National Women’s Sports
Lord Addington Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Lord Addington
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to celebrate the success of national women’s sports, particularly in team sports.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it is no secret as to why I have brought this issue forward. We have had a long run of great sporting success. For someone who would sooner cheer for Scotland, unfortunately this has been mainly by English teams. We have all seen our national women’s sides enjoying a tremendous run of success in team games that were originally thought to be male dominated.
The Euros were an odd one—for me, a hardened rugby union player, football suddenly became enjoyable to watch. This was not only because there was a successful team to relate to, but also for the sheer joy the players seemed to have in competing and in that success. Who would have thought that a song, brought out in 1969 by Neil Diamond, would be belted out with such great gusto and with which everybody would join in? “Sweet Caroline” has become an anthem for British sport. It happened because a group of female players enjoyed and enlivened their success. It engaged the vast majority of us in a way we did not expect.
This success has been backed up—though this is a little bitter-sweet—by the England rugby union team, which had 30 consecutive victories at international level. I do not know how many records that broke, but it was magnificent. If we cannot celebrate this degree of success with better grace and embrace it a little more than we have done so far, we are going to be in trouble.
The whole structure of sport encourages people to take part and enjoy it. I am asking the Government what we are doing to get the best social, health and emotional health benefits from it. How are we going to do this?
What did we do to allow that success to be seen? First, we made sure that it was all on free-to-air television. If either of those tournaments had been tucked away in even the most brightly lit corner of a streaming service, the vast majority of the population would not have seen them. This had to be something that the BBC and ITV particularly took on and said, “Here it is.”
It is also about the warm-up to it, not just the events. Women’s football has been available for a long time, mainly on the BBC—we have seen it. If you did not see it, it does not really matter, and that applies to any form of public entertainment or engagement that goes on. For the first time, rugby union having the women’s competition in stand-alone tournaments when you can watch it has been massively beneficial to getting people engaged in it.
Why does this matter? If you are getting the women and girls to think that sporting activity is normal, you can encourage more of them to take part in it. It is not a totally closed book because they are out there now, but most of the clichés and stereotypes which have stood against female participation are thus addressed. You are going through and making sure that people can get out and get involved. How do you access this and encourage people to do it? You start at school, I hope by having a smorgasbord of opportunities to try. You encourage children to get out there and enjoy the sports that are going on. However, the thing about school is that you leave it. Generally speaking, people drop out of sport post 16, 18 or 21, when they leave this controlled environment where to an extent it is made easier for you or you are encouraged—indeed, forced—to take part in sport.
What do we do to break that down? You encourage children to try sports, hopefully ones that are culturally available to them. For instance, if you are talking about codes of rugby, I suggest that St Helens rugby league might be your first port of call—this might be the first opportunity to celebrate that other bunch of Lionesses who got into the semi-final of that particular tournament. You have to make sure that it is culturally available for your background and the groups that you are going out to, and then you must encourage people to go from the club at the school to the small amateur clubs—the big, professional, international, shiny stuff does not really matter that much as regards the benefit to society if you do not get people taking part in these games on a voluntary amateur basis.
In this country, government is very lucky that we have a tradition of sports clubs which founded themselves, fund themselves and look after themselves. Sport does a lot. Government helps but primarily, sport helps itself. That is why they are there and why, for instance, local government finds itself assisting football clubs with their grounds, not providing all of them as they do in most of Europe. The Government should be encouraging that. One of the easy ways of doing this is to make sure that there is an effective link between school and club activity. You get better coaching and the idea that you can carry on afterwards. I hope that this will be encouraged.
For women and girls, this might mean expanding the traditional bill of fare. We have just spoken about two sports which are not encapsulated in the traditional diet of netball and hockey, although they should both be represented. Indeed, both those sports have had their degree of success but possibly, if we televise them more we might do them a bit of a favour. However, maybe that is taking the debate a bit too far down one avenue.
How are we going to encourage this, making sure that that offer to take on these things in later life is done? We have to do more on that. School sport partnerships took a step in that direction—I do not know whether they were all-encompassing and fully working that through, because in most cases they got stopped when they had only just started to get going. Can the Minister give us an idea of what they are going to do?
I return to one of the things which government should probably do more of, which is to celebrate better team sports generally. We are in an odd position here, in that we have handed out honours and awards like toffees for people who have had modest successes. It was great back in those heady days when England won the Ashes for the first time, but they should have beaten Australia before that. Everybody got a gong—or whatever the correct term is in cricket; others will correct me later—at the end of it, even if they sat on the bench. Then England win the Rugby World Cup. Great: everybody gets a gong. The England women’s team were amateurs in 2014. The definition of amateurs is that you pay to play, you are not paid; you give up time and effort and you put money in. When they won the World Cup—and they are much more consistent about getting to finals, and so on, than the men—two of them got medals. Has the person who devised that for a team game never actually watched a team game, let alone participated in one? Do not goalkeepers and defenders count in football, or the people who do the hard work to win the ball in rugby, or is it only the glamour boys? I speak as someone who was definitely in the grunt brigade.
This is what the Government could easily do. If it upsets some weird table of achievement or the giving out of awards, give one medal to the entire team and give people a copy of it. That is a way out. The example I give of where that has been done is the equestrian teams for eventing. There used to be one medal; now they give them each one, but it still counts as one medal. That is something that the Government could do easily.
I know the Government had a lot on their plate this summer, but they did not have an official reception for the Lionesses: come on. There was enough of the Government left to celebrate that better. Why did that not happen? You could probably do it now and nobody would lose any Brownie points for having a party late, as opposed to not having it.
As the clock beats me, I thank everybody for taking part and hope that the Government will be able to answer my questions and the other thoughtful ones that I know are coming.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for securing this important debate on the success of women’s sport. The timing is, as noble Lords noted, particularly apt with so much success occurring across women’s sport, not least the success of England’s Red Roses reaching the final at the women’s Rugby World Cup last weekend—and coming so tantalisingly close to winning the tournament—and the Lionesses at this summer’s Euros. I am very happy to be responding to this Question for Short Debate at such an exciting time, and I assure noble Lords that His Majesty’s Government are keen to build on this success and momentum to create a lasting legacy for women’s sport.
The Government are fully committed to supporting women’s sport at every opportunity, pushing for greater participation, employment, commercial opportunities, visibility—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Addington accentuated—and opportunities at school. It is important that we take the time to recognise and celebrate success, which is why today’s debate is so important as well as so timely.
This summer we witnessed a major success in women’s sport the Lionesses beat the German team at Wembley to lift the UEFA European championship trophy. This inspirational tournament was staged in July across England, from Rotherham and Wigan to Southampton and Brighton. As noble Lords have noted, the final at Wembley was attended by a record crowd of over 87,000 people. That was not only a new record for a women’s international game in Europe but broke new ground for a women’s or men’s Euros final tournament game. The tournament also became the most watched women’s Euros ever, with a global cumulative live viewership of 365 million people across television, out-of-home viewing and streaming. This massive figure is more than double the number that watched the last UEFA European Women’s Championship in the Netherlands in 2017.
The tournament was truly a ground-breaking moment for the sport and has dramatically boosted interest in the women’s game, bringing it to the forefront of people’s minds. The event held for the Lionesses in Trafalgar Square the day after the final was a momentous occasion and saw 7,000 fans celebrate with their heroes. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State and the former Prime Minister Liz Truss met the Lionesses at their training ground to congratulate them and were very proud to support the event in Trafalgar Square. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, said, it is also important that we focus on the long-term legacy by way of celebration. To commemorate their already incredible achievement, we are working with the Football Foundation and the FA to name sites after the players in towns and cities that shaped their careers. We hope that that will inspire many generations of more players.
We will also continue to invest in grass-roots sport to bring on the next generation of Lionesses. We know how valuable physical education at school is: it gives pupils an opportunity to excel, to be active and to lead healthy lives. My noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington talked about the importance for bone density and preventing diseases such as osteoporosis. That is why we are actively working with the Department for Education to understand the barriers that prevent the ambition of two hours of PE a week being achieved. We will also continue to work with the Department for Education to ensure that girls have equal access to sports.
There is more work for us to do to identify and address the different barriers to participation that exist for young people; we have heard about some of those again today. We will continue to adopt a more targeted approach as part of our new sport strategy. Alongside this, the Department for Education is working on updating the School Sport and Activity Action Plan, which will set out steps to improve PE teaching in primary schools and to help schools make better use of their sport facilities.
On facilities, my noble friend Lord Sandhurst spoke about the importance of single-sex changing facilities. The Government are committed to maintaining the safeguards that allow organisations to provide single-sex services and we do not plan to announce any changes to the law.
Aside from the Women’s Euros, there are a number of other recent examples of success in women’s sport. Over the last week, we have seen the England Red Roses reach the final of this year’s women’s Rugby World Cup, as well as the other Lionesses—as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, put it—reach the semi-final of the Rugby League World Cup. The Great Britain team reached the semi-finals of the Billie Jean King Cup for the first time—as my noble friend Lady Sater said—in 41 years. Great Britain’s women also won three medals at the recent Gymnastics World Championships in Liverpool. Jessica Gadirova claimed an historic floor gold medal for Great Britain on the final day and sealed Great Britain’s first ever women’s all-round World Gymnastics Championship medal with bronze in Liverpool. This year’s Commonwealth Games also highlighted the success of women’s sport with Eilish McColgan’s outstanding performance in the 10,000 metres, to give just one example. Some 173,000 spectators attended the T20 women’s cricket at Edgbaston, a record for women’s cricket.
It goes without saying that Emma Radacanu’s win at the US Open in 2021 truly inspired the nation as well. A peak audience of 9.2 million tuned into the match on Channel 4, including 48% of 16 to 34 year-olds. The UK’s honours system can provide a way of recognising stellar sporting achievement and moments of national celebration. Examples of this include the MBEs awarded to the GB women’s hockey team who won gold at the Rio Olympic Games in 2016 and the damehood awarded to Dame Laura Kenny as a result of her becoming the most successful female cyclist in Olympic history following her performance at the Tokyo Games in 2020.
Lord Addington (LD)
The fact is that we have given out honours to every member in a team. If you are giving out only two, the only team you are ever going to honour is beach volleyball. Can we do something about it?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I take the point the noble Lord raises. Of course, the honours system is independent of government, but his point will be well heard and, I am sure, fed back to those who sit on the independent committees.
All those sportswomen, whether honoured yet or not, are inspiring the next generation to follow their dreams. We are looking forward to this momentum being maintained and built on with the rugby league World Cup final this weekend, the ICC women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa, the FIFA women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, the netball World Cup in South Africa and the Solheim Cup in Spain. I am sure all noble Lords will want to send our best wishes to the mixed England team who are in the finals of the wheelchair rugby league World Cup tomorrow.
As noble Lords can see, there is much to celebrate in women’s sport, but it is not enough that we celebrate these successes; we must continue our hard work in ensuring that they continue for decades to come. We are doing this by investing £230 million between 2021 and 2025 to improve grass-roots facilities across the UK. In addition, after Emma Radacanu’s spectacular win, we put just under £22 million into tennis court facilities. We will also look to continue our world-leading reputation for hosting major and mega sporting events and bringing all those special moments, like the Lionesses’ victory, to the United Kingdom. Major events make people feel good in a way unlike others and it is right that we should all have the opportunity to witness at first hand the successes of our brilliant athletes, men and women.
With this in mind, we must continue to build our pipeline of sporting events so that we can inspire more people across the country to watch, participate in or volunteer in sport, putting emphasis on the need for events to consider their social impact and legacy at the early bidding stage, to maximise the benefits after conclusion. It is worth highlighting in that regard that we successfully won the bid to host the women’s Rugby World Cup in 2025 in May this year, and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Hayward for securing the financial commitment from the Government for that and pass on, via him, my congratulations to the Kings Cross Steelers for their victory in the Bingham Cup. Hosting the women’s Rugby World Cup in 2025 and delivering the legacy programme will generate transformational social impacts across rugby fans and more widely, including in the towns and cities which play host, and the legacy programme will look to focus on access to rugby for women and girls across the country. The 2026 ICC women’s T20 World Cup was announced as being awarded to England and Wales in July this year, another important opportunity that will further boost the ECB’s strategy to make cricket a gender-balanced sport.
The UK has also won the bid to host the International Working Group on Women and Sport from this year until 2026, another great opportunity not only to share the fantastic work we are doing but to learn from other countries. There is no doubt that the visibility of women’s sport is continuing to grow, and this was boosted earlier this year when we added the FIFA women’s World Cup and the UEFA Women’s European Championships to the listed events regime, meaning both tournaments will remain available for free-to-air television broadcasters and to the biggest audiences.
We want to continue to build on recent successes, such as the Women’s Euros and the good work already being done to encourage more women and girls to participate in sport and physical activity. We need to look ahead and be prepared to take advantage of opportunities and find ways to overcome challenges, such as have been outlined in today’s debate. We need to keep talking about issues relating to women in sport, asking questions and pushing ourselves to do more, so that women can continue to be in the driving seat of our national sporting success and not just of the Government Car Service. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for today’s debate and to all noble Lords who participated in it.
Public Service Broadcasting: BBC Centenary
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debates where there has been less direct confrontation and “You’re wrong and we’re right” than I was expecting, but, at the same time, there is the fundamental truth that to those of us who feel really embedded in it, public service broadcasting feels slightly under threat. I do not know why this is, other than that it has become fashionable, certainly on the right in politics, to feel that the BBC—let us face it, that is the lead organisation, the unit—is against the Conservative Party.
I feel that this is almost totally down to the fact that the Conservative Party has its behinds on the Treasury Bench. Any news organisation that does not primarily put fire under what the Government are doing is not worth having. Let us face it, if they are the people making the decisions—I point my finger towards the Treasury Bench—they will be the ones getting the criticism and being the most solidly examined. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, gave a little suggestion about what happens if you are not in power: you get ignored. When a party comes third or fourth in a general election, they are begging the BBC to pay them some attention. So if noble Lords want the BBC to be nicer to them, they should lose the next two general elections—it is that simple.
Having got that off my chest, I will now address some of the things that it is very unlikely that anything other than a public service broadcaster will do well. We have already heard a few examples: children’s television and science. Another is sport, particularly sport that is not immediately mainstream at a given point in time. It is a fact that public service broadcasting has proved to us that disability sport is still a contest worth watching. If Channel 4—whatever happens to it—has carved a little place in history, it is because of the huge step it took in making the Paralympics accessible. It was a massive change that went beyond sport itself: it managed to broadcast programmes in which disabled people were people who happened to have a disability, and viewers did not notice it half the time. By the way, Adam Hills playing disability rugby league for Australia and losing to Wales, while still having a smile on his face, gets my round of applause.
We can look to another sector, which is probably bigger still: the growth of women’s team sports as national institutions and events. Who is going to forget the Euros in a hurry? It is not the type of football with which I am most closely associated, but the degree of enjoyment, celebration and success that came out of that game—the team will probably have it coached out of them by next time—was something we could embrace as a nation. The fact that 51% of the population can play sport, enjoy it, be good at it and have a degree of sheer joy in it is wonderful.
At the moment, we have yet another England team—the rugby union team—which is the betting favourites to lift another world cup. We will see what happens with rugby league. There is a lot of enthusiasm here. These sports would not have been brought to the attention of the public if it were not for public service broadcasting. There was no ready market, so nobody was willing to invest money to get them there. It takes a leap of faith to bring them forward—and that must come from public service broadcasting, because who else is going to do it? You can make a huge investment and work for 100 years to build an audience—you might be able to do it—but who is going to make that first investment? The public service broadcasters took something that already existed and said, “Enjoy it. Make sure that people are embracing it more strongly”. No matter what happens in public service broadcasting, this, among other things, is something we must encourage for the future: that minority groups, by taking part in something, are given the credit they deserve, allowing them to become mainstream. I cannot see this being done anywhere else—or in any other way going forward. If anybody has any suggestions, I am all ears.
I will make one final point: when we look at public service broadcasting, we must also remember that it is a public service. Before we get rid of it, I would turn our minds back to the pandemic. Who else other than the BBC would have taken on providing huge support to education? Who else could do it? Who else would even consider doing it on a commercial basis? Whatever the Government do, I hope they will retain that capacity for public service somewhere within our broadcasting system. If we do not, we are potentially damaging ourselves in the long run.
Football Governance
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I join the noble Lord in paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Kamall, with whom I swapped places on the substitutes’ bench; I hope that his stay there will be as brief as mine. However, for all the changes in ministerial positions, the work to continue examining the recommendations made by Tracey Crouch, in commitment to and fulfilment of our manifesto pledge, as the noble Lord said, has continued at official level. The Secretary of State and my right honourable friend the Sports Minister, who have stayed in place, have been engaging with organisations. The Sports Minister made sure that his first meeting was with the Football Supporters’ Association. They are taking the time to continue that engagement and to look at the policy, and they will bring forward a White Paper with the answers to these complex issues soon.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, will the Minister assure us that the Government are still in absolute agreement that there needs to be change and that it will happen soon? If that is so, can they assure us that we will not be talking about this in another year’s time, because there needs to be action now? Those assurances are required, and other sports have similar problems. I put my hand up as a rugby union player.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
Yes, we still agree that football needs to be reformed to secure its long-term sustainability. Some of the action can be taken now; it does not require legislation or government action. The clubs can do it—for instance, on the financial flows throughout the football pyramid. We continue to encourage clubs to do that, and we are discussing the challenges facing rugby football clubs as well.
Loot Boxes
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debates when you think that you have something to say, you wait to say it, but then somebody says it all before you. The noble Lord has probably just done the House a favour by getting rid of much of what I was going to say. I came across loot boxes and started taking them seriously while following my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath’s campaign, for which he deserves a gold star from the rest of us. I am sure that most of the Front Bench dealing with DCMS would like to give him something else, but never mind. We have a situation where something is clearly not right.
The difference between loot boxes and gambling seems to be one of semantics, as the noble Lord, Lord Trevethin and Oaksey, just said. It is totally artificial: players are taking a chance on something. It also seems to be inspired primarily by the thrill and chance of getting something good. I have a very old friend who works at a senior level in the gaming industry—I will not name him because I did not say that I was going to mention him—and we previously had a look at this issue. I will share a story about us to illustrate how senior he is in the gaming industry. I saw a picture of a BAFTA on his Facebook account, and I said, “Oh, you’ve been to the BAFTAs.” He replied, “No, I’ve won one for game design.” So this is someone who knows what they are talking about. When he asked me whether I knew about loot boxes, I said yes. He said that they were nasty ways of making more money. They really do nothing else. In our messages, he also added, “Oh, aren’t they illegal?”
Loot boxes are something that people do not quite get their hands on. The more you look at this idea that you might just get something if you purchase one, and it might just be useful, the fact is that the chance you will get that thing next time is incredibly attractive to somebody who is paying just a small sum of money, then another and another. It is an endorphin hit which makes you think, “Maybe I’ll get it.” I had not really taken on board the impact of the near-miss strike; I had only seen it a couple of times and had not really understood it properly, so the noble Lord must be congratulated on discussing that.
Anyone who does any form of gaming—even if it is, for someone like me, only card games on a phone—is in their own little world for a bit. The loot boxes are saying, “Have a look at this: you can get this thing which allows you to get further in this little world.” As has been pointed out, we all know that the adolescent male is probably most likely to want to dive into that world. That was certainly the case when I was an adolescent male. You have the idea that you are doing something that really brings you in, and that you can get a little further into it and more secure and successful by taking on that little extra hit, that little extra bit of expenditure—usually with a parent’s credit card. It draws you further and further in.
As I said, apparently only the British Government think that this is not gambling, from what we can make out—only because they devise rules that do not hit. It is also very rewarding for the games industry, which does not have to go back to my aforementioned friend, for example, and say, “Devise another level where you’ll need to make a purchase to go up.” Your development costs have actually been kept down to get a reward. Let us just have something that ensure that, to make a change in a classic shoot-‘em-up, such as body armour or extra gun capacity for someone’s video image as they blast things into the sunset—I will be told that I am being far too simplistic, but that is it—someone at least knows what they are buying. Basically, it is the case that they are very bad value. If you know what you are buying, buy it. If your game is good enough people will stay and make that purchase. Even if it is only for a limited period of time, they will know what they are getting. They will be able to come in and out of the game and ask what the value is of what they are doing and whether they can get a better product somewhere else.
If there is that eternal element of chance, you always come back to “It might be a bit better next time.” I have heard stories from colleagues about people discovering that money is being spent only when they look at their credit card and go, “No, that definitely isn’t a coffee shop and I didn’t have 43 cappuccinos in one day.” That is the level of expenditure that we are talking about.
If the Government will not do something, what sticks or carrots will they give to the games industry to do it itself? At the moment, it is quite clear that the industry has a financial incentive not to do anything. It could be made marginally more difficult by, say, reminding people to check on something. If you are doing something illegal or something you should not and someone tells you that you are doing it again, you will say “Yes, that’s right; I knew.” What will the Government do to engage on this? If the Government are not going to do this, they really have to just come down and say, “No”.
This is a creative, developing industry. If it cannot develop a monetising model that avoids this then it really is less attractive and has less capacity for the future than any of us thought. It should have that capacity within itself. Let us please make sure that people at least know what they are purchasing. There may well be an addictive element to that, but there will be some limits on it and it will be easier to spot and stop.
Can the Government please just say that they will do something? At the moment, they are obfuscating behind an odd definition and saying that nothing is going to happen. That is what it feels like—the Minister shakes his head; he will be able to tell me why in a few minutes. What is actually going to happen? If nothing, then we will simply keep coming back to this. The problems will get worse until there is some form of tragedy and the Government are dragged into doing something—that is what happens, let us face it. Then we will have to do something. Let us get ahead of the game, or at least catch up with it for once.
Youth Sport Trust Report
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Kamall (Con)
My noble friend raises a very important point about the partnerships. We want to learn from what has worked in the previous partnerships and make sure that we continue to expand them, not only with this scheme but looking at how we address those who have trouble getting kit, for example. We are working with charities such as Sport for Change to make sure that we do it across government. We are also working with the voluntary sector as much as possible and using existing infrastructure.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it is well known that people drop out of sport at the various stages of education—at 16, 18 and 21—and that people who take their sport predominantly through small clubs, because they have better linkage to them, remain active. What are the Government doing to actively support the small club sector for the amateur sports that we are talking about, particularly considering how hard they have been hit by the pandemic?
Lord Kamall (Con)
During the pandemic a lot of local community sports clubs relied heavily on volunteering. We are looking at some of the challenges that they face, for example, with increased energy bills, and how we can support them. We are also looking at how we can encourage the incubation of far more projects and make far better use of existing facilities. It must not be just about elite sport, and not just about sport but about physical activity. Sometimes, children who are not so good at sport may feel a barrier to taking part, so we must find some physical activity such as cycling or walking.
Channel 4: Annual Report
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
We are very proud to see the benefits that Yorkshire and other parts of the country have accrued from Channel 4 moving its headquarters. Under private ownership, we will maintain Channel 4’s existing obligations for regional production across the whole of the UK. That is one of the things that is so distinctive about the channel, and which would make it an attractive asset to a buyer.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, if the Government have decided that Channel 4 is doing well, which apparently it is, and they would like it to carry on with some of the things it has been successful with, where is the Conservative principle of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, or have we dumped that?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
It is not about this year’s results; it is about securing the long-term sustainability of Channel 4. Channel 4 is particularly dependent on advertising revenue. Fewer people are watching live advertising. The cost of independent production is rising because of the entry into the market of global streaming giants, so we want to make sure that, in the decades to come, Channel 4 is able to raise the capital to continue doing what it is doing so successfully now.
Champions League Final
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I certainly agree with the noble Lord’s final comments: we want to see the truth out and to do so quickly. We want the facts to be established, which is why the Secretary of State and the Sports Minister urged that this independent investigation be swiftly set up and are glad that it has been. We are confident that UEFA is committed to a thorough review.
I will write to the noble Lord on the question of police liaison beforehand, having checked, but I saw that UK police officers were present there, which suggests liaison beforehand, and we will of course want their insights and evidence, as well as that of fans and others, to feed into UEFA’s review. He is absolutely right to mention the Hillsborough tragedy in this regard. Liverpool fans, above all, know all too well the importance of proper security and policing at football matches. That is important for fans across the world, whatever team they support. Something clearly went wrong on 28 May, and we are very glad that UEFA is investigating it so that the facts can be established.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, will the Minister expand on the idea of liaison between the various police forces? Not just the English and French police should be talking to each other; there should be at least a Europe-wide connection, because we do not know when we will next have British fans in a foreign country in a European competition, when something can go wrong again. The more high-pressure the situation and the bigger the competition, the more pressure we have on those structures and the more people will travel. Is Europe-wide communication going on here? How effective are we now at collecting intelligence from home to feed into the process?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The noble Lord makes an important point. In international fixtures, it is important that lessons are learned across jurisdictions so that scenes such as this cannot be repeated. The French Government, who are hosting the Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympics in Paris, will want to make sure that they have learned the lessons for those important sporting events. The Home Office will be working with its counterparts, in line with existing protocols of co-operation, to ensure that any appropriate evidence is gathered to contribute to the review, and has undertaken to look at many aspects of the event beyond the policing response.
Gambling: Loot Boxes
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The noble Baroness is right that parental controls are an important tool for parents and guardians to supervise and manage how their children interact with video games. The industry has taken some action to develop parental controls, and some companies have also committed to disclose information on the relative probability of obtaining virtual items. Gaming platforms will be in the scope of the regulatory framework of the Online Safety Bill if they host user-generated content or facilitate online interaction.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I recently spoke to a member of the gaming industry, who described loot boxes as a thoroughly nasty, money-making scheme based on the dopamine hit of playing and levelling up in a game. You pay for them. Surely that alone should be enough to justify their being banned.
English Football: Independent Regulator
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The noble Lord is right that the voices of fans need to be heard clearly. That is why this was a fan-led review and why we are grateful for all those who participated and gave their thoughts. The issues highlighted in the review are, in some areas, complex and the reforms need careful analysis to make sure that we get them right and safeguard the sustainable long-term future of the sector. My honourable friend the Sport Minister will set out further detail in another place.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that all professional sport has had problems? Community-based clubs representing us nationally in both forms of rugby, for example, have come under pressure and indeed collapsed or had to be reconstituted. Will the Government use this example as a way of making sure that all sports are better regulated? If they become successful, they become community assets, and all deserve to be looked after.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The noble Lord makes an important point. There are lessons to be learned for other sports from the work that is being done here. The fan-led review had its origins in some of the challenges facing a number of football clubs, which is why the Government set it up. We are grateful to Tracey Crouch and to everyone for their thoughts. This review does have a wider application.
Channel 4 Privatisation
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I will not join my noble friend in singling out particular programmes —de gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. This is not about the content which Channel 4 currently produces or about its recent results; it is about ensuring that it is able, in the decades to come, to compete, invest and continue to provide a range of programming from which a range of people can benefit.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, following on from the last question, would the Minister give us his thoughts on which other body could have done the work which has been done for the Paralympics and disability rights in general? Once he has dealt with that, could he possibly tell us how that will be put into some sort of bidding contract?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
Channel 4 did a fantastic job in broadcasting the Paralympics, and indeed in bringing the entire country together to cheer on Emma Raducanu in the US Open final. We want it to keep doing that fantastic job in the years to come, and that is why we want to set it on the right path, so that it is a sustainable and successful organisation.