Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, like everyone else, I congratulate the Government and the Minister on bringing forward the Bill at this time. It seems extremely apposite, with the World Cup just in play. It is a privilege to take part in a debate that, as others have observed, features some of our Olympian and Paralympian heroes.

I cannot but make reference to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes. It is good to see him back in his usual position, causing his usual amount of trouble. I reassure him that Hearts are now the second favourite team in Brighton.

I pay tribute to all the other speakers. I particularly enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Barber. I see that he is Lord Barber of Chittlehampton. Having heard what he said about cricket, and with my own particular love of the game, I think he should now be known as Lord Barber of Delivery—and I am more than happy to come out of my cricketing retirement to test his outside edge.

This is a simple set of measures, but it will, potentially, be of enormous long-term benefit to UK sport, tourism, hospitality and so on, making life easier for those who plan and manage large sporting events. The UK, as many have said, has an enviable reputation for the way in which it puts on a show whenever we bid and win major international events such as the Olympics, Paralympics and football competitions such as the Euros for both men and women. I am delighted that the Bill begins to address issues such as ticket touting, which many of us in the Chamber have, over the years, raised in different ways and under different guises.

It is right, too, that the Government are tackling unauthorised association issues and that they make transport planning for major events simpler and easier. It has always been a puzzle to me, like many, that, each time we stage something such as the Commonwealth Games, as they have in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and so on, or the Olympics, new legislation is required, leaving the planners with uncertainties until Parliament is finished with the Bill. It is pleasing to note that the Euro 2028 planning will be made simpler and more straightforward as a consequence of this legislation.

As the Minister set out, the Bill will make it easier to bid for future events, such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2035. I do not need persuading of the economic benefits that hosting major sporting events can bring. I live in Brighton, and we are familiar with hosting such events. When I was council leader, we took the wise decision to host the Tour de France, and we were the first city to do so. We have since played host to the Rugby World Cup, the Women’s Euros in 2022 and the Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2025.

The boost to the local economy of all those events has been enormous. The single stage of the Tour de France alone was worth a net £10 million in 1994, not to mention the added value that it gave to the profile of the city as a desirable destination, with a value-added spend into local hospitality industries. More recently, it is estimated that the Birmingham Commonwealth Games brought roughly £1.2 billion of additional economic output and £80 million of social value. This, along with the soft power benefits that others have referred to and a sense of social cohesion, better trade, and a health and well-being legacy, brings enormous side benefits.

For that reason, I too welcome the recent announcement by the Government of a scoping and strategic assessment by UK Sport of the potential to host an Olympic and Paralympic Games in the north in the 2040s. As we found in 2012, the economic and social benefits far outweigh the costs. The regenerative potential of major sports is enormous, and the Government are to be congratulated on seeing this and putting in place the Bill and other measures to tap into that potential.

Unsurprisingly, for this reason the Bill has been widely welcomed. Its powers seem proportionate and will enable greater flexibility in the planning of major events. This is all a long way from the planning and preparation behind the 1966 World Cup. As I recall, a major competition event of this sort was done on a government grant of some £500,000 that Denis Howell, the Sports Minister, managed to extract from a reluctant Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Howell’s only major obstacle was that games could not be played on Sundays because of the strict Sunday observance laws at the time. Surely Denis Howell would be rubbing his hands now if he had sight of this Bill.

I have a few minor gripes, and I hope the Minister can put my mind at rest on some points. Lawyers at Lewis Silkin have questioned why the Bill, while understandably focused on mega events that we compete for internationally, does not also cover large and regular events such as the London Marathon, the Six Nations, the Open and Wimbledon. I might add several other regional marathons, the London to Brighton cycle ride and other cycling competitions. The lawyers argue that it leaves a gap as these events collectively bring in enormous value to the UK and are regularly targeted by ambush marketeers. They have a point. They suggest that there is a case for adding provisions to cover the unauthorised association provisions that impact on regularly held, nationally significant competitions.

I also wonder whether, with a bit of tweaking to the Bill’s Long Title, it could cover music events too. UK Music’s Tom Kiehl has suggested that the ticket touting provisions, for example, could be extended to cover music venues. It does seem a bit odd taking measures to counter ticket touts at football and sporting events while leaving music events entirely unprotected. It is somewhat illogical. Why use a Bill to consult on these provisions for other issues such as music when provisions have already been published in an actual piece of legislation? Perhaps the Minister can explain this. On the face of it, the ticket touting offence seems pretty all-embracing, properly capturing ticket platforms and marketplaces. It also applies to businesses that operate from outside the UK but where the offence relates to people in the UK. These conditions seem entirely replicable to musical events.

I support the advertising, trading and unauthorised association measures in the Bill that target illicit commercial behaviour ripping off the sporting event by association with its brand. My only concern here will be how effectively the relevant offences will be policed, given the resources currently available to weights and measures authorities, the CMA and the other enforcement agencies. Perhaps the Minister can advise us whether additional money will be made available to carry out that work.

Finally, I think the transport measures should work. I presume they draw on the experience of the bespoke legislation that worked well for the Olympics, Paralympics and Commonwealth Games. I must say that such powers would have made Brighton hosting a Tour de France section back in 1994 much easier, the route passing as it did through multiple local authorities from Dover to Brighton. The Bill makes it clear who exactly has responsibility over transport issues, and this is most welcome.

Like others, I celebrate the introduction of this Bill and look forward to further constructive engagement on some of the areas that have been usefully raised this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[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?

Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

This Government are not learning or explaining how this will work. Once again, they are on the side of big business, not the fan or the single family member who has to move on that ticket because his girlfriend is not his girlfriend any more.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 28A. The Bill usefully sets out that regulations in relation to ticket touting will be brought in for sporting events. But a number of organisations, including UK Music, are understandably asking the Government to completely fulfil their manifesto commitment. In this sense, I am coming to the issue from a similar place to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, although I disagree with his remedy. It is right that we should do this because we need to end exploitative ticket touting across all types of events. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and I have been on the same side on this for many years.

Like many on these Benches, I am delighted at the progress that has been made on ticket touting for sports events, but I am puzzled about the wait for legislation covering music and other events. What makes it more puzzling is that music and sports events often take place in the same venues. This week, my wife will go to listen to Harry Styles; a few weeks ago, I could have gone to the same Wembley venue to watch the cup final. So I am sure that the Minister will understand why there is a measure of disappointment, particularly among music fans, event organisers and performers, none of whom derive any benefit from the current situation.

According to YouGov research commissioned by O2, online ticket touts are costing UK music fans at least £145 million a year. For some time, UK Music has been calling for legislation that includes a resale price cap to prohibit someone from reselling a ticket for more than the original ticket value, service fee limits to ensure that price caps cannot be undermined by inflated fees or hidden charges placed on consumers, and volume limits to make it unlawful to buy more tickets for an event than one individual is permitted to buy on the primary market. Taken together, those measures would create transparency for ticket purchasers and create a more level playing field for consumers.

My amendment 28A would simply require the Secretary of State to review the ticket touting provisions in Clauses 5 and 6 within 12 months of the Act coming into force and report to Parliament on their effectiveness. This review would provide an important opportunity to assess whether similar protections should be extended to the music sector and music events. I am conscious that a draft Bill is to be published in this Session, but I am also conscious that these things have a habit of slipping and falling foul of other priorities. We have yet to see the terms of the wider legislation, so can we better understand why sport has come forward first, and what makes the challenges of policing this area different or more complex for music?

Music fans face many of the same challenges as sports fans: tickets being acquired in bulk and resold at inflated prices, and genuine fans being priced out of events. The draft Bill, announced in the King’s Speech, means that music fans will continue to face inflated resale prices and unfair ticketing practices while they wait for reform. If the ticket touting provisions prove effective in the sporting context, the review should urgently consider whether comparable measures should be applied to music events, ensuring greater fairness and consumer confidence in protections. I have tabled this amendment to try to achieve a speedier route to having equity across all sporting, cultural and music events, because those who support those events—music fans, sports fans, or whatever—deserve that equality of consideration.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and to take part in this group. I am physically and actually right behind my noble friend Lord Moynihan on these issues: it is a good provision, but it is the wrong position. It offers a solution that is fine for those critically important but few events that it will cover, but, for the vast majority, it is a tantalisingly close yet elusive solution across the rest of sport, music, culture, et cetera.

“World in Motion”, 1990; “Football’s Coming Home”, Euro 96: music and sport have always been inextricably linked, yet the Bill has not only missed the opportunity to bind these together with effective ticket touting provisions, it has also unfortunately set out a solution for the very few—which, understandably, is extraordinarily frustrating for the many. The provision is also unfortunate because it is very analogue and does not seem to speak to ticketing, touting and abuse as they are today—never mind how they will be in five, 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, when thinking about an Olympic Games and Paralympic Games bid in the 2040s.

I will speak to Amendments 27, 89, and all the amendments in my name in this group. I will start with Amendment 89, which proposes an accessible ticketing duty on all these events. For this, I use “accessible” in the broadest sense of the word. This goes to discussions that we have had in earlier groups around ensuring that we get the right principles threaded into this legislation. When we were putting together the ticketing strategy for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, all the weight of history was on us: all the rules, structures and expectations of what had gone before at all the previous 29 Olympic Games. Of course, there was a lot of good and a lot to follow in that, but, equally, we were the first people to be delivering an Olympic Games and a Paralympic Games in London in 2012. We not only took that incredibly seriously but took it for what it was: a once-in-a-generation opportunity. So we should seek to test, stretch and develop those principles that have been set out in all the documentation and history from previous Games.

Ticketing was a clear example of this, and it is one that I brought out in my amendment. We wanted hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren to have the opportunity to come to the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games and not pay a penny for their tickets, but we were also fundamentally committed to the value of the Games, the sports and the event. So we had a key principle: no free tickets. That is completely the way to structure these things. You do not drive engagement, fans and greater inclusion by thinking that you just need to give away free tickets. The way to structure it is to have tickets available to schoolchildren, as was the case in London 2012.

My amendment is broader. It would make tickets available to local organisations, to disabled people and to other groups—the list is not exhaustive—and have the face-value price of those tickets paid out of a portion of the most expensive tickets for those events. It worked effectively and inclusively at London 2012, and those people who were paying for the highest-priced tickets were delighted that part of what they were paying for was to enable hundreds of thousands of young people to come and experience Olympic and Paralympic sport, often for the first time in their lives, and certainly for the first time in their lives at London 2012. Taking a principle developed there, it would make sense to thread an accessible ticketing duty into this Bill.

On the tickets themselves, as I say, this is currently an extraordinarily analogue Bill at a time when tickets have become extraordinarily complex, more enabling and potentially exclusive in digital token form on digital ledger technologies. We have the ability to do so much more with tickets. First, we can drive out fraud and touting through having the tickets in an immutable form. Secondly, we can attach whatever we choose to that ticket. Say that somebody has particular access needs, food allergies or whatever it might be—you can put that in as part of the digital token representation of their ticket. We can make the ticket so much more powerful, inclusive and connected to the event. It could potentially drive fan engagement: tokens, merch, exclusive benefits, interviews with the players or interviews with the competitors. Whatever you choose, that is all available with ticketing technology that exists today, yet the Bill is silent on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her quite extensive, albeit rapid-fire response. Many of us will read it in greater detail and come back with any questions after we have had that opportunity. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that, while we might have disagreed on my recommendation that we oppose Clause 5 becoming part of the Bill, he at least recognises that it is effectively a probing amendment. The reason I put it down in those terms was that there were many good amendments that were already tabled on this subject. I wanted to highlight a really important point: by simply placing it on the face of this Bill, given the Government’s commitments, we lacked consistency across the country.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

That is my point exactly, and that is why this is an important debate to have had this evening. I congratulate the noble Lord on his observations and comments.