Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

37: Schedule 1, page 16, line 31, leave out “Football Licensing Authority.”

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

In moving the amendment, I shall speak to Amendment 91, which is grouped with Amendment 37. Both amendments refer to the future of the Football Licensing Authority.

Those of your Lordships with long memories may recall that the FLA was originally set up under the Football Spectators Act 1989 to oversee the introduction of the compulsory membership scheme so beloved of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who believed that such a scheme was the right response to the football-related hooliganism of the 1980s. One of the worst examples of such hooliganism had resulted in the Heysel stadium disaster of 1985. However, before the Act could be implemented, almost 100 people lost their lives at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield at an FA Cup semi-final match and the subsequent inquiry conducted by Lord Justice Taylor reported that the scale of the disaster would have been even worse if a compulsory membership scheme had been in force. Therefore, that provision in the Act was shelved and has not seen the light of day since. Lord Justice Taylor’s principal recommendation in his final report that the grounds of Britain’s professional football clubs should eliminate standing and become all seated was accepted by the Conservative Government of the day and supported by subsequent Labour Administrations. The one variation was to exempt clubs in the lower two divisions of the Football League from the requirement to go all seated.

At this point, I should declare that not only was I at that cup semi-final at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989 but, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I was deputy chairman of the Football Trust. Our distinguished chairman was the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, whose son sits on the Cross Benches today. The Football Trust was the body charged by the Government to provide the funding from football pool competitions for the transformation of Britain's football grounds. The Football Licensing Authority was given the responsibility for licensing grounds and ensuring spectator safety—principally by implementing the all-seater policy.

Over the past 20 years, not a breath of scandal has been attached to the work of the FLA. The Football Licensing Authority has acquired a worldwide reputation as an authority on stadium safety and is the Government's principal adviser in this area. Mercifully, there has been no repetition of the Hillsborough disaster or the dreadful fire at Bradford City's ground in May 1985. So why is the FLA listed in Schedule 1 as facing abolition?

The DCMS statement does not help us very much, as it suggests that the proposals involve,

“continuing the Football Licensing Authority as a separate body until after 2012 when its expertise and functions will be transferred to another body”.

Bizarrely, included in that announcement was the statement that,

“The Government will support the Sports Grounds Safety Authority Bill 2010-11, a private members’ bill, presented on 30 June 2010 by Jonathan Lord MP. This would rename the Football Licensing Authority the Sports Grounds Safety Authority and allow it to provide advice, on request, about safety at sports grounds to any national or international organisation, person or body (including local authorities and Ministers of the Crown) and to charge for these services in certain circumstances”.

The FLA has been seeking such powers for years, and I was looking forward to giving that Bill my full support once it reached your Lordships' House. That Bill has every prospect of coming here because it has already secured its Second Reading in the other place without opposition and has been committed to a Public Bill Committee.

I must ask the Minister what on earth is going on. How can the Government support a Private Member’s Bill that will extend the scope of an organisation that they list for abolition? To refer vaguely to transferring the FLA's responsibilities after 2012 to “another body” is just not good enough. Cleverer people than me have been racking their brains to think what other body the FLA could be moved into. Bearing in mind that the FLA has licensing and regulatory functions, it is hard to see how those functions could go to a body such as the Local Government Association. Nor would the Health and Safety Executive be appropriate. The FLA deals with spectators and with professional football, whereas the HSE is responsible for the safety of workers and the places where they are employed. The ethos of the HSE is to investigate accidents; that of the FLA is to prevent accidents in the strictly specialist environment of sports stadiums.

The truth is that the Football Licensing Authority enjoys the support and respect of all the authorities and individuals with which it deals. It would be a public relations disaster for the Government to give the impression that football spectator safety somehow did not matter any more. What sort of message would that send, for example, to the Hillsborough victims, whose grievances are now being addressed by the Government's own Hillsborough inquiry panel, chaired by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool? I hope that the Minister can give us some answers and, better still, accept my amendments. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Rawlings]

I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for his questions. The savings are not a number one priority in this case. Regarding the Private Member’s Bill, it is going through Parliament at the moment, and the FLA has to be abolished in order to be merged with something else afterwards.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her attempt to answer the debate. I have to say that this bit of the Bill is an indication of the problems the Government have with their whole approach, in that the Cabinet Office decided on a series of death sentences in advance of publishing the Bill, and then decided to put forward the trials and amass the cases in order to prove that those sentences are justified. In the case of this body the DCMS, to its credit, is resisting what the Cabinet Office is doing. It does not believe for a moment that there is any other place which the FLA or, in its new form, the sports grounds safety authority can go to for the reasons I set out in my opening speech. I am pretty sure that at the end of this rather painful period, it will be concluded that the sports grounds safety authority, which is what it will become with the passage of the Private Member’s Bill, will continue as an independent body.

The Minister has said helpfully that the functions of the FLA in its new guise are essential and that there is no intention to weaken football stadium or sports ground safety legislation, which is very welcome. The logic is therefore inexorable in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, explained. The conclusion has to be that the authority will continue in some guise or another.

I am most grateful for the contributions that have been made, including that of the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, whose support for the FLA is greatly appreciated. He asked my noble friend Lord Clark a question about what role the authority has now. The answer is that sports ground safety is not a piece of history. Local authorities are obliged to license sports grounds year by year. New stadiums are built and new sports are going to come under the remit of the FLA as a result of the Private Member’s Bill, which I hope your Lordships will pass in due course, so the role of an independent body is going to be very considerable indeed.

I am tempted by the amount of support that this amendment has received to test the opinion of the Committee, but it would be fairest if I gave the Minister an opportunity to reflect on what has been said, and I hope that we can come back to this on Report, when she may be able to give a rather better explanation about just where she thinks this authority is going in the future. It cannot go to the Health and Safety Executive, and it cannot go to local government, so the Government are going to have to create a new authority to take over this one. That strikes me as barmy. It would be much more sensible if the Government accepted this amendment, and agreed that the authority should go into Schedule 5 and was reconstituted along the terms of the Private Member’s Bill. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 37 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

39: Schedule 1, page 17, line 2, leave out “Inland Waterways Advisory Council.”

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, this is something a little different. The purpose of Amendment 39 is to remove the Inland Waterways Advisory Council from Schedule 1. This is not the most controversial proposal in the Bill, but I believe that the 14 members of the IWAC, all of whom are volunteers and unpaid, its part-time chair, John Edmonds, and the two support staff deserve at the very least an expression of public thanks and recognition for what they have achieved since April 2007, when the council was set up as a consequence of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. The same goes for the predecessor body, the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Council, which was formed in 1968.

The IWAC does exactly what its title suggests. It gives independent advice to the UK Government, the Scottish Government, navigation authorities and other interested parties on matters appropriate to our inland waterways. If no one wants to listen to that advice, of course that is up to them, but before IWAC disappears it is worth making the point that the next two or three years are going to be absolutely critical for the inland waterways as the British Waterways Board turns itself into a charitable trust. That will represent a huge change in culture as well as in status for the BWB, and I would have thought that it would benefit enormously from being able to call on the Inland Waterways Advisory Council for advice, particularly bearing in mind that there is not a lot of experience in Defra in this area.

My question to the Minister, who on this occasion I think is going to be the noble Lord, Lord Henley, is: how long do the Government expect the IWAC to stay around for? Would he not agree that it makes no sense to get rid of it before the British Waterways Board has completed the process of converting itself into a charity? One only needs to look at the CVs of the IWAC board members to realise how much talent is assembled at its meetings. It has economists, accountants, environmentalists, campaigners, academics and heritage experts—they are all there.

What I feel is so sad about the Government’s approach towards the quangos is that it seems to be based on knowing the price of everything but the value of very little. Most countries would give a great deal to be able to draw on a group of volunteers who are experts, who cost the state virtually nothing and who come together out of a sense of public duty and service. It may not be apparent for some time just how much is being lost as a consequence of this Bill, but we should be in no doubt that we shall as a nation be the poorer because of it. I beg to move.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Faulkner in this amendment. He has outlined the role of and described the people involved in the Inland Waterways Advisory Council extremely well and he will be aware from the briefing that we have all had from Ministers that two secretarial staff are involved in the council. To abolish something because two people are employed there seems quite extraordinary.

The role of the IWAC seems to fit very well with the Government’s plans for localism because canals are a wonderful local amenity. However, there are challenges in maintaining them. We have all read of how volunteer labour is used so often because canals are expensive to maintain and do not produce a lot of revenue. Their transport was rather taken over by the railways about 150 years ago, but they remain a wonderful amenity for leisure purposes and for what they provide to communities. We shall debate this issue again when we talk about the future of the British Waterways Board, but there will be some tension when the BWB becomes a charity. We have not been and we probably will not be told where it will get its funding from and it struggles hard to find funding at the moment. Indeed, there are occasions when I see it turning itself into a property company to the detriment of people trying to use the canals.

I heard about an example of this a couple of years ago in Brentford on the Thames. Some of the BWB people had done a deal with a property company to build some very nice waterside houses at Brentford. To make them even more attractive to the buyers and to make more money, some pontoons were put into the canal so that lots of canal boats could be moored there. The problem was that the pontoons and the boats together were so wide that it was almost impossible to get a canal boat into the canal, which is after all the point of the lock connecting to the River Thames. There are quite strong tides there. Anyone who has driven a canal boat will know they are not like motor cars. They respond to the wind and the tide and they do not steer very well, so you need a bit of space not to hit things. But these people were quite happy to put these pontoons in the river at the entrance to the canal and to allow things to moor, because that would make more money. There were allegations, which I do not want to pursue, that people were making personal gains but, regardless of who got the revenue, it affected navigation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. I am sure that the members of the IWAC will have been heartened by his opening comments about the useful input that they have provided to waterways policy. He could have been a little more fulsome, but at least the remarks were made. They will appreciate that. The Minister has not been able to answer the question of how long this organisation will be around, which is unsatisfactory. I understand that that is due to a process of consultation. This is one of those areas where it would have been better if the consultation had happened before the Bill rather than the other way round, but that is true of so much of this part of the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, made the most telling point. It does not seem sensible to abolish a body such as the IWAC and then to find in two or three years’ time that you have to reinvent it because that role is still needed under the new status of the British Waterways Board. We shall have to wait and see. I shall read carefully what the Minister said. There were some words of comfort, although his comments were not totally satisfactory. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 39 withdrawn.