Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I too am a supporter of Queens Park Rangers, although perhaps a slightly more steadfast one than the previous speaker.

I want to raise an issue that at first blush does not appear to be within scope of this Bill but, for reasons I will set out, I believe is: namely, the overuse of football banning orders. Football banning orders were originally introduced by the Football Spectators Act 1989 for the purposes of preventing violence and disorder at football matches. This was a targeted measure intended to be used sparingly, since it imposes such wide-ranging restrictions on a person’s liberty, preventing them, as it does, attending football matches and using public transport on match days, drinking at pubs near football stadiums and even, in certain circumstances, travelling abroad. Breaches of these orders, which can be imposed for as long as 10 years, carry serious consequences, up to and including being sent to prison.

Predictably, subsequent Acts of Parliament have hugely extended the football banning order regime. The Football (Offences) Act 1991, the football spectators Act in 2000 and the Unauthorised Entry to Football Matches Act 2026 have all added numerous offences to Schedule 1 to the 1989 Act, which sets out the criminal offences that can result in banning orders, with each edition lowering the threshold.

Recent statistics lay bare the direction of travel. As of 1 June 2025, there were 2,439 football banning orders in force in England and Wales—an increase of 12% on the previous 12 months. Those figures are taken from a recent article in the Law Society Gazette, which raised the alarm about the overuse of these orders:

“Behaviour that is fleeting, non-violent and often part of the charged, emotional atmosphere of live sport—momentary lapses of judgement, reactive shouting or ill-considered gestures—is being treated with a level of seriousness that risks losing all sense of proportion: individuals of good character with no previous convictions suddenly face a criminal record and permanent implications for employment, immigration status, travel and reputation. This trend uncomfortably blurs the line between maintaining public safety and over-policing the ordinary realities of live sport”.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

I was the Minister who took the 2000 legislation through your Lordships’ House. That legislation was widely praised at the time as a way of tackling the outrageous behaviour of England fans travelling across Europe during the Euro 2000 competition. It changed for ever the attitude of football fans in this country and it helped to reverse the tide of racism that had been partly engendered by that. The noble Lord should think long and hard before he starts to seek to “liberalise”, as he might put it, that piece of legislation.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I would not dispute that there were serious problems that football banning orders were originally designed to address. My point is that they are now being used far more extensively than intended in the legislation that the noble Lord took through this House, for much more trivial misdemeanours —nothing like travelling abroad in order to cause violence and disorder at games overseas.

I declare an interest. The Free Speech Union, the organisation I run, is currently defending a young football fan who is being prosecuted for calling some Chelsea fans “rent boys” at a match earlier this season. This was in the context of an exchange of insults between rival fans, and none of the Chelsea fans complained. It is unlikely, to put it mildly, that any of them were caused harassment, alarm or distress, which is what he has been charged with.

Nevertheless, the prosecutor has informed the court that, if our member is convicted, she will be seeking a banning order. His hearing is not due to take place until September 2027 and, in the meantime, he has been banned from his team’s stadium for the duration of the 2026-27 season and told that, if he wants to keep his season ticket, he has to continue to pay for it, at over £1,000 a year, and cannot resell his seat or pass it on to a friend or family member. The club, meanwhile, which is a Premier League club, is allowed to resell his seat—and, to judge from the fact that it was occupied for the remainder of the last season, is already doing so.

This is a disproportionate punishment for behaviour which, to quote from the Law Gazette, was

“fleeting, non-violent …part of the charged, emotional atmosphere of live sport”,

and a “momentary lapse of judgement”. He has never been in trouble with the police before. Yet, in addition to not being able to watch his beloved team for the whole of next season, he faces the prospect of a five-year banning order if he is convicted. Even the noble Lord would not, I am sure, regard that as a proportionate penalty for a momentary lapse of judgment.

Why do I think that an amendment raising the banning order threshold is within scope of this Bill? For one, it is perfectly possible that the new criminal offences created by the Bill will be added to Schedule 1 to the Football Spectators Act 1989. Could a street trader selling unauthorised merchandise outside a Wembley match, or a food vendor without a clean-zone licence, end up being banned from attending football matches?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The noble Lord made the point a moment ago that a trader without a licence could be banned. Under this Bill, even if you have a licence, you are still subject to a fine of up to £50,000. Having a licence is of no consequence in this Bill. You can follow all the rules and be licensed by the local council, but it counts for nothing. It is another infringement on trade.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. He makes the point that I was trying to make even more forcefully. Even those with licences, nevertheless being unauthorised to sell merchandise, food or drink outside a stadium, could find themselves being given football banning orders if they are convicted of one of these new criminal offences. Even if there is nothing in the Bill as drafted before our House today that says these offences could be added to Schedule 1, what guarantee do we have that they will not be added in Committee, which has happened as I have followed the passage of various Bills through this House numerous times before? Bills change a good deal, and I would not be at all surprised if those offences were added to Schedule 1, and anyone convicted of them could be subject to a football banning order.

Perhaps more importantly, there is nothing in law to prevent football banning orders being imposed on fans visiting from overseas. The purpose of this Bill, we have been told, is in part to prepare the country for the 2028 UEFA men’s football championship, which, as we have heard, will take place in England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. An amendment limiting the circumstances in which banning orders can be imposed on fans, including those visiting from the continent, will make Great Britain a more attractive destination in 2028 for lovers of the beautiful game. For those reasons, I hope to table an amendment in Committee reversing the expansion of the authoritarian banning order regime.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am tempted to follow what the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, was saying, but not quite in the way he suggested; I am tempted to follow up what he said about referees, particularly in the Scottish context, not least because my Scottish team of Motherwell bore the brunt of some of the difficult decisions that were made. He also mentioned the difficulty that footballers seem to have in coming out as gay. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Young, that one of the reasons why we need banning orders is that there has been so much homophobia, as well as many other problems, in football in recent years.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

Without wanting in any way to defend the remark that our member made, it was made in the heat of the moment and in the context of an exchange of insults with a rival group of fans. None of those other fans complained or said or showed in any way that they were upset or offended. There is also absolutely no evidence that they were gay—they were just Chelsea fans. Does the noble Baroness nevertheless think that, if he is convicted, a five-year banning order involving draconian restrictions on his liberty is an appropriate and proportionate punishment?

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

My Lords, I know nothing of the detail of what was said, the circumstances or whatever, but, as someone who has attended football matches in many stadia over many years, I know that some very unpleasant things happen and we need the ability to have football banning orders where appropriate.

Virtually all noble Lords have welcomed the Bill, as I do. It is necessary that we have as much power as we can to make sure that events such as Euro 2028 go well. Many people have spoken about the importance of different sports and sport generally to the economy, society and the whole psyche of the country. When I think about sporting events, because of my particular interests I think about football. Noble Lords opposite are smiling, because they have heard me talk about this on many occasions. It is important to my family. During the football season, each of us looks at the football results and knows which of our colleagues will be smiling on Monday morning. It is a very good test. I am still smiling, and I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, for mentioning this, but 10 days ago I was at Wembley with my family when Bolton Wanderers won promotion to the Championship. My noble friend Lady Morris and I were comparing notes on this just a little while ago.

Football is important. The preparations being made for Euro 2028 are important, but there are issues that colleagues have raised on the Bill that are worth emphasising. Although we all more or less support the Bill, it has aspects that could be tightened up or go a little further. Ticket touting has been mentioned by many others. I think there is an impression that it is a series of one-off events; in fact, it is a pretty big industry. My noble friend Lord Mann called it “organised crime”. It is right to take action, but is the Minister sure that the penalties are severe enough, given the nature of the people we are talking about? Like many others, I would like to see this apply to domestic competitions and non-sporting events as well. This Bill, as has been mentioned, applies just to international events, which means we cannot talk to or amend it in ways that we might want to so that it covers domestic situations. However, we can learn from some of the problems we have in domestic sporting events to try to make sure we get some of these things right.

Advertising has been mentioned. It is not a straightforward issue, nor one that is completely in the Government’s control, because there are international contracts. FIFA, UEFA and any other governing body will do its own deals on sponsorship and advertising, and then of course companies will spend a great deal of money and effort circumventing those restrictions. I acknowledge that it is a complex problem, but the Government are thinking along the right lines here. Over recent years, we have had lots of changes and dire warnings about what would happen if we banned certain types of sponsorship. I remember the discussions about football and tobacco, and the threats we were told existed when Formula 1 was forced to give up tobacco advertising. It was supposed to be the end of Formula 1—it was not. However, it is a really difficult issue because this is a changing picture and a very different, challenging situation.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned that, next season in the Premier League, betting companies will not be allowed on the front of shirts. It is a welcome, small measure. It is probably because clubs feared something more draconian but, at the same time, some clubs now say that they will have betting companies on the front of their training shirts, which are also very visible and seen by many, and indeed replicas are bought.

I mention this not because it is covered by the Bill but because it illustrates the changing nature of the challenge we are facing. It is a moving target, and it is the same with gambling. We are soon to see prediction markets being regarded as products and the Gambling Commission in the UK has regarded prediction markets as a “betting intermediary”, so they would be covered. However, they are not classified as such in other countries, so, again, there is always going to be a problem with implementation, and a real challenge for the Government and those who monitor sporting events.

The other issue that I want to raise is transport. The Bill enables the Secretary of State to direct someone to prepare a transport plan in connection with a sporting event. This is very sensible and I welcome it, and I wish we had such plans for more sporting events, especially domestically. However, the Bill seems to concentrate on roads. We need plans for roads, but I am old enough to remember when there were “Cup Final Specials”: trains which went from the towns that were playing in the cup final. Now, almost every big event at Wembley is marked by train travel problems. Indeed, at the match that I was at 10 days ago, fans from Bolton had to be advised to make alternative arrangements because of the difficulty of getting to Wembley for 1 pm on that Sunday. The day before, when the Championship play-off was being held, there were no trains whatever from Middlesbrough to London. Again, there was no co-ordination, which made it difficult.

Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

That does underline the need for investment in our newspapers if they are to continue to flourish, and to perform the job that they do which is so vital for our public discourse and our democracy. That is why we all want to make sure not just that we are getting the rules right now in the regulations currently before the House, but that we have a regulatory regime which balances the need for protection of this vital part of our democracy, while also allowing space for investment to continue, so that these newspapers and press organisations can continue to flourish for many years to come.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a Telegraph contributor and as the director of the Free Speech Union, which defends freedom of the press among other freedoms.

First, I thank the Secretary of State for bringing forward these regulations. I was one of around 50 Peers to write to her pointing to the shortcomings of the first set of regulations, which we have already heard quite a bit about, whereby it was not clear whether the 15% ceiling on the percentage of shares in a British newspaper a foreign state could own applied to those states both individually and collectively or just individually, leaving open the possibility that a number of foreign states could each take a 15% stake and collectively end up with a controlling stake.

In our letter, we urged the Secretary of State to bring forward a second set of regulations making it clear that the ceiling applied to foreign states individually and collectively, so I am grateful that the Secretary of State has done so, although a good deal of the credit for the closure of this loophole should go to my noble friend Lady Stowell.

The Telegraph group has now been in a state of “protracted uncertainty”—those are the Secretary of State’s words—for nearly two years. In that period, senior executives and senior members of the editorial staff have been unable to make strategic decisions, which they need to do given the profound upheaval in the newspaper business caused by AI. It is vital that the group is sold to a reputable owner as quickly as possible so that it can adapt to the rapidly changing business environment and attract the investment it urgently needs to grow.

In order to end the prolonged period of uncertainty, I share my noble friend Lady Stowell’s hope that the bid by the Daily Mail and General Trust is successful. As I understand it, the Secretary of State has given DMGT until Monday week to submit a bid and she is then at liberty to approve the sale, provided no flags are raised by the Competition and Markets Authority or Ofcom. Alternatively, she can refer the bid to the CMA. Should that prove necessary, I urge her to impress upon the regulator how important it is to complete its scrutiny process as quickly as possible and make a decision about whether to approve or reject the bid.

Should DMGT’s bid be rejected and it becomes necessary to invite other bidders to submit offers, it would be highly improper if RedBird IMI is still the entity holding the gavel, as it were. The reason it is selling the Telegraph group is because the United Arab Emirates owns a controlling stake in the company. If it is a breach of the regulations for a company that is controlled by a foreign state to own a British newspaper, how can it be appropriate for a company controlled by a foreign state to decide who to sell a British newspaper to?

I am not alone in being prepared to overlook this anomaly in the current circumstances, given the need for an expedited sale. But should DMGT’s bid prove unsuccessful, or if it fails to materialise, the course of action the Secretary of State must take is clear. I share my noble friend Lady Stowell’s disappointment that the Secretary of State did not set out what she would do in the event of DMGT’s bid not materialising, or it being rejected, in her Written Ministerial Statement at the beginning of last week.

To my mind, the Secretary of State’s course of conduct is clear. She must immediately refer RedBird IMI’s ownership of the Telegraph group to the CMA. The CMA will, I imagine, quickly declare that the arrangements fall foul of the foreign state influence regulations, as it must, and it should then use its powers to order the independent directors of the Telegraph group to hold an auction with no floor price in which the bidders are transparent about the origin of the money they have raised for the acquisition.

Those last two points are crucial. Should RedBird IMI retain its grip on the gavel, not only would that be improper but it will be reluctant to accept bids of less than £500 million, given that is how much it paid. In the light of the tumult unleashed in the newspaper business by AI in the past two years, not to mention higher interest rates, economic tariffs and a soft ad market, few if any bidders, with the possible exception of DMGT, will be willing to meet that price. To insist on a reserve price of £500 million might very well condemn the Telegraph to remain in limbo for the foreseeable future, with disastrous consequences. Should the bidders not be transparent about the financing of the deal, there is a risk the new owners will also fall foul of the regulations and we will be back here again. Rinse, wash, repeat—meanwhile, a great British newspaper shrinks and shrinks until it becomes invisible.

In short, if the DMGT bid is viable, the Secretary of State must use her powers to ensure the deal is completed as quickly as possible. If it is not, she needs to move equally quickly to a transparent auction process overseen by the company’s independent directors. To govern is to decide, and the Secretary of State must start making some decisions.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

I do not want to detain your Lordships’ House, and the speeches already made by several noble Lords are very much to the point. I should declare an interest as a long-serving employee of the Daily Telegraph. In that capacity, I draw the attention of the Minister to what it is like for a newspaper not to know who is owning it for such a very long time.

It seems to me that the greatest power of bureaucracy is delay, which increases the power of bureaucracy with every moment; that is its appalling leverage on everything else. But business, and particularly journalism, has the opposite desire. It needs to get on, and the word “journalism”, of course, comes from the French word for day. It happens every day, and every day lost is a disaster for us. In certain respects, we have been losing day after day—we have lost roughly half the length of the Second World War not knowing who is really going to own us.

I make no distinction really here between Governments of either party because both, it seems to me, were guilty of a similar failure. I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that there is a strong contrast between the quasi-judicial role that DCMS quite rightly operates, which is necessary in these cases, and all the manoeuvring and use of time and delay to try to satisfy—as the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Young, have pointed out—the needs of a foreign state that the British Government seem to be overzealously courting.

This is a very bad piece of politics—not party politics—and it puts us all in play. If we were to write the history of this, we would have to see that it fell to the journalists of the Daily Telegraph twice to start making a noise before anything could prevent very bad things happening. That seems to be nothing to do with the quasi-judicial process. I hope that the very sharp deadline of 15 December is tacit acknowledgement by the Government of the damage done by delay and that therefore something more drastic is being done now.

In another place, the Justice Secretary, when trying to do something about jury trials, has made the point that justice delayed is justice denied. We at the Telegraph have had justice delayed for a very long time and therefore denied. The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and other noble Lords have been clear that it has to be acknowledged that a process of this sort should never go on again and that there is a big lesson here. If, for whatever reason, the Daily Mail bid fails or gets called into question, there has to be an open, swift and fair process.

Telegraph Media Group

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I am not privy to the Secretary of State’s thinking on this matter, but I will pass on the noble Lord’s suggestion.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a Telegraph contributor and as the director of the Free Speech Union. Can the Minister assure the House that, in keeping with the principle that foreign states should not be able to exercise any influence over the editorial content of a British newspaper, foreign states should not be able to exercise any influence over the sale of a British newspaper either? To repeat the request of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, assuming that the Minister agrees with that principle, will she ask the Secretary of State to guarantee that RedBird IMI is not involved in the decision regarding to whom the Telegraph is sold?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

As I have said previously, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on any live merger case. I agree with all noble Lords who have stated their support for the Telegraph, which is a world-renowned title, with a long and proud history that we want to see continue. The public interest intervention notice and pre-emptive action order on RedBird IMI’s proposed acquisition of the Telegraph both remain in place. As I have stated previously, the Secretary of State is keen to make sure that the matter is resolved, as she agrees, as I am sure do noble Lords from across the House, that the sale process is taking too long.

Independent Football Regulator

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

There is no doubt in my mind, and I know in the minds of noble Lords from across your Lordships’ House, that David Kogan is supremely qualified for the role to which he has now been appointed. As the noble Lord highlights, he was approached under the previous Government for this role and is eminently qualified for the job.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, the Hillsborough law that this Government are introducing will make it a criminal offence for an elected official to mislead the public even if he or she did not intend to do so. Does the Minister agree that, had the Public Office (Accountability) Bill been on the statute books, the Prime Minister would now be liable for prosecution for telling his independent ethics adviser that he had recused himself from the appointment of David Kogan, only to then sign off on David Kogan’s appointment?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

Absolutely not. The Prime Minister replied, as I have said previously, on the basis that this decision had been made, and he made it clear that it would have been preferable for him not to have been given a note or confirmed that he was content. He sincerely regrets this. As I have previously stated, the Football Governance Act is clear that this is a matter for DCMS Ministers alone.