Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lord Moynihan

Committee stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in Amendments 91 and 92. I support his view on having free-to-air services for certain sports. My main reason is to expose those sports to the next generation—the youngers coming through. He mentioned rugby—which is not as available as it used to be, certainly not compared with when I was young—but this applies to other sports, including cricket specifically, as well as golf and boxing, which all now have very restricted free-to-air viewing. You wonder what that does to the current generation of children, who may want to be exposed to the sport, but cannot because their parents, for whatever reason, do not have subscriptions to the various channels.

Of course, the regulator will not cover Scotland—perhaps it will have its own regulator following this—but, currently, the Scotland men’s national football matches are available only on YouTube. You could say that that is equivalent to free-to-air viewing, but it is not in any way how international football should be presented. The whole question of how sport is made available to future generations—although it is not really for our debate today—is one that we need to think about very seriously.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I say simply that, while some very good arguments have been put forward, we have to be very careful here. The whole question of listed events that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and I have been engaged on for many decades, let alone a year, is a complicated and difficult issue.

Currently, the Secretary of State has to opine as to whether listing an event meets the criterion of having “special national resonance”. That, in its own right, is a difficult thing for the Secretary of State to opine on. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, will recall that, only five years ago, the then Secretary of State made a famous speech on listed events where she put forward the idea that whenever a men’s event was listed, the women’s equivalent should be too. That brought into play a whole series of complex questions, which were important but certainly set the hares running among the people who were focused on listing events.

This is complicated further by virtue of a generational change. Young people increasingly access, and are comfortable accessing, all forms of media to watch the sporting events that they wish to see, sometimes in ways that do not necessarily follow the rules. The changing media landscape, certainly for young people, means that the listed event question may even become obsolete. I am not saying that it will but that is the sort of question that is now being posed as a result of the different patterns of media accessed particularly by young people, as opposed to our generation. I am being courteous to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, when I say that, because he looks a good deal younger than I am.

In that context, I would hesitate to push the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as valuable as they are, to further consideration in this Bill. However, it is important and probably timely that we now look at the whole question of listed events separately because they are vital to many sports. Equally, in the context of football, and without the wider issues that I have sought to bring to the Committee’s attention, we may be too focused on one sport and not considering the wider implications of what should and should not be listed in today’s media landscape.