Euro 2016: Fan Violence

Baroness Billingham Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie]

We will take the Russian Government’s response into consideration. Indeed, I understand that the Russian Sports Minister was present in the stadium at Marseilles at the time of the match. It will be the subject of the further ongoing inquiry that has been initiated by UEFA.

[Baroness Billingham (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very apprehensive—in fact, I am almost paranoid—that a sword of Damocles is hanging over the England team. My worry is that somebody or some group of people could trigger an event during, after or before the match. Can the Minister guarantee that the French authorities and our own authorities will have an enormous presence there to make sure that there is no injustice?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

The policing and security arrangements at Lens are a matter for the French authorities, not for this Government. Of course we have stepped forward to assist them when requested to do so, but we cannot guarantee anything in that regard.

Olympic Games: Security

Baroness Billingham Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I can give my noble friend an assurance that everyone doing a job involving security will have adequate training and we shall make sure that people who do not have adequate training will not be accredited.

Regarding whether the G4S contract will be published, that might be a matter for both parties to consider after the event, so let us leave it until then. It might be that G4S wishes to publish it, or that some sort of post-mortem, as my noble friend is suggesting, might be appropriate after these Games. I do not think it is proper that we should create fears that are not necessarily there at this stage.

[Baroness Billingham]

My Lords, we are where we are, and I entirely agree with the Minister that this is not the time for looking retrospectively and trying to find out what happened. However, the fact of the matter is that every week, every day and almost every hour we hear things that are completely disconcerting to the general public and to the people who are going to be involved in the Games, both participants and spectators. The role of the Government should always be the safety of those people and it has to be their priority. I am sure that the more the general public read, the more they are losing confidence and faith in what the Home Secretary has been doing. Heaven knows how we got ourselves into this predicament. I do not want to put it too worryingly, but it looks as if we are almost in a national security crisis and I want to know how bad it has got to be before the Minister does something about that. Every single thing that we have heard today indicates that the security we have always promised to the people coming to watch these Games is not going to be in place. So what is the Minister’s next move—we want to know?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, again, I suspect that the noble Baroness is exaggerating by saying that every day there is some new problem. There were problems last week and over the weekend there were further press reports that have now been dealt with by my right honourable friend in her Answer, where she made it quite clear that most of them are completely untrue. Although I appreciate that not many have been doing it in this House, when I listened to the debate in another place there was a great deal of unnecessary point-scoring on questions of security. It is very dangerous of the party opposite. I can assure the House that we take security as the absolute top priority but we do not want to turn these Games into the security Games. We want to ensure that there is appropriate protection of individuals, and that will happen. That is why we have reacted as we did and why we set up the contingency plans that we have. They have come into effect as a result of the failures of G4S.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Billingham Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Billingham]

My Lords, this is Olympic year, so I scanned the Queen’s Speech with eager anticipation. Just for once, I hoped that sport would take centre stage, for it plays a crucial role in all the topics in today’s debate. Of course, I was disappointed.

I wish to speak on a major sport that I believe is under threat. That sport is tennis, and I genuinely fear for the future of the game. I do so with a heavy heart, for this has been my chosen sport and that of my family.

I was absolutely delighted when Roger Draper was appointed as chief executive of the Lawn Tennis Association in 2006. We met Roger Draper and heard of his wide-ranging plans to promote British tennis to the full, building a national tennis centre to facilitate that development. I hosted a reception in the House of Lords and he pledged that Britain would have five players in the top 100 by the end of 2008 and, at the same time, that every school child, by the age of eight, would have held a tennis racquet. We were delighted. However, none of that happened.

There was another juggling of the figures in 2008 when it was announced that Britain would have five players in the top 100 by 2010. There were two. By now, alarm bells were ringing. Everyone knew that the LTA was one of the richest governing bodies in the world with some £60 million being poured into its coffers every single year, none of it with any strings attached. The press and the tennis public were losing patience. News trickled through that huge sums of money were being spent on coaches. More worrying was the allegation, never denied or confirmed, that Roger Draper was paid £400,000 per annum on a six-year contract with bonuses on top—no transparency and no accountability.

It was around this time that Gerry Sutcliffe, the then Minister for Sport, asked me to review the LTA. I with nine colleagues, many of them from this Chamber and the Lords and Commons Tennis Club, formed a panel. The members were absolutely outstanding and excellent. We had only a very short time, with just three weeks to go before the general election. We held hearings and wrote a report that was highly critical. We were shocked at the performance of the LTA, given its resources and freedom of action. We could not believe its strategy, which was to put all effort into elite performance and so little into school, club and grass-roots tennis. What really incensed us was that the Government had made a direct contribution to tennis of some £26.8 million over a four-year period through Sport England. There was absolutely no indication or account of how that money was spent, and we could find no benefit.

All our misgivings became reality. The profligate LTA continued to infuriate the British press, the public and anyone who had an interest in tennis. Failure followed failure. At last, Sport England, which distributes funds from government and lottery sources, found its voice. In April of this year, it announced that it would cut £530,000 from tennis because of a fall in participation figures. The drop of almost 30% in two years was dire and the funding cut fully deserved. So this is where we are today. The LTA is a total shambles, tottering from one broken pledge to another, and the British and the world's press are aghast at the huge cost and pathetic results of six years of mismanagement. It is pitiful.

If you think I am but a single disgruntled observer, perhaps I may share with you the views of others who are far more knowledgeable and who confirm my misgivings. The nation's tennis writers have long run out of patience. They watch every twist and turn of the LTA and its CEO. I can find no support in the newspapers for them. Here are just a few headlines from dozens over the years. The Guardian said:

“LTA suffers major embarrassment: the LTA receives almost £60 million per year, when will British tennis see some results?”.

The Daily Mail said:

“Lame Duck Draper must go. He was supposed to save British tennis but now it’s worse!”.

The Daily Telegraph said that after five years and £250 million there is “still no progress”. But perhaps the strongest criticism over the past six years has come from Neil Harman of the Times. He has followed and written about every twist and turn, every inexcusable failure of an organisation that is wealthy almost beyond belief. Tim Henman, the former British No. 1, and not a person given to confrontation, said that,

“the lack of contenders is just not good enough”,

and that,

“I lament the failure of the present system”.

Meg Munn MP made a timely intervention in a Commons debate some time ago with the horrifying statistic that the number of tennis courts has declined in the past 10 years from 33,000 to only 10,000.

So, what can be done? I call on Hugh Robertson, the Minister for Sport, to set up an urgent review and inquiry into British tennis. He must insist on transparency of all expenditure and salaries, especially given the fact that the LTA receives public money—taxpayers' money. This money must be ring-fenced in order to ensure that grass-roots tennis projects are properly funded. He must insist on freedom of information from the sport's governing body and call on the board of the LTA to face up to its responsibilities. All this must be done urgently. In less than eight weeks’ time, millions of tennis lovers in the UK will sit down in front of their televisions, some for a whole fortnight, and watch every ball struck at Wimbledon. They have a right to expect more success from the game they love. Unless he intervenes, the Minister could be accused of allowing one of the oldest and most distinguished sports to decline into obscurity. The entire tennis world is looking on in disbelief. The Minister can and must help to put this right.