Football: Safe Standing

Marcus Jones Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

Safe standing has been a somewhat vexed issue for many years; it actually predates the times that hon. Members have talked about. I think back to when I first started getting interested in and following football. Sometimes we do not know why we have done some things, but I decided to become a fan of Coventry City. That was around the time in 1981 when the late, great Jimmy Hill, who was Coventry’s chairman, decided to change the Highfield Road ground in Coventry from being mainly all standing to an all-seater stadium. That was seen as revolutionary at the time. Sometimes we do not like revolution that much in this country, and that decision was quickly found to be very unpopular. The upshot was that the all-seater stadium lasted for approximately two years.

I commend to the Minister a very interesting report released by the University of Leicester’s sociology department in 1984, which actually looked into that experiment and discussed it at some length. While things have moved on greatly since that time, some things in that report are extremely pertinent today. However, we all know the events that took place following that decision and the deeply distressing disaster at Hillsborough in 1989. Although I do not want to go into the detail of that, when we look at the context for this debate, we need to look carefully at the history and why we went to a system of all-seater grounds in the top two leagues in 1994.

I have been watching football for 30 years and I know that, back then, at many grounds that were all-seater, most people sat down, but there is a challenge now. I take my son to watch Coventry City—some people would think that is a good thing; he seems to enjoy it. When I took him to an FA cup game against Arsenal when he was only eight, he spent 90 minutes standing on a seat because we could not see, and he would not have seen a thing if he had not done so. We went to Brighton this year in the FA cup, and he stood for another 90 minutes. Fortunately, he is nearly as tall as me, which is not that tall, and he managed to see.

The point is that there are large sections of our football grounds where people choose to stand in seating areas, and we should consider that in the context of this debate. I ask the Minister to reflect on that choice that people are making and on whether, as many hon. Members have said, there is another way of doing things, given the more modern technology and the advances that we have made in football over the period from 1989, the time of the Hillsborough disaster, to where we are now.