Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Hayward Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I wanted to allow some time to raise and discuss the important issue of gambling advertising—I was hoping for more discussion of it. I note that I support Amendments 37, 41 and 44. The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, has already made the case on gambling very strongly, and it was something I raised at Second Reading, so I will speak chiefly to my Amendments 42, 45, 49 and 52, which are about fossil fuel advertising. They seek to ensure that sporting events covered by the Bill are free from advertising and sponsorship by fossil fuel companies. We could hardly have picked a better day to be debating these amendments, given the heatwave that the UK is currently facing. One significant impact of that heatwave will be on many sporting events. Many people’s intention to do all sorts of physical activity will be, for very good reason, curtailed in the coming week.

In the Bill, we are talking about highly valued, important events, and they should not be used as platforms to boost the reputation of damaging industries whose products are driving the events that we are currently experiencing. Sponsorship is not philanthropy. Companies invest in sport because they know their association with trusted institutions improves their public image and strengthens their social licence. With this Bill, we have the opportunity to ensure that the biggest events in this country that we host do not become a vehicle for greenwashing. We note that young people are a significant part of the audience of many of these events, and that they are the people who will have to bear the consequences for the longest time.

As I raised at Second Reading—and it became very much a basis for these amendments—this is not something we are dreaming up. Britain would not be able to claim to be world-leading should the Minister say, “Yes, I entirely agree with you” and adopt all my amendments. France became the first European country to ban advertising for fossil fuel products in 2022. The Hague has introduced a legally binding ban on fossil fuel advertising in public spaces. As I said at Second Reading, a number of councils have already shown leadership. Today, we are seeing leadership arriving in Westminster from the rest of the country; this is a place where we could find some more leadership on that. The UN Secretary-General has called for restrictions on fossil fuel advertising similar to those applied to tobacco.

I move to my next set of amendments, which are related but different. Amendments 43, 46, 50 and 53 are about the advertising of less healthy food. There is a huge and similar kind of contradiction of promoting sport as a route to health and well-being while simultaneously allowing sponsorship from products that undermine those outcomes. These and other amendments seek to ensure that sporting events covered by the Bill are free from advertising and sponsorship for less healthy food and drinks. We are talking here about the major ultra-processed food and fast food brands, which are, sadly, major suppliers of the British diet; we are all paying the price for that.

The gap is that Ofcom does not regulate sports sponsorship deals; we have regulations about junk food advertising, but not about sponsorship. Therefore, Ofcom cannot do anything about watching a sporting event and being bombarded with advertising for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Budweiser and so-called sports drinks like Powerade. Those brands appear everywhere. We do not see adverts for tap water, though it would be quite nice if we did—let us put that down as a thought. This creates a health halo effect: products are conceived and often advertised as compatible with a healthy, active lifestyle when their nutritional profile is anything but.

Public health bodies and parliamentary research have consistently identified marketing as a key driver of childhood obesity. The Government already have policies on direct advertising to act in this area, and historically we saw the bans of cigarette advertising that had to be continually strengthened. We need to see the same thing for ultra-processed and other unhealthy foods. We have an accepted principle that the marketing of less healthy food to children is a legitimate public policy concern. These amendments address an inconsistency in public policy. Sport should be used to inspire healthy lives, not as a platform to promote the consumption of foods we know will shorten people’s lives and make them less healthy.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to these proposed amendments, I have sympathy with a number of points, particularly as they relate to gaming. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, made very clear the logic behind what he is asking for in these amendments.

Unfortunately, on the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, while I am extremely sympathetic to the issue of climate change, and I will not buy all sorts of things in plastic or plastic bottles and the like, I worry because we are talking about adding things to an ever-extending list; every time we get to a major sporting event, we will look at whether we should add on other things that operate in other countries.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, just spoke about an established principle, and I think that is a far better route by which we should operate in terms of these international sporting events. In other words, our established principles of advertising as they operate in this country should be the principles by which the major sporting events should operate. We cannot spend our time trying to run ahead of policies we have, whether in relation to age-related matters or food and drink-related products.

I have spoken critically on a number of occasions in this Chamber about Coca-Cola and its sponsorship of major sporting events. However, it is a very difficult road we will go down if we start adding on one thing after another—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

To make it clear, when I was talking about an established principle, I was talking about the fact that we have restricted advertising of these products—particularly to children. Therefore, it is a question of how far that restriction goes; it is not about doing something new.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification; I was not absolutely clear on whether she was talking about the established principles or extending the limits in some form or another.

I want to make an observation on a comment the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, made on the last group of amendments. I think I heard him refer to sporting events as ones of “chance” on two occasions. There are a fair number of medallists in this Chamber today who may think, “Well, it wasn’t chance that got me a gold, silver or bronze medal”. Equally, when I refereed rugby, it was very rarely viewed as chance that one team or the other won—though there was the odd chance that the referee might have made an error at the time.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that I did not mean chance as in random, because I accept that in sport the harder you work, the luckier you get.

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[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 19 and 22 to 25 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, to which I have attached my name, and I thank the Minister for sparing time to discuss these. I said when we met that there are a number of sports organisations that are feeling a bit unloved at the moment. These are events that have a global reach and help cement our standing on the world stage.

The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, mentioned the London Marathon. I think I competed in 17 of them—it is quite hard to remember when you get to that many. I know I did one more than my husband. I also commentate on the wheelchair race for the BBC. The marathon is not just the race itself. Anyone who walks up the Embankment at 6.30 pm on the Sunday will see people valiantly keeping going, to try to make it to the finish line. On Westminster Bridge the next morning, you also see the hundreds of people who have competed standing there with their medals, wanting to take a photo in front of Big Ben.

Beyond that, the impact is quite significant. It puts London on the map as a city, and it brings a huge amount of tourism. People stay in London for days afterwards, thanks to the many good deals that the marathon has negotiated with various restaurants and different companies around the city. We need to think about this in a slightly different way. That is positive chemistry and association that you cannot buy. It is because people feel amazingly good about putting themselves through 26.2 miles around the city.

I will speak briefly to Amendment 25, because it is really important. Mostly, athletes will mention something they saw at another event that inspired them to do sport. That is probably because they are asked about it a lot. But we cannot underestimate this—it is not just about people seeing these moments in time and doing sport. They will do lots of other things, and 2012 was a brilliant example of that, such as people who have gone into the creative industries because of what they saw.

The Minister talked about wanting to change the health of our nation, which is incredibly important. To quote a bunch of statistics, Women in Sport has said that 80% of women in the UK are not fit enough to be healthy. That has a massive impact on jobs, pensions, life—everything. It means hitting frailty at an earlier age. ukactive has said that we have a generation of children who are more likely to die before their parents because of inactivity. This is really worrying, and we have to do something quite radical.

It is not necessarily the Bill’s responsibility to do that; we need some joined-up government. We need to look at physical literacy in primary schools and progression steps. We also need to look at the cost of the pathway for athletes who aspire to compete at the highest level. SportsAid data, which is probably a little bit out of date now, shows the average cost of the pathway for a teenage athlete is £10,000 a year. I imagine that is significantly higher now. There are a lot of families who cannot afford that, but what we can do is broaden the base of participation.

I am particularly interested in Amendment 25 and what we can do to encourage more disabled people to be active. Activity Alliance has said that disabled people not only find it hard to be physically active but that they are actually quite worried about how it is perceived if they are physically active, so we need to look at this in a different way. I was not a product of special education—thank goodness, because it meant I actually received an education, when a lot of children who went through special ed did not. As much as the world has moved on in many ways, that was actually really good for enabling disabled children to be physically active. Mainstreaming, which is much better for education, has actually made some of those things much harder. I receive emails at least monthly, often weekly, about how disabled children in schools are not able to take part in PE.

That is not a problem for this Bill—it is an issue for the Department for Education. But unless we are more explicit about what we are trying to do and how we are trying to change some of these stubborn inequalities, we are never going to move it on. In Wales we are incredibly lucky that we have the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which gives us a very useful framing for what we are trying to do to encourage young people to be active. The Sport England campaign, This Girl Can, was ground-breaking. For the first time, it showed real women doing sport—as opposed to Olympians or Paralympians, who look slightly different. But we cannot expect just an advertising campaign to radically change what we do, so any way we can think differently about developing a fit and healthy nation that truly stays engaged in physical activity is really worth exploring in more detail.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the comments of my colleagues across the Chamber in relation to this set of amendments, although I tend to disagree—or will clarify—in relation to one of the amendments. This is an enabling Bill. Surely, therefore, it should provide the opportunity, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has said, for major sporting events which wish to make use of the Bill—whether it is the RFU, the LTA or whoever—to be able to come forward and say to a Government, “We wish to use this Bill for the following reasons”. Surely that is the objective of this legislation.

The point has been made a number of times already that sporting frameworks change, and we cannot guarantee that the Olympic Games, European Championships, et cetera, will be the same in 15 or 20 years’ time, or whenever it may happen to be. Structures of international competition change. If ever there was an example of one—and I am surprised that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, did not refer to it—it is the announcement in the last few days that the London Marathon is going to move from one day to two, with the objective of having 100,000 participants.

It is about the level of attraction from around the world. Most people look at the London Marathon and say, “Oh, it’s just the London Marathon”. It is not; it is part of an international body of marathons, a set group of them. If there are 100,000 participants next year, we are going to have many hundreds of thousands of visitors. There are transport and all sorts of other implications. Surely, if this legislation is anything, it should be available to that sort of sporting evolution, because it is so positive both for this nation and for fitness in general.

I wish to make a brief observation in relation to the amendments, where they cite certain categories of people. I just ask, for reasons most people in this Chamber would recognise and which I identified at Second Reading, that where there is specific identification of women, girls, the disabled and ethnic minorities, we either use the classifications of the Equality Act or just stop at

“removing barriers to physical activity”.

I speak, as I identified on previous occasions, as the founder chairman of the world’s first gay rugby club, a structure that now has 100 clubs around the world and an international structure where we compete on a regular basis. Certainly, I know only too well the difficulties and the challenges associated with bidding and with organising international competitions, with people coming from other parts of the world.

We had the European championships in Birmingham less than a year after the Commonwealth Games. The competition, the Union Cup, was the largest sporting competition in the Midlands after the Commonwealth Games over the following 12 months. There are international competitions all the way down—they restructure and they reorganise. But I ask that we remove barriers to physical activity for underrepresented groups and stop at that point, rather than trying to cite specific examples, because we risk excluding some groups or others, and I know that is not the intention of those who have proposed these amendments.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Hayward. Were I to imagine myself—as I never would—on the Bishops’ Bench, in approaching this set of amendments I would be very much reminded of the parable of the prodigal son.

The Bill rightly sets out a whole raft of provisions for mega sporting events that come to the United Kingdom on occasion. Events already listed by my noble friend Lady Evans, such as Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix, and so on, do their thing year in, year out, staging world-class events which are far greater than sporting celebrations and competitions, with economic, social and cultural benefit which goes far beyond, for example, Wimbledon, SW19.

In asserting the principles in the Bill that have to be in place when it comes to international bids, it seems odd that at least some of these provisions would not be available to those extraordinarily impactful sporting events that are the very fabric not only of our sporting nation but of our culture. I ask the Minister to consider, if not implementing these amendments, the essence behind them and to how it could be threaded into the Bill. Further to my noble friend Lord Hayward’s comments on frameworks, why would the Government not want that to be available to the sporting events that wish to avail themselves of some parts of it? Ambush marketing is ambush marketing, whether it is targeted at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games or the Wimbledon Championships every year.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Evans and I have a lot in common—we both support Norwich City Football Club, and we show our allegiance to it—but I disagree with her in her amendments. I did not contribute to the last debate, but it is safe to say that it confirmed what I think we all know: that, while this may be an enabling Bill, if we actually capture one of these global events, we will need to have specific legislation anyway. If that is the case, we will not be doing any more than virtue signalling in the Bill. The conclusion that all the noble Lords have made is that the Bill is incomplete and half-full. I will not say that it is half-baked, but there is plenty more work to be done on it.

However, if the Bill is incomplete, I do not think that it is the right thing at all to extend it in scope to other events, because the mission creep brings politics into sport. Of course, it is very difficult to keep it there, but it brings politics into sport by law. It will prevent somebody who is interested in public discourse from having an opinion and gives them leverage over the event. It will sanitise so much of the activity that goes on around the game. It will make unlawful things that are part and parcel of what we do—certain trade, advertisements and things such as that; it stops innovation—for Wimbledon, the rugby union, the rugby league, the Grand Prix, the Open, the Test match, Premier League and, if we listen to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, cultural events such as the Proms and Taylor Swift. Where does this end?

I am concerned that, however well-intentioned it is, it could backfire. My noble friend Lady Evans talked about a gap to be filled. I see it a different way; I see this creating a chasm between the fans and the men in blazers, who want this for their own narrow purposes. We have grown the well-trusted and well-organised events of global repute that we host without the benefits of the Bill. While it is an enabling Bill and has very important new rules for traffic wardens, I am not sure that having more traffic wardens is enough in and of itself.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for giving way, but just for clarification, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, my noble friend Lady Evans, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and I made absolutely clear that it is not a case of the Bill encompassing these competitions; it is the sporting authorities asking that they might make use of some of the facilities of the Bill.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to follow the Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, who is very much the leader of your Lordships’ House in this space. I am here having signed Amendments 15 and 26 to show cross-party support, so I will be brief.

As the noble Baroness set out, we have seen a gradual erosion of people’s access. We often discuss access to the right to participate in sport, but there is also the access to being part of the whole sporting experience and to view major events live. Free-to-air broadcast is what keeps major sporting events genuinely public, rather than turning them into elite viewing that is available only to those who can afford subscription television or other sources. If access depends on payment, watching sport becomes unevenly distributed, with lower-income households at a clear disadvantage. In practice, that particularly excludes, or risks excluding, many children and young people from the shared experience of watching major sporting events with their peers and their communities. Free-to-air coverage ensures that money is not a barrier to participation in what is a common cultural space, where sport is experienced collectively rather than privately. That broad access is something that gives sport extra public value, and that is why it is important to protect it as something that belongs to everyone, not just those who can pay.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I disagree with the proposed amendments for a number of different reasons; first, because the terminology “free to air” is a complete misdescription. You have to pay £180 for your TV licence. It therefore is not free—that is, for the 88% of the population who choose to pay for their TV licence. The number of people who choose not to pay for a TV licence has been rising for many years. I say 88% because the latest figures published say that 12.5% of all viewers do not pay for a television licence.

Secondly, there is the question of competition. The essence of sport is competition. It is a very odd state of affairs whereby one says that broadcasters can compete but, by the way, we will restrict the competition in certain fields. We were debating in the previous set of amendments the question of assisting people who face disadvantages in society. Again, it is a very odd state of affairs whereby one broadcaster might be willing to pay much larger sums to broadcast a particular event, and in that process guarantee substantial funds to the underrepresented groups, but they are not allowed to because the event concerned is a crown jewel. So not only do you lose out because the broadcasting may be inferior; the funding might be inferior as well.

Thirdly, my concern is that the crown jewels were a product of a different technological era. Sport is now broadcast on a whole range of different platforms, and none of us in this Chamber knows what the platforms are going to be in five or 10 years’ time. Therefore, to decree in this piece of legislation that you can have certain sporting events, and I noticed that it suggested that they might be extended only on—I will use the jargon although I have indicated that I do not agree with it—a free-to-air basis, when multiple levels of platforms will probably be available in a few years’ time does not recognise the changing technological world in which we live and which the sporting world will have to adapt to.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 26. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, makes an interesting reference to free-to-air. As well as not knowing what platforms are going to be available, we do not know even what events there are going to be. The Olympics and Paralympics are going to change radically in the next few cycles, not least because of the impact of global warming. In quite good timing, there was an article this morning online on the Broadcast Sport website which talked about the changing world of events. Rights holders have more choices about where to go to put their events on, and they can ask for more money. It has been estimated that FIFA is going to make about £3 billion from organising the World Cup. Where is that money going to go? If you look at something closer to home such as Wimbledon, it puts a considerable amount of money back into the grass roots, which is incredible.

How people watch is going to change as well. The same article on Broadcast Sport was saying that even if you are watching a live event, you are probably checking your phone at least 10 times during that event to see what else is going on and what other comments are being made. We should be looking at how we make available these major sporting events. A number of people are disappointed that the Commonwealth Games is not going to be readily available, certainly on BBC TV. Everything that Team Wales does is going to be shown on S4C. There will be two hours’ live coverage a day, which is amazing—in Welsh, which is really important in terms of continuing to develop the Welsh language. I am sure there will be lots of other home country athletes competing who will be seen within those time slots. I do not think we can underestimate the importance of being able to watch the Games.

If we look back through history—we have been talking about this today—when the BBC covered the Sydney Paralympics in 2000, one of the decisions behind putting the Games on at teatime was so that schoolchildren could watch the Games. That developed a much better understanding of disability and the Paralympics. It got an age group of children watching sport that they probably would not have been able to see before. Whether it is free to air or however we define that, it is important that the public in the widest possible sense are able to watch these events in real time without spending some quite significant sums sometimes on monthly fees.

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[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

To fail to commit for the whole of this Parliament, when we have years to run, is disappointing, given the strength of the comments made by the Prime Minister and other Ministers in recent months. It is vital that the Government indicate by the time we get to Report whether they will legislate during this Parliament.

The public have longed to get legislation on to the statute book to protect people from being ripped off and turning up at many concerts, having paid a lot of money to bring their kids down from wherever they live, to find out that they have a forged ticket. That must be stopped. We must have tough legislation. That is why I share with the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, the need to legislate on this and why we were so pleased that the Government were willing to come forward with legislation that Parliament could consider. To know that this might not happen in the current Parliament would be deeply disappointing.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My noble friend emphasises the importance of tackling touts in a broad piece of legislation that does not cover just these events. Could he also emphasise, as my noble friend Lord Fuller raised, ensuring the obligation of those selling the tickets to maximise the controls to avoid touting?

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

I absolutely endorse that comment. As my noble friend, who has sat with me on this subject many times over the past five years, will know, ever since the Waterson report and many others, I have sought to table and introduce legislation—sometimes successfully—to give far greater clarity and visibility on tickets and to make sure that when people sell tickets, they follow the conditions that the organiser of the event has brought forward. If the organiser has set the condition that it should not be sold on the secondary market, it should not be. We have needed legislation to be introduced in order to achieve that.

I am absolutely tough on this subject, as the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, knows. I have the privilege of co-chairing the All-Party Group on Ticket Abuse. We have to take action on this. I really hope that, following the Minister’s response, she will be able to go away and consider before Report an absolute commitment that this Government will honour their word and introduce legislation not during this Session but during this Parliament.

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[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friend Lord Fuller in his expression of concern about the impact on small businesses. Sadly, many noble Lords will know me as a statistician who spends all his time looking at opinion polls and numbers in one direction or another and then commenting on them. I have spent inadequate time looking at the impact assessment, to which no reference has been made yet in these debates. Despite my apparent facility for statistics, all I can say about the impact assessment is that my head hurts. I found it incredibly difficult to comprehend page after page of low-impact, central-impact and high-impact estimates.

I will comment on one section. I could comment on others, but I address my comments overall. I find it very difficult to understand the impact that each of the different events would have in terms of positives and negatives, because they are aggregated in a very odd way. Page 41 of the impact assessment refers to the impact on street traders. It says:

“The low estimate reflects that 50% of traders will be able to continue to trade due to potential mitigations”.


Therefore, 50% of the traders will not be able to continue trading—and that is the low estimate. It goes on to say:

“The central estimate reflects the likelihood that 75% of traders in the affected area will be unable to trade while the provisions are in place. The high estimate serves as an upper bound where all traders operating in areas where prohibitions apply are unable to trade”.


We are therefore talking about a very substantial impact on businesses. We debated earlier the duration under which these provisions would apply, but we are talking about potentially every single street trader in those relevant areas. There are pages identifying the numbers of traders affected, whether it be at the Everton stadium, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, at Hampden Park in Glasgow or wherever you choose to name. There are numbers and numbers of street traders. That is their livelihood. If these events are running for several weeks, which is likely to be the case, they are losing their livelihood for that period.

I therefore share my noble friend Lord Fuller’s concerns about the impact that is identified—but identified in such a complex way that it is incredibly difficult to understand what we are talking about.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My noble friend has painted a picture and enumerated it with examples of sports stadiums. Under the Bill, there is to be a zone cast around the stadium where trading will be banned. But there are other provisions that have other events; for example, fan zones. Has my noble friend considered that fan zones could be in town centres? Town centres could be sterilised from trading. Has he considered that the net may be cast much further than just street traders, to other organisations too?

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that intervention and for identifying other areas. I tried to make it clear that I had taken only one element of one page of an impact assessment. It was on page 41. The impact assessment is over 90 pages long, with central, low and high estimates in all sorts of different categorisations There is no overall assessment of cost potential for any small or large business or the impact on the economy.

There is lots of explanation that tells us how wonderful it is going to be week in, week out, because of the benefits of sport. That is right—we have all recognised that—but there is an indistinct identification of the potential costs to some small and very small businesses, and we really should recognise the potential implications for all concerned.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, in many senses, we have outperformed a World Cup football squad tonight, because we have hit the target ahead of schedule for this first day in Committee, and we have done it without a hydration break.

Let me begin with the two amendments I have tabled in this group. It is an important group on which to end our debate, because it deals with the significant impact of the Bill on the restrictions on commercial interests, small as well as big, a point that my noble friends have rightly accentuated. My Amendment 40 seeks to create an exemption for charities from the advertising offences in the Bill, applying only where a charity is advertising wholly or partly for the purpose of promoting itself or a specified list of charitable services. I hope the Minister will be attracted to it. It is word for word taken from the provisions in the Birmingham Commonwealth Games (Advertising and Trading) Regulations 2021. If it was suitable then, why not for the new framework that we are seeking to set out?

Amendment 55 similarly relates to charitable exemptions. Paragraph 1(2)(d) of Schedule 3 to the Bill states that a “Trading activity” includes

“appealing for money or other property (whether for charitable or other purposes), with the exception of begging”.

That means that the offence of trading in a restricted trading zone applies to charitable fundraising but not to people who are begging. I wonder if the noble Baroness can explain why it has been drawn up in that way. Surely we do not want to restrict people from collecting for good causes where that can be done in a way that is consistent with the sporting event, particularly when we consider that charities historically have been exempted from the advertising offences when we have hosted sporting events of this nature in the past.

I have tried in doing that to follow the example that my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond has taken with his Amendment 39. As he said, that mirrors the approach taken in the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006, which provided carve-outs for community and educational uses, and I congratulate him on the way he set that one out.

I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, undersold his Amendment 38 a little. It concerns the impact of exclusive advertising authorisations on small and medium-sized enterprises and, as my noble friend Lord Hayward has done, it is worth drawing the Committee’s attention to what the Government’s own impact assessment says about this, because it is rather revealing. The final stage impact assessment, published by the department, acknowledges candidly that the provisions most likely to affect small and micro-businesses are the trading provisions of this Bill, which could prevent established street and market traders operating as usual in and around restricted zones. It recognises that there may be

“small disproportionate impacts on local traders relative to the broader business community”.

Therefore, it acknowledges that the greatest potential impact will fall on street traders in affected areas—as my noble friend Lord Fuller said, the people who add to and enhance the enjoyment of many people going to sporting events. The impact assessment promises that

“careful consideration will be given to how best to mitigate these impacts when making regulations on a case-by-case basis”.

That is a candid admission, but candour in an impact assessment is not the same as a legal safeguard in the Bill. Amendment 38 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, seeks to translate the Government’s own stated intentions from the impact assessment into an enforceable obligation. I think that one is worth the Minister looking at carefully in her response this evening but perhaps also as we consider all the issues we have looked at today between now and Report. I am grateful to noble Lords for all their amendments in this group.