arrangements within the FA, particularly the composition of the FA Board. Out of a membership of 12, six come from clubs within the Premier League and the Football League. How can conflicts of interest possibly be avoided when the board is discussing such matters as FA Cup revenue and match arrangements, payments to clubs for players in the England team, punishment of players found guilty of doping or disciplinary offences, the release of players for friendly internationals, and so on?
One of the strongest critics of current governance arrangements seems to be Mr Rupert Lowe, who is chairman of Southampton FC and a member of the FA Board. Back in August, he attempted to persuade the chairmen of the FA, the Premier League and the Football League to sign a letter to FA Council members which contained these interesting words:
"The current structure indubitably fails the accepted tests of Corporate Governance applied outside of sports organisations".
I could not agree more. However, I have difficulty in supporting Mr Lowe's solution, which would have given even more control over the England team, the Community Shield and the FA Cup to the rich and powerful Premier League clubs, especially given their track record of opposition to the Independent Football Commission and, in earlier times, to the FA's financial advisory unit.
There are only two possible ways forward. One is to go down the route of statutory regulation. Because they are so disillusioned with how things are at the moment, that idea is surprisingly backed by a majority of clubs outside the Premier League surveyed in a follow-up to the report of the All-Party Group on Football on the game's finances. It is also backed by the Football Supporters Federation. But it is one which I know that the Government are reluctant to take on, and I can understand why. However, I would say to my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham, who is replying to this debate, that the Independent Football Commission, suitably enhanced and independently funded, could undoubtedly do the job of independent regulator, if that is what the Government choose to do.
The alternative is for the FA to do what, so far, divisions within the game have made it impossible for it to do, certainly since the formation of the Premier League, which is to regulate all football in England. I support the call of the Football Supporters' Federation for,
"the creation of one unified governing body to replace the current multiplicity of leagues and associations".
To me that makes so much sense: it would require the Premier League and the Football League to surrender some of the autonomy which they currently enjoy for the FA to establish a supervisory and regulatory board on which there is a majority of non-executive directors with no financial interests that could conflict with their duties, in marked contrast with the FA board of today.
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It is possible to envisage, with an effective system of self-regulation, the IFC acting as a new board's investigative and reporting agency, but we are a long way from that at the moment. That is why the FA's structural review is so important.
Despite all its difficulties, and thanks to the unsung efforts of thousands of people who give of their time freely and without reward, football in England is astonishingly popular. It is still the national game, played and followed by millions of people, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. But it could be so much better. It is not helped by ambitious individuals using the political dark arts of spin and leak to promote their own cause or to denigrate those who were doing their best. The whispering campaign against Geoff Thompson, the FA's chairman, is but one example.
What I hope that we can demonstrate by this debate is that we in this House are on the side of those striving for improvement while maintaining sporting and other standards of decency and for uniting the elements of the game to achieve one common purpose. I beg to move for Papers.
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