Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Grantchester and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 6th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord. I am getting inspiration in the form of a book from my noble friend.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My noble friend could retable the amendment. He should, really.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

In short, the advice is confused, but I am going to think about it.

The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, set a very high test for the response today. He wanted a detailed response that would assure him that the Government had in mind significant changes that would meet some of the questions raised. I think the view of the House is that the response was not up to that level; therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.

Films (Definition of “British Film”) Order 2015

Debate between Lord Grantchester and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My Lords, I enjoyed the Minister’s explanation of the order before us today. If a film that has been supported by the Government and the taxpayer in this way should be very successful—he mentioned “Paddington”—and especially profitable, is some element of the profits returned to the pot, if that is the right expression, for further use by British films to encourage the British film industry or does it escape from the system? Is it in some way self-fulfilling that the profits of a publicly supported film go back into making more British films?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond in this debate. First, I declare my interest as a former director of the British Film Institute. I thank the Minister for his kind words about my contribution in that time.

I have spent many happy hours over the last few years debating issues that come up on the DCMS brief with the Minister. I have usually been able to, I think, in his own words, “trip him up” on something and cause him difficulty. I am normally rewarded, because is it often a delight to have a two or three-page letter—indeed, the last one almost ran to four pages—in which he finally gives me the answers that I have asked for, usually to my complete satisfaction and sometimes even far beyond that.

Today is different. I have consulted widely with my remaining friends and colleagues in the industry and have sought comments from FACT and the British Film Institute. Nobody has a word of doubt about this order. They are delighted with it, and it seems otiose for me to stand here and even question the Minister about it, so I shall give the Committee one anecdote and ask three very small questions. I do not expect a letter.

When I was director of the British Film Institute, which I was for nearly nine years, I spent most of my time trying to argue with officials and Ministers in what was then a Conservative Government that we needed a better definition of a British film. It is therefore somewhat ironic to be considering an order which not only deals with that but improves the current definition and brings it forward. There is a little irony within that irony, which is that the order does not define a British film at all; it defines a film as British if it is made in the EEA, which must have come as a bit of a shock to those who perhaps take a view different from mine about the benefits that flow from the European Community, but let us pass over that.

The reason for the anecdote is that part of the work I was doing at the British Film Institute developing a public policy issue around this stemmed from work that was initiated by the late Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher, who held a very high-profile summit in Downing Street in 1990, from which most of the policy that we are now concerned with started. Indeed, other Members of your Lordships’ House were at that meeting and could talk about it as well. It was the beginning of government interest in film, but it constantly worried us because of something within the idea that more people should be going to see films, which was Mrs Thatcher’s view. She recalled her time in Grantham when the whole village used to go to the village cinema twice a week to catch the latest films, which were, of course, largely British. In the early 1990s, it was feast or famine. There were occasional rushes of successful British films that were invested in by American studios, but that tended to fade away and we were back to the usual diet. The main diet in British cinemas at the time we went to see her was films that were often made by British people, or had British expertise in them, but were financed, often produced and almost certainly made outside Britain, and we wanted to resolve that. It has taken a very long time, but the situation is now transformed. As the Minister said, between 150 and 200 British films a year benefit. It is an extraordinary transformation of the arrangements.

Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill

Debate between Lord Grantchester and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

I speak in favour of Amendment 8, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Heyhoe Flint and Lady Grey-Thompson, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and my noble friend Lord Stevenson. This amendment not only comes from all sides of the House but is in the names of great sporting personalities who have participated at the highest level of elite sport. I support them in their contention that sport must maintain the highest levels of integrity and be recognised to be fair and honest. Sport governing bodies have been relentless in stamping out cheating, whether through drugs, unfair equipment or fraudulent activity, in order to maintain the public’s interest and trust. We all enjoy the pursuit of excellence and recognise that competition is the spur to improvement. The public will turn away, sponsors withdraw funds and participants lose interest if they detect any level of cheating or corruption, or any lack of fair play.

The amendment creates a clear and specific offence of cheating that covers all activities that fixers may engage in. All sports would have this offence available under the Gambling Act. Recently, we have witnessed the difficulties cricketing authorities had to face in prosecuting and getting convictions regarding the bowling of no-balls by Pakistani cricketers. This situation could easily occur with throw-ins and other events in professional football. I understand that the authorities had to go to great lengths to enforce fair play and that they went ahead under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906. This offence will enable a strong deterrent from stricter penalties to warn and educate all sportspersons. Professional bodies such as the Professional Footballers’ Association in soccer can underline to their members the dangers and risks associated with being caught cheating.

I urge the Government to take this amendment seriously and, if they cannot accept it tonight, to be amenable to bringing forward their own amendments at Third Reading, otherwise similar amendments will be pressed very vigorously then.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I am reminded by my noble friend Lord Grantchester that I have joined a rather elite and special grouping in turning up on this list. I certainly cannot pretend to have, in any sense, any quality that matches theirs in terms of the sporting achievements they have had. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, I was a not-indifferent squash player, but I am afraid that does not take me far towards either the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, or the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson or Lady Heyhoe Flint.

I apologise for intruding on their party but I do so because this is a really interesting amendment, and I am rather annoyed we did not think of it ourselves on this side of the House. The 2005 Act was much castigated earlier on in our debates but is still a rather good Act in its way. It goes out of its way to make it clear that it is not dealing with the integrity of sport—this point has been made already—and does not attempt to try to deal with the actual issues around the playing of sport. Its actions are about gambling, and sport is only one of a number of things that people can gamble on. We should not therefore expect that Bill to carry us all the way to where we want to get to in this new area, which is about trying to make sure that the sport that we all love and enjoy is played to the highest standards.

I talked earlier about the need for integrity. It is an issue that we need to think very hard about. It is not necessarily the case that if you follow the argument that I am about to make through to the end we would end up with simply amending the current Bill; I suspect our ambitions are a bit broader than that. When the Minister responds, perhaps he could reflect on the question that has been posed implicitly in the speeches we have heard today and explicitly outside by a number of people who are now saying that there is something slightly odd about the way in which we pay so much attention to the process of gambling around the sporting activity but we do not think hard enough about what we need to do to ensure that the sporting activity itself is as clean and above suspicion as it should be. That is the way in which I want to approach this.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said that we were talking about something that is called a victimless crime and pointed out that that was a contradiction in terms. I follow him on that: his point is very well made. My noble friend Lord Grantchester, who has substantial experience in running a sports club of great distinction, knows all too well about some of the issues that have arisen there.

It is interesting that the only serious case we have seen in recent years, which involved spread betting rather than fixed-odds arrangements, was prosecuted under a conspiracy to defraud offence and not under the provisions of the Gambling Act. On my reading of it, that is not unreasonable because the Gambling Act does not go in that direction but, if that is the case, the point was made earlier about the need to level up the tariffs on all these approaches to try to clean up sport—they need to be the same. So we are talking about a 10-year penalty being the standard for crimes against sporting activity. If anybody affects the integrity of the sports that we are concerned about, we should be able to use a range of penalties and approaches to ensure that the person is nailed.

We have looked at the number of prosecutions for match fixing in sport and there seems to be about one a year at the moment. Although, as I have said, there are difficulties in raising these offences, it is important to recognise that they do take place. There is evidence that there is quite a lot of match-fixing activity going on, not necessarily all related to gambling, and that is one of my points.

The DCMS itself has a sports integrity review. It must have been ahead of the game in thinking that it would need to look at that, and the Rick Parry report calls for further action in this area. Therefore, the onus is on the DCMS to come forward with proposals on this. The European Parliament and Commission have called for all member states to have specific match-fixing legislation. Again, one might ask the Minister what action the department will take to respond to that call. The amendment before us derives from evidence of recent work in Australia, where legislation has recently been introduced. The amendment is based on a model that seems to be working well and is widely seen in the sport as an exemplar.

To return to my first point, although we must be thinking about the question of what to do to strengthen our sport, of which gambling is a part but not the full amount, it is interesting that the gambling industry supports this approach. Sue Rossiter, director of projects and policy at the Remote Gambling Association, which supports the amendment, says:

“Cheating is already an offence under the Gambling Act and match-fixing falls into that category. But anything which further clarifies the fact that it’s illegal is welcomed by us. Players should be made aware that if they get involved in match-fixing, they’re involved in a criminal activity wherever they are. We work closely with sports governing bodies to make sure players are clear about that”.

There is an educational element to this, which will be very important.

This amendment may seem to be at a distance from the main purpose of the Bill but it should not be rejected out of hand. I appeal to the Minister to think about bringing this back at Third Reading for a further debate, when it might be possible to get the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, to add their arguments to this. We will have to fix this in the future if we do not fix it now.

The sport that we play in Britain somehow makes a huge contribution to our culture. As my noble friend Lord Grantchester said, if people feel that the games they watch are in some sense fake then, to quote from “The Hunger Games”—a recent film that I am sure all noble Lords have seen—the games will not be quite as enjoyable as they might otherwise have been. That is rather an unfortunate and sad analogy but I hope some of it might live long in memory.