Policing Costs (Football Matches)

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Crausby. I am particularly grateful to Mr Speaker for granting me this debate on contribution to the costs of policing football matches by premiership clubs. It is my first Westminster Hall debate, as it was that of the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who secured the previous debate.

To set the parameters of the debate, my proposals this afternoon only relate to premiership football clubs. Policing costs are associated with other sporting events, including lower league football matches. However, premiership football matches require a uniquely heavy police presence, because of the number of fans involved and the rivalries. The policing requirements of Wimbledon, the Ashes at Lord’s or even an international rugby match at Twickenham are much lower compared with those of premiership football. In general, sports spectators are not violent or confrontational, and other sports do not have the same problems as football and hence do not need to separate fans or have strict alcohol laws.

Premiership games require a huge police presence, and I am challenging the idea that the taxpayer should pay for the adverse effects of one party on another. My contention is not that all sporting fixtures should pay for the costs of policing their matches, because at the poorer end of the scale that could wipe out the profit made on a small-scale fixture. However, with the average salary of a premiership footballer now estimated at £55,000 a week, and with some earning as much as four times that amount, or a salary of more than £10 million a year, the affordability of premiership football clubs paying the full costs of policing their highly profitable businesses cannot be questioned in any way. My simple contention is that the total police costs attributable to the policing of a premiership football match should be met by the clubs and not by the taxpayer.

To give some background, the provision of policing at a football match, or at any other commercial event such as a music concert, is a special police service. Special police services are governed by section 25 of the Police Act 1996:

“The chief officer of police of a police force may provide, at the request of any person, special police services at any premises or in any locality in the police area for which the force is maintained, subject to the payment to the police authority of charges on such scales as may be determined by that authority.”

In effect, special police services are extra that police officers provide for security at commercial events. The event organiser must pay for the service at a price determined by the chief constable. If the cost is not met, the organiser can be denied a safety certificate and therefore cannot hold the event.

In 2008, the Association of Chief Police Officers made a submission to the Home Office about the Green Paper on the future of policing, calling for the introduction of full-cost policing. Full-cost policing would extend the definition of special police services beyond the so-called footprint of the event to include consequential policing: policing that is provided beyond the event itself, at train stations or town centres, to deal with crowds arriving at and leaving a commercial event. How is that ACPO submission currently viewed in the Home Office? How would a similar submission by ACPO today—for recovery of full-cost policing from football clubs—be regarded by Home Office Ministers?

Under current arrangements, football clubs are only legally obliged to pay for the policing in their footprint, which usually means inside the stadium and the surrounding car parks. However, the provision of consequential policing outside a football match—for example, at the nearest railway or tube station, in nearby pubs and bars or even in the city centre—is currently the responsibility of the police and is provided at their discretion and their cost. Clubs do not have to pay for that extra service, so the cost is paid for by the taxpayer. That has led to a disparity between what the police estimate the total cost of policing a football match to be, and what the clubs currently pay. In the 2007-08 season, it was estimated that the policing of 13 premier league football clubs cost the police £3.2 million in consequential policing. That difference was met by the taxpayer.

The disparity is the result of current case law—in particular, the case of the chief constable of Greater Manchester v. Wigan Athletic—but also of Home Office guidance on charging for the policing of football matches. The result, according to a report of the Select Committee on Home Affairs on this issue in July 2009, is that

“some forces recovered less than half, some as much as two thirds of the costs of policing football”.

The current disparity, therefore, is between what the clubs are legally obliged to pay in policing costs and what the police actually estimate those costs to be, and it stems from grey areas in the current legislation and Home Office guidance. Can the Minister address that issue in his response, and ask his officials to look into clarifying such an important area?

What are the actual costs? Sunita Patel, the London correspondent for the Wolverhampton Express & Star, has recently submitted freedom of information requests to the West Midlands police on the issue. Her story, published yesterday, revealed some interesting results. Data obtained from the West Midlands police show that the force estimated costs of £1.14 million to police Aston Villa and West Bromwich Albion’s home fixtures in 2008-09. However, the force was only reimbursed £875,655, leaving a shortfall of £266,111. That quarter of a million pounds alone would pay for 10 police constables or seven sergeants. In essence, the police are recovering only three quarters of the costs of policing Villa and West Brom.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the biggest challenge is the lack of transparency—that a freedom of information request had to be submitted? Coupled with that, if he was granted his wish and football clubs in effect had to pay for their own policing, surely they should also have a greater say in how that policing is carried out.

[Mr Burley]

That is a fair point. One of the challenges to such arguments is that defining the cost of consequential policing is difficult. Is a fight in a bar at midnight between two guys wearing football shirts, a long time after the match, the responsibility of Villa and West Brom or of the police only? However, my argument, and what we found in the FOI figures, is that the police calculate such costs quite accurately. They know the costs for policing in the ground—the footprint—and outside, because we have obtained those figures under the FOI requests. A simple test would be to ask a police force what its extra deployment would be if there were a home match on a Saturday. The police would tell us straight away: they would have an extra 10 coppers at the station, a sergeant to oversee, and everything else. Those officers would not otherwise be deployed, so it is quite easy to calculate the extra costs.

Further figures obtained by Miss Patel for the most recent season, 2009-10, showed that West Midlands police recovered £1.23 million for policing the home games of Wolves, Aston Villa and Birmingham City. That is an increase of 40% on the previous season because of an extra west midlands club being in the top flight—I accept that that might change by the end of the week if Wolves or Birmingham go down. If the policing costs outside the football club premises went up by the same ratio, the taxpayer bill for the 2009-10 season would be an estimated £372,555. Extrapolated across the country and the 20 premiership clubs, that would equate to £2.5 million, which is equivalent to 106 police constables or 68 sergeants—at which point, such figures start to appear rather significant.

ACPO itself, in a BBC news article in October last year, estimated that it costs the police up to £25 million to deal with all football matches, but that they only recover £12 million to £15 million a year from the clubs. That is for all football matches, whereas my proposal is for premiership clubs only. Hammersmith and Fulham council estimates that the total cost of policing football matches in its borough, which, uniquely, has three premiership clubs, will be £5.69 million a season. Either way, the cost of policing football matches ranges from £2.5 million to £5.6 million to £15 million, depending on how many clubs and matches are included, and according to the different estimates by different forces of policing their local games. However, one thing from all those figures is abundantly clear. The taxpayer is subsidising wealthy football clubs to the tune of millions of pounds a year, and my simple question to the Minister is: why?

There is an issue and a principle. The issue is the disparity between what the clubs are legally obliged to pay in policing costs, and what the police estimate those costs to be. The principle is that the polluter pays. On the taxpayer subsidy provided to clubs through extra paid-for policing, my personal feeling is that the estimated consequential costs are far higher than freedom of information figures from the west midlands suggest. Let us consider three recent examples.

At the derby match involving Arsenal and Spurs on 31 October last year, a large group of hooligans smashed up several pubs after their side’s 3-0 defeat, causing thousands of pounds of damage. Because of the nature of the derby rivalry at the previous year’s game, the police classified it as high risk, and almost tripled the number of officers on duty from 180 to 560. In the north- east alone this year, British Transport police has already overspent its football budget by around £400,000. In April, a dozen arrests were made after a town centre pub was forced to close when Wigan Athletic, Sheffield United, Barnsley and Manchester United fans turned violent, and the police again had to call in hundreds of extra patrols to deal with the disturbance.