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Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, for facilitating this debate and for his excellent speech. When I arrived in your Lordships' House today, I suddenly realised that, as a Bolton Wanderers fan about to speak in a debate on football, I might have chosen a better colour of scarf to wear. To say that football has played a significant part in my life would be an understatement. I went to my first Bolton
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Wanderers match in my mother's womb. Not only was I born into a football-mad family, I married into one. My husband and I were married on Friday 20 October, 1978, so that we could watch Bolton play Manchester City on Saturday 21. It was a draw.
I hear that there are other supporters of Bolton Wanderers in your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Roper, who is not in his place, tells me that his grandchildren in Edinburgh go to sleep in Bolton Wanderers pyjamas.
Unlike most of your Lordships who are speaking in today's debate, I do not profess to be an expert on the game, although I do understand the offside rule. I am a passionate supporter and it is as a fan that I speak today. I simply want to make a couple of observations about accessibility and the funding of grassroots football.
In the 1970s and 1980s, professional football was in crisis. Crowds were falling, and there was serious violence both outside and inside grounds. Since then, although the game faces new challenges—not least the concentration of vast sums of money in the hands of the top Premiership clubs, their players and agents—crowds are increasing, television audiences of the game are enormous and, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, mentioned, violence has been all but eliminated from the grounds and is not as great a problem as it once was outside, given the all-seeing eye of the CCTV camera. There is as much fascination with football today as there has been throughout the past century. Yet, I fear that the game is becoming inaccessible to its core supporters and the young. No longer is there cheap terracing, and ticket prices are high. I understand why, following the disasters that scarred the national game, a decision was taken to make stadiums all-seater, but it has also taken away some of the character.
Only once did I watch a game from the terraces of Burnden Park; it was a Rugby League match. Oldham was playing Wigan in the Stone's Bitter Challenge semi-final; they had to play at a neutral ground. I arrived early with my six year-old son, and we had a good vantage point. After a while, we were surrounded by rather large men. My son kept asking them politely if they were supporting Oldham, only to be told, politely, that they were supporting Wigan. As the crowds grew, one of the Wigan supporters asked my son if he would like to sit on his shoulders; we gratefully accepted. Just as the match was about to start there was a lull; into the silence my son chirped up, "We're here because my mummy is the Conservative candidate for Oldham". I was just wondering how I could get my son down and escape intact, when the man whose shoulders he was sitting on said, "Well, lad, she's got about as much chance as her rugby team". As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, knows, he was quite right.
I tell that story because it was fun to stand, and it was much warmer on a very cold day. But I also tell it because it has long puzzled me why crowds at rugby matches mingle easily, yet crowds at football matches must be so heavily segregated. Has it anything to do with the fact that we get the behaviour we deserve because of the way in which we treat people? I pose
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that question not least because when my son was in San Francisco he went to a baseball match where everyone sat together, tickets were cheap and the game was accessible. Now that players have such huge wages and agents take so much money, are the top football clubs in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden egg?
Football has a powerful hold over the imagination of so many young—and not so young—people. For many of us, it provides an excitement and an escape from the day to day. But it is not just top-flight football. When I realised that my noble friend Lord Lyell was an Everton supporter, I was not sure whether I should call him "my noble friend". As he said, for many, football is played in the park, at school, five-a-side in the gym, or just knocking a ball about in the street. It is a great way of getting kids and young people active. We should capitalise on that and do all that we can to encourage the game.
Many top clubs do wonderful work in the community. Charles Hendry, the shadow Minister for Young People, who has visited many of those projects, tells heart-warming stories of clubs involved in schools, working with the disabled and taking part in academic studies. I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester: I would like to see more such activity, although what is done is very welcome.
Many sports clubs and youth clubs are also making an impact. Until recently, I was a director of Bolton Lads and Girls Club, one of the biggest youth clubs in the country, if not the biggest. It is a true success story. The football section of the club is flourishing, with 19 football teams and many children on the waiting list. One of the biggest problems is the lack of pitches. We need to do all that we can to protect our playing fields and ensure that more are brought into use by the community.
The late, great Bill Shankly used to say to his strikers, "If you find yourself in the box with the ball at your feet, just stick it in the back of the net, and we'll discuss your options later". Whatever options football and the Government take, let us never forget that football is a game, and as such it should be fun, enjoyable and accessible for all.
Lord Newby: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, on initiating the debate. In recent years, my personal experience of the game has been almost entirely positive. I have two teenage sons for whom football is their major way of getting exercise and one of the best ways of making friends at school. Their experience of it has been entirely beneficial. As a spectator in recent years at Premier League matches and a viewer of live football and highlights on television, I have found football one of the most satisfactory forms of relaxation. However, watching Leeds United lose 6-1 to Portsmouth in the Premier League last year was a blip on that otherwise relatively satisfactory pastime.
In response to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, about standing, as a youth standing at the kop end at Elland Road, I can assure
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her that it was cold, uncovered and unpleasant. One was subject to a range of missiles from the "away" supporters who stood behind the youth section. I therefore support seating at football grounds. On Sunday, when I went to the Arsenal match and sat at the north bank, there was no lack of passion there, despite the fact that people were sitting down, for at least part of the game.
As everybody has acknowledged, football is more important than any other sport. Why? More people play it; more people watch it; more people care about it; and, in many communities, the football club is the most significant institution and a major local employer. That is why it has such potential to influence people's lives and to be a power for good, or for harm. That is why it is the subject of so much scrutiny.
As noble Lords have said, the game has changed very much in the past decade. There have been steadily rising crowds across the divisions; huge investment in stadiums; increased professionalism in the management of clubs and the game itself, and a huge increase in the revenue of the top clubs, through television, merchandise and the development of the game and clubs as global brands, which was unimaginable 20 or 30 years ago. We have seen an explosion in the number of women and girls playing football and the development of supporters' trusts.
Much attention has been focused on, and many concerns expressed about, the governance of the professional game. But as several noble Lords have pointed out, those issues are being addressed systematically and professionally by both the Premier League and the Football League. The Premier League's new governance rules, published in August, deal very satisfactorily with issues such as directors' qualifications and the need for more transparent financial reporting than ever before. Manchester United's latest annual report is a model of transparency in every aspect of the game. Admittedly, pressures were brought to bear on the club to lead to such a situation. However, compared to what one knew previously about the players, how much they were bought for and how much agents were paid, the club's report marks a new, positive standard.
There remains a raft of issues concerning many fans that are as yet unresolved or unsatisfactorily resolved. Those include the wealth of the Premier League compared to lower divisions; wages at the top clubs; and the role and regulation of agents. Why, for example, was an agent paid £750,000 to facilitate Alan Smith's transfer to Manchester United, when I am sure that he would have gone on his hands and knees across the Pennines with little help from anybody? I believe strongly that those matters should be left for football to resolve. The role of the Independent Football Commission is undoubtedly to prod and goad people, as a result of which it will never be very popular; that is not its role. Personally, I am very dubious about the need or desirability of statutory regulation of football. It is for a combination of the Premier League, the Football League and the FA to sort out.
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As I have said, the Premier League and the Football League have made great progress recently. The FA is changing and doing a tremendous amount of good work in providing a framework for grass-roots football through, for example, its coaching and refereeing training. It is also increasingly doing a great deal of work internationally to promote good practice in all aspects of the game—not least in the world's poorest countries.
The recent problems of the FA have been exemplified by the soap opera of its senior management. I hope that the appointment of Brian Barwick will bring some stability and leadership. He should be left to get on with it. The Government, who have been barely mentioned today, should concentrate, as they have belatedly, on providing more resources to get more children playing football and other sports at school.
My particular interest in football, other than as a fan, has been how to use the power of football among young people to inspire them to improve their lives and their communities. I declare an interest as chairman of the Prince's Trust football initiative and as an adviser to the Karrot project. The Prince's Trust began its relationship with football in 1997 with seven of the Premier League clubs. It is now working with more than 50 professional clubs in England.
The trust works with "hard to reach" young people, particularly those who are unemployed, under-skilled, ex-offenders or are at risk of offending and care leavers. In recent research among that group of people, about 75 per cent of males and more than 40 per cent of females said that they supported a football club.
The work of the trust is to get people's lives working again. It has been using football's unique position in local communities and its general magnetism to do just that. It does that through its "Team" programme, which is for 16 to 25 year-olds. All of the young people are unemployed. It is a 12-week personal development course, which develops confidence, motivation and team-work skills and the young people gain QCA Key Skills Unit and City and Guilds Profile of Achievement awards at the end.
The clubs provide a mixture of team-building activities, team rooms at stadiums, motivational talks, work placements, use of learning centres at the stadiums for CV and letter-writing workshops, stadium tours, involvement with the players, and venues and hospitality for team presentations.
To date, some 8,000 young people have been through that programme, of which about two-thirds were male, more than 20 per cent were ex-offenders, nearly 20 per cent were from minority ethnic backgrounds and more than 10 per cent were in or leaving care. As regards the outcomes, more than half of those young people who were unemployed from these difficult to reach groups got a job. Another 30 per cent went on to further education or a training course. More than 80 per cent had a positive outcome, which is a higher proportion than equivalent young people working through equivalent courses that are not linked to football.
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The funding has come in no small measure from the world of football—£750,000 a year from a combination of the Premier League, the Football Foundation and the Professional Footballers' Association. The programme, which is now in its eighth year, is to be developed further to ensure that even more of those young people use it to get jobs, which we hope are very often linked to the sport and leisure services industry.
I now turn briefly to the other project with which I have worked. The Karrot project in Southwark, which was initiated by the police as a diversion programme, has worked with branded providers of sport and art activities, of which Millwall Football Club has been one. Interestingly, of all the activity providers, Millwall has been deemed to be the most efficient and effective. In a recent evaluation, the only criticism was that there was not more of it.
I know those two examples extremely well, but they are only a very small proportion of what football is doing in the community. The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, referred to the Football Foundation, which has spent, as he said, more than £200 million on that kind of activity and grass-roots activity, which is a huge sum in a relatively small number of years. Learning centres, the use of players and the development of healthy living courses are now being increasingly rolled out by football clubs. I believe that there is much more to do.
In conclusion, football is in a very vigorous state. There are remaining challenges, but it makes a positive contribution to the lives of millions of people in England who play, watch or get involved in the social programmes that are linked to football.
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