Policing Costs (Football Matches)

Debate between Aidan Burley and Eric Ollerenshaw

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on calling this important debate. As he is aware, British Transport police does not police football grounds—it is completely separate from that—but it estimates that in 2009-10, policing premiership games on Saturdays alone cost £8 million and involved deploying more than 300 police. That, as I say, excluded matches between Mondays and Fridays, and on Sundays. That is all extra expense for the public purse.

[Mr Burley]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is difficult to know how far the footprint goes. People catch trains to football matches, and one sees them at all the stations. That is why I contend that the consequential policing cost is far greater than we think. Whatever the figures, it is clear that it costs more than we recover from the clubs, and my question is: why?

We have all seen the extra police in tube stations and town centres on match days. They are there for one reason: because it is match day. They are doing their job of safeguarding the community, preventing trouble from occurring, and dealing with scuffles and fights between fans. My simple question is: why are the clubs not being billed for those extra policing costs?

In other walks of life there is a principle of, the polluter pays. A constituent, Nigel Clempson, runs a successful shop-fitting company in Rugeley. I am grateful to Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail for highlighting his case in the national press. He said that my constituent

“is the kind of businessman upon whom Britain’s recovery depends.”

His team of craftsmen work seven days a week, mostly at night, refurbishing shops and banks. All the debris that they strip out of the buildings they are refitting is taken back to the firm’s yard at Rawnsley, near Cannock, where it is dumped in a large skip to await recycling and disposal. Because of the nature of the firm’s business, the yard is accessible round the clock, and the skip attracts the attention of local rag and bone men and groups of Travellers who sort through it in search of salvage.

Nigel Clempson has never had a problem with scavengers, who are looking for scrap metal and other materials that they can sell for a few bob, but recently he had a visit from a police officer and an inspector from Cannock council’s environmental health department. The police had seen some Travellers loading scrap from his yard into a transit van, and he was told that he needed a licence to transport industrial waste. He assured them that his company was fully insured and licensed, but was told, “Ah, but the Travellers aren’t.” Nigel was informed by the police that it was his duty to ensure that anyone taking material from his premises had a waste transfer certificate.

We all know that Travellers come and go at all hours, so how was Nigel expected to keep track of everyone, and make sure that they were carrying the correct permits? The police said that that was up to him, but that if any of the material was fly-tipped and traced back to him, he would face a hefty fine. People might ask why the onus should be on Nigel, and not on the Travellers themselves, who probably do not tax their own vehicles, so they are hardly going to bother getting a waste disposal certificate. The principle is that a local businessman from the west midlands has been told that it is his personal responsibility to make sure that a gang of Travellers do not remove stuff from a skip, so he has reluctantly spent £2,000 on a special cage to encase his skip. My question to the Minister is: why are the same police not telling their local premiership football clubs that it is their responsibility to make sure that the local community is safe, that the streets are cleaned, and that the train stations are protected from damage as a result of their businesses?