Sport: Football Clubs

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, some people think that football is a matter of life and death, but I can assure them that it is far more serious than that. The late great Bill Shankly knew of what he spoke. Like it or like it not, there is only one majority sport in Great Britain, and it is Association Football. I love swimming; the Olympic and Paralympic Games were awesome; golf, cricket, rugby and Formula One are all excellent; but only one sport dominates in Britain and that is the sport of soccer.

To go to any of the grounds, many of them now long gone, to walk through the small side streets that lead to Upton Park, to Filbert Street or to my home club at Molineux, the golden palace that is the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers, is to get a true sense of why football currently has this place. It grew up out of the communities that surround the grounds. You can feel it in the streets and in the hearts of the local people who have committed to their clubs since their initiation in Victorian times. There is now an undoubted divide—some may say it is a seismic chasm—between fan and club. It is a divide which has to be narrowed if not eradicated. Anything that we can do to draw the fan, the player, the manager and the club closer together has to be a positive thing and worth striving for.

I want to focus on two areas: safety and inclusion. The Sports Grounds Safety Authority has done excellent work for the last 20 years. It was born out of the tragic events at Hillsborough in 1989. One of the authority’s key recommendations has been to have fans involved in the local authority safety advisory group. There are two important points to make. First, this demonstrates that fans should be involved in every element of football, not just with the governance of the club but in every element of the spectator experience. Secondly, and crucially, sport is nothing without safety.

On inclusion, it is great if we can have champions for inclusion on the board of directors of Premiership and Football League clubs. Spectators should be involved and connected in key positions so that they can give their own personal perspective on how to make football a truly inclusive sport: a sport for everybody. When I was part of the leadership team at LOCOG, we could quite easily have ignored, avoided or minimised inclusion, but we believed that it was the way to make London 2012 the most inclusive and, through that, the most successful Olympic and Paralympic Games ever. Disabled people were involved in key leadership positions, along with people from black and minority ethnic groups, and women, through all the strata of the company. We set up a built environment access panel to focus on the accessible and inclusive build of all the stadia. We had an access, diversity and inclusion board to ensure that everything we did at LOCOG would be truly inclusive. Football is no different.

Now, as a non-executive at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I have the privilege of leading our sports inclusion programme. Working with the professional sports of cricket, rugby union and football, over the next 18 months we aim to make these sports more inclusive by some considerable measure for decades to come. Yes, we want to get more girls playing sport, yes, we want to get more BME people involved across the three sports, and yes, we want to get disabled people involved to ensure that stadia are physically and culturally accessible to everybody.

Football is at the heart of the community. One key way to reconnect and ensure that it holds that place by right and respect is by making the game, the club and the experience truly inclusive. We are working to have access reviews of all grounds, with spectators involved in the process. If we can make rugby, cricket and football accessible and inclusive, it will not just make for better sport, it will make for better Britain.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for initiating this most significant and important debate. There is also in the Labour Party paper that sits behind it a very interesting contribution that is surely worthy of keeping this discussion going for much longer than this evening.

I have one final caveat. When the left gets involved in sport, caution is required. I refer to an article in the Guardian in 2003 involving my club, Wolverhampton Wanderers. In the corrections column—it is unusual, I know, for there to be a typo in the Guardian—it said:

“In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: ‘Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.’ Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was ‘Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.’ Profuse apologies”.