Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

My Lords, having sat through the entire legislative process, minute by minute, of the Olympic Bill, along with the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath—there were not many of us there—I am slightly perplexed. I recall what we had to pass, which was certainly not easily transferable. Whether it was done by primary or secondary legislation, it was, frankly, tedious.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but I remind him that, during that long deliberation, I moved an amendment that changed the Title of the Bill to the Olympic and Paralympic Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, until the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, spoke, I was beginning to feel incredibly isolated as a rugby fan in your Lordships’ Chamber. Only two of us have now mentioned rugby as a major sport.

I thank the Minister for her excellent introduction to this very important Bill and for the praise that she gave the important work of the late Tessa Jowell. It was through her that I was able to join the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, as a member of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic board. As the noble Lord, Lord Mann, said, long before 2012, a great deal of work had to be carried out to provide the necessary legislation. Had the event-agnostic common legislative framework that is proposed in this Bill already been in place, much time would have been saved.

While I want to propose a few additions, I fully support the Bill, as I do the proposal from my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter, that international cultural events be included alongside sporting ones. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Paul of Shepherd’s Bush, I very much hope that the secondary legislation that will follow will lead to measures that are proportionate, and not to situations such as the one in 2012 when a butcher had to dismantle his window display of strings of sausages in the shape of the Olympic rings.

The 2012 Games also made me realise the importance of tackling ticket touting. It is an issue I have progressed in other places at different times. Notwithstanding the important point about the international aspect of ticket touting, I am genuinely pleased that the Government are taking action on this, including within the Bill.

I want to raise two issues. The first, on gambling advertising, has been foreshadowed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the second is on sports rights. I declare my interest as chair of Peers for Gambling Reform and as a member of the all-party group on intellectual property. I believe that we should all be worried about living in a country in which 1.4 million people, including 80,000 children, suffer from gambling disorder, with individual lives destroyed, families and communities impacted and, tragically, far too many gambling-related suicides. The Minister is well aware of my concerns about gambling advertising and its ubiquitous presence within sport.

Time prevents me detailing all my concerns, not least those about the impact on children and young people, who are constantly being led to believe that the enjoyment of sport is closely linked to gambling on outcomes within sporting events. In this country, we have more research on the links between gambling advertising and gambling harm than almost any other country. That research shows that gambling advertising leads people to start gambling, existing gamblers to gamble more and those who have stopped gambling to start again. This is especially relevant during major sporting events, when the volume of gambling advertising, and illegal black market gambling advertising, grows massively, leading to increased gambling harm. On Monday, the Nationwide Building Society published research showing that 83% of 18 to 24-year old existing gamblers expect to gamble more during the World Cup, with a quarter of them saying that they will do so to hopefully get more money to pay essential bills.

What can be done? Section 8 of the Bill, which has already been referred to, enables the establishment of “restricted advertising zones” around designated sports events and the regulation of what advertising activity may take place within those areas. However, these provisions currently appear to be primarily intended to deal with ambush marketing, and to protect official sponsors and commercial rights holders. I believe they should go further. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, raised a concern about what other international bodies say about this. It is worth reflecting that the IOC has always maintained a strict “clean venue” policy that prohibits sports betting and gambling sponsorship associations with the Olympic and Paralympic Games. FIFA has a similar clean-venue policy for the men’s World Cup. Several other international sporting bodies have rules which allow domestic bans in host countries to supersede their own rules. I hope the Government will consider adopting a similar clean-venue policy in the Bill, so that no gambling advertising is allowed in the restricted advertising zones of the events covered by the Bill.

Additionally, if UK TV and radio coverage of such an event is by a commercial broadcaster, I hope the Government will also consider banning gambling ads during transmissions, or at least until the watershed. Many other countries, including Italy, Belgium and Australia, have adopted far more stringent safeguards where gambling advertising and sport intersect. I believe we should be doing the same.

I turn to the issue of sports rights. In addition to the many other benefits that have already been referred to, the sports sector is now a major economic powerhouse for the UK and, at a time when we need to promote growth, sport can support that in many ways, from tourism to event management, and so on. It is vital that this Bill ensures we have the best framework to support relevant sporting events.

The Bill includes measures to ensure that sports event organisers have the right to ensure that those seeking association with the event must have the correct permissions in place and, in many cases, pay for that association. In most cases, this is easy to arrange and police. For example, spectators, broadcasters and sponsors all have clear conditions and payment arrangements. However, despite the enormous profits that gambling companies make from bets on sporting events, with the exception of horseracing and its horserace betting levy there is no explicit statutory requirement for gambling companies to pay sports organisations for betting rights—an issue that I hope, separately from the Bill, the Government will consider.

To get around that, many sports organisations attempt to assert copyright and database rights over their fixtures and statistics, and gambling operators enter into voluntary commercial data agreements to purchase official data to ensure that they have fast and accurate betting markets. For example—I will use football rather than rugby, since that is what everybody is talking about—data from the English Premier League, the Scottish Premiership and the EFL is licensed through Football DataCo to Genius Sports, which then sells that data to other parties, including gambling companies. But unlike a specific sport’s rights, those are voluntary arrangements and are much less easy to enforce. Indeed, enforcement is even harder when sports data is often scraped by third parties and sold to betting companies without the permission of the sporting event, which has little or no means of redress.

The noble Lord, Lord Barber of Chittlehampton, told us that he has been the chairman of Somerset County Cricket Club. Speaking to me on Monday, he told me about the effort the club makes to prevent the activities of in-ground so-called data scouts, who feed micro-level match data, such as ball-by-ball outcomes, to whoever will pay them—whether gambling companies or betting syndicates. More sophisticated operations also exist—especially, as it happens, in horseracing—where people are using drones to capture data, which they then sell without the agreement of the organisers of the event. When this happens there are potential integrity issues, and certainly the sport event loses potential income. In relation to association measures, will the Minister ensure that this is addressed in the Bill by, first, ensuring that there are tough penalties for those who capture data without permission and, secondly, requiring gambling companies to use only data licensed to them by official sources? I hope that can be extended more widely. This is a very welcome Bill. I am delighted to support it.