English Football: Financial Sustainability and Governance

Clive Jones Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Earley and Woodley (Yuan Yang) for securing this debate and for her diligence in campaigning, along with many others, as she highlighted in her speech, for the future of Reading football club. In the Reading area, including Wokingham, Bracknell and Newbury, the cross-party approach that has united fans and politicians of all political persuasions is to be applauded. I look forward to continuing to work with the hon. Member and others and Reading FC fans on this important issue.

Reading football club is a recent story of tragedy for its fans, for its community and for English football. Gone are the glory days of Sir John Madejski, former chairman, who embodied the very definition of what ownership of a football club should look like. I am young enough to remember seeing Roger Smee and Frank Waller in the stands at Elm Park as chairmen of the club.

Back then, Reading football club was an institution driven by its owners for the good of the club and for the fans. It promoted close links to the community and with its fans, built a great relationship with schools and was able to deliver premier football quality as well. That makes it more frustrating that it is now a stark contrast to what it was a decade ago and synonymous with the very worst of football club ownership.

Dai Yongge is not accessible to fans; nobody knows where he is. He has attempted to asset strip the club and is one of the clearest reasons why Reading football club is being held back from greater success. For example, alleged cash-flow issues under his ownership have caused the late payment of wages, resulting in points deductions.

People are just fed up with the way that the club is being run. Take, for example, the saga over Bearwood Park, Reading football club�s training ground in my constituency of Wokingham. This is a state-of-the-art facility that Dai Yongge attempted to sell in early 2024, with no consultation with fans on the decision. All he wanted to do was to get some cash for his business�for himself.

Sue Symes of Sell Before We Dai contacted me on a Thursday evening to ask what a clause in the training ground�s planning permission meant. At the time, I was a local councillor for Wokingham borough council. By lunch time the following day, I had a clear answer from council planners: the training ground development had been approved several years before, provided it belonged to Reading football club. Dai Yongge wanted to sell the training ground to Wycombe and further devalue the club. If the training ground was lost, the club was at a significant risk of having no alternative sites to train its squad.

I arranged for Reading FC and Wycombe to be reminded of the existence of that all-important clause, and within hours Wycombe had pulled out of the deal. That is just one battle that was won in a war that is hopefully close to concluding. I am pleased to acknowledge Sue Symes�s role in that.

Sue can rightly be proud of making sure that the sale of the club�s training ground did not happen, so that the club, the training ground and the stadium could all be sold as a viable concern. The club has been up for sale for more than 500 days, and it may have been close to selling several times. It will hopefully not be long before a sale actually happens, because Dai Yongge has bled the club dry and no one will deny that he must go.

The issue does not, unfortunately, end with Reading. Football clubs are not just luxury goods for millionaires to buy and sell like yachts; they are important to fans and are part of the DNA of their local communities. It is therefore good to see successive Governments bringing forward important legislation to establish an independent football regulator, which will provide a vital bulwark to protect our national game. I seriously hope that the new regulator will consider the case of Reading FC and other teams, such as Bury and Macclesfield Town, and take the time to speak to fans and learn the lived lessons of fans faced with an agonising process to retain their club�s assets and identity.

The Football Governance Bill is currently making its way through the other place. I want to record my support for the rules in the Bill requiring an assessment of the honesty and integrity of owners and officers. Importantly, the Bill also includes provisions to monitor owners and hold them accountable during their time in office, rather than just before they make their purchase. That will hopefully prevent any future Dai Yongge from taking root in a football club. I do, however, hope that the Bill will go further to protect assets beyond just stadiums. Protections should be extended to other club-owned assets, particularly training grounds but also car parks, hotels and other land owned by the club.

I would greatly appreciate it if the Minister answered a few questions. Will the independent football regulator, once set up, have any formal duty to engage with clubs that have faced hardships? What steps are the Government taking to strengthen the protection of club assets? Will the Minister reflect on whether the new Football Governance Bill, in its current form, would have prevented the takeover of Reading by Dai Yongge?

In conclusion, football is not just any other sport; it is an integral part of the fabric of our cities, towns and villages in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That is what drives passion and desire among so many people. Quite simply, they want the five tiers of professional football to function because, from their perspective, if football cannot function, then how can society? Finally, I pay tribute to all those fans who have tirelessly campaigned on this issue, including the groups Sell Before We Dai and Supporters Trust at Reading, and people such as Sue Symes, Adam Jones and Ian Morton. They have all taken time from their personal lives to save a team about which they care deeply, and they are a wonderful example to our community.

[Karl Turner (in the Chair)]

I call the Opposition spokesperson.

Employer National Insurance Contributions: Charities

Clive Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) for securing the debate. A number of charities in my constituency of Wokingham, including The Cowshed, First Days and Citizens Advice, have been really disadvantaged by these national insurance charges, one of them by up to £16,000 a year. The Government could have been bold by taxing banks, online gambling and social media giants to raise more money.

Can the Minister answer this simple question? Is she content with putting bankers’ bonuses first instead of debt advisers and support for people facing evictions, homelessness and genuine need?

[Valerie Vaz (in the Chair)]

I thank hon. Members. Everyone who wanted to speak has done. I now call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Daisy Cooper.

Leisure Services: West Lancashire

Clive Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ashley Dalton]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention and I agree that swimming pools and leisure facilities more broadly are crucial for the mental and physical health and wellbeing of all of our communities.

West Lancashire borough council recognises the importance of our pools, so it has issued plans that include replacing the leisure centres in Skelmersdale and Ormskirk, and relocating facilities while keeping the existing provision open during construction, to prevent any reduction in services for local people. However, since 2019, and the pandemic, the energy crisis and the huge rise in interest rates under the last Government, the project costs have risen by more than 30%, from £36.6 million to £49 million, and it is not just the costs of building new facilities that have increased. The cost of simply keeping the doors open at Nye Bevan Swimming Pool and Park Pool have also increased, not to mention the fact that both facilities continue to age.

All of this means that plans to replace our pools in West Lancashire are now at risk of failure. Although West Lancashire borough council remains committed to delivering new pools for the community, it also has to empty bins, provide housing support, and look after our parks and green spaces. Local government finances have been squeezed to the bone over the past 14 years. Councils were once able to undertake large capital projects, in order to invest in the future of their communities, but the rug has been pulled from under their feet. The council has been left with no choice but to open a public consultation on the future of our pools in Skelmersdale and Ormskirk. That consultation ends tomorrow.

Since 2010, more than 400 swimming pools have closed in Britain, with deprived areas taking more of a hit than affluent ones. The number of pools in local councils with the highest levels of health deprivation fell by 14% over the past 12 years, while those in the least health-deprived areas fell by 6%. Only 45% of children and young people attending school in the country’s most deprived areas can swim 25 metres, compared with 76% in the least deprived areas. Among year 6 children, 25% cannot swim 25 metres unaided, while that figure is almost 50% in low-income families.

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

I agree with the hon. Lady that swimming pools are important. Like her, I am not a very confident swimmer, although I would love to be. When I was leader of Wokingham borough council, we opened the Carnival Hub, a multimillion-pound leisure centre that is enjoyed by residents from across the constituency. I agree that leisure services promote better health outcomes and build a sense of community. Does she agree that the Government need to fund local government properly, so that we can keep those centres opening, and that they need to set out the impact of increases in the national minimum wage and employer national insurance contributions on our leisure centres?

[Ashley Dalton]

I agree that the mechanisms for local authority funding need to be—and are being—addressed by the Government. I am confident that we will see announcements on that in due course.

We all know the value of swimming, especially for children. Learning to swim shapes the relationship we have with water, which stays with us. That relationship can literally mean the difference between life and death, sink or swim. Our children understand the value of that relationship. The school council at Crawford Village Primary school in Skelmersdale wrote to me last month. They are desperate for the pools in West Lancashire to remain open to the public, because they know that access to swimming brings health, as well as social and educational benefits to the community, as the hon. Members for Wokingham (Clive Jones) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) have mentioned.

The alternative to council-run pools is costly private leisure facilities. The Bannatyne health club in Skelmersdale is the nearest private pool to Nye Bevan. I looked at its website to see how much membership would cost. It states that subscriptions start from “as little as” £42.99 a month. For a family of five, that would be more than £200 a month. The council currently charges £15.99 a month per person to access all its leisure facilities across three sites.

People might not need a monthly subscription, but just want to swim for a day or two a week. Anyone wanting to swim at the Park pool or Nye Bevan can do so for £4.70. At private facilities, such as Bannatyne clubs, an individual swimming session would require a day pass at £25. Many of the people responding to the council’s consultation will be simply unable to afford anything close to that. We know that when leisure facilities become less accessible for the community, those from low-income households literally pay the price.

Those living in affluent areas, classed as middle-income families, have a higher chance of being able to swim than those living in a deprived area. Even if someone cannot swim, they have a better chance of attending a school that can foot the bill for swimming costs, which have risen dramatically in recent years. I know that the Government are committed to opening opportunities to children of all backgrounds. Announcements of investment in our schools—an additional £1 billion for students with special educational needs and disability, and free breakfast clubs—are transformational and will make a huge difference in outcomes for children leaving school.

We also know that education is far more than what we learn in textbooks. It comes from interacting with the world outside the classroom and learning life skills, such as swimming. West Lancashire borough council wants our community to have access to swimming and leisure facilities. It wants our children to form a positive relationship with water. It wants to create a more social community, and it wants a more active community. However, its hands are tied behind its back. It tells me that it needs the Government to bring forward plans for councils to restructure local government finance, so that it can invest in the big capital projects that will support our communities. I appeal to the Government to do that, and to help us to unlock the funding that will give our community access to the facilities it needs.

I know that my colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be working with the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to improve our communities’ access to leisure facilities. I would like to ask my hon. Friend the Minister what plans the Government have to support access to affordable swimming and leisure facilities for those communities that cannot access private centres.

Film Industry

Clive Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

I, too, pay tribute to the unions who work in this field. I have held discussions with Bectu and the Musicians’ Union in recent weeks, and I am very grateful for their insight and expertise and all their work to support our amazing creative workforce. I recognise the challenges that my hon. Friend lays out, particularly over the course of the strike, which many workers and studios found very difficult. Our Government are very aware of that, especially coming off the back of a global pandemic, which posed major challenges for the industry. We are aware that the situation of many workers and institutions in the creative industries is extremely fragile, and we are committed to working hand in glove with our unions to resolve that.

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

Berkshire is the Hollywood of the United Kingdom, and I am proud that Wokingham contributes to its success, whether it is on stages of the Arborfield Film Studios or through my constituents commuting to Shinfield Studios. Today’s announcement is a very welcome step and great support for our independent film industry, which is crucial to our local economy. Will the Secretary of State confirm when the guidance on business rates tax relief will be published?

[Lisa Nandy]

I do not think it has been said in this House that Berkshire is the Hollywood of the United Kingdom, but I will take his word for it, and I look forward to visiting at some point. He is right to raise the guidance on business rates, which we are aware is a pressing issue. I am afraid that I cannot give him a date today, but it is at the top of our agenda and will be forthcoming.