Refugee Crisis in Europe

Debate between Mark Field and Damian Collins

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

I am afraid that I have very little time left. I just want to make a couple more remarks.

The Home Secretary was absolutely right to focus on the efforts that have been made by the Government in conjunction with the French Government in Calais. This is very important. Although the death of a three-year-old boy touched the heartstrings of everyone all around the world, it has not been the only death this summer. I represent the constituency where the channel tunnel enters this country. Migrants have died seeking to access the channel tunnel to get into this country. That cannot be allowed to continue. We have an obligation to protect our borders and to safeguard the lives of people seeking to enter this country. We need to ensure that the border and the frontier are secure. The Government have provided millions of pounds for proper security fencing, which has safeguarded the channel tunnel site and led to a massive reduction in the disruption of services, which has been a terrible blight on the people in the south-east of England and Kent throughout the summer. The fencing has also prevented people from breaking into the tunnel where they can not only lose their lives but endanger the lives of other people as well. That support, in conjunction with the extra policing effort from the British and French police forces, has been a huge step towards securing the site at Calais.

We all want to see proper humanitarian intervention in the camps as well. No one is advocating that we should let everyone who is at Calais into this country without any checks. If we did so, we would encourage greater numbers of people to make that treacherous journey to get to those camps, believing that simply arriving there is enough to provide them with instant access to the UK. That is not what should be done. There has to be proper processing of people on the sites to determine who are the genuine refugees and asylum seekers. Decisions can then be made about where they should go to seek asylum. That is the next necessary step.

[Mark Field]

I regretted the rather cynical approach of the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). I fear that it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that some ISIS sympathisers might well be infiltrating this massive flow of refugees with a view to obtaining asylum and becoming sleepers ready to agitate and foment terrorist activities in the west in the years ahead. That is not a fanciful or cynical idea that the Prime Minister has put into our minds. It is something that we should take very seriously, especially given the large numbers that will be coming onto these shores.

[Damian Collins]

I agree that we cannot ignore the security situation, which is why the Prime Minister was right yesterday to address the two things together. We cannot ignore the debate about what is causing this massive migration crisis. This refugee crisis has been caused by an out-of-control war and civil war in Syria and Iraq, which is displacing millions of people. There must be an international solution to stabilise the region and provide safe havens, but we must also consider what other tools we have at our disposal to limit the murder gangs and the genocide being committed by ISIL forces in the region.

We would be doing a massive disservice to the refugees and the people living in these countries if we refuse to consider whether using our armed forces and airstrikes in Syria as we have in Iraq is the only appropriate step to prevent likely murder, the likely displacement of even more people and even more misery. We must consider that alongside our efforts in the region, to provide safe haven in this country and to protect our borders. That is the broad strategy that the Government have set out and they are correct to have done so. I do not think that there is too much of a difference between the positions of those on both sides of the House, but we must consider seriously the efforts to provide more safe havens and ultimately, if necessary, the use of our armed forces if we are to provide a decent service and decent hope for the people living in these countries.

FIFA

Debate between Mark Field and Damian Collins

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is right. We are talking about a widespread, systemic failure of an organisation—widespread corruption—and the role of Jack Warner in this is key. He has said that he has handed to the FBI an “avalanche” of evidence, which includes references to Sepp Blatter himself. I think it is highly likely that Sepp Blatter will be asked to co-operate with both the FBI investigation and the Swiss authorities’ criminal investigation into the World cup bidding process.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

My hon. Friend’s concerns about the systemic corruption within FIFA have been known for some time, but does he share my concerns about why the Football Association decided in 2010 to bid for the World cup in 2018? If FIFA is rotten to the core, why was British football having anything to do with this matter?

[Damian Collins]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. It has been known for a long time that there are systemic problems within the organisation of FIFA. The England World cup bid, although it was commendable and carried out with a degree of vigour by all who took part, was always doomed to failure, largely for the reasons set out to the Select Committee by Lord Triesman: for their necessary support, members of the FIFA executive committee wanted to be rewarded in whatever way they saw fit. The allegation that Lord Triesman made about Jack Warner was that he solicited bribes so that he could personally profit from his role within football, which is also the case with most of the other allegations: people sought to profit personally from their positions in world football. The FBI has gone through that in some detail in its report.

[Mark Field]

I understand what my hon. Friend says: the bid was doomed to failure, which we can see even without 20/20 hindsight. The broader issue is why on earth the FA had anything to do with this organisation. It was well understood that FIFA was a corrupt organisation, and in a sense our own footballing organisation, which is not without its own problems, as we are well aware, is now complicit after trying to secure the 2018 World cup. Indeed, any talk now of a World cup being awarded to us at some point in the near future without cleaning the stables seems to be entirely wide of the mark.

[Damian Collins]

We have seen allegations of corruption going back for almost the entirety of Sepp Blatter’s presidency of FIFA, and before that, too. The process that concluded in 2010 for the rights to host the tournaments in 2018 and 2022 was on a previously unseen level. The Football Association may have been aware of some of the murky waters it was getting into in bidding for the World cup but nevertheless thought that it could make a good, strong case. The fact that England had the strongest technical bid but received only two votes is testimony to the fact that footballing grounds were not the key defining factor for the members of the executive committee who voted. It should also be noted that seven of the 22 people who voted on where the World cup should be played have already had to resign from their positions in world football due to corruption, and others are still under investigation.

Football Governance

Debate between Mark Field and Damian Collins

Thursday 9th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, in this important debate. We have heard a lot from both sides of the Chamber about the report and about people’s experiences of their local football clubs. It is clear that when football and football clubs fail, fans bear the cost, which is why we take the matter so seriously. Because football plays such a fundamental role in society—football in Britain is an expression of the country in which we live—it is right that Parliament take a view on some of the issues that are highlighted in the report. Those issues affect the whole of society and not simply the administration of a football club or a football competition.

[Mark Field]

I can understand why many in the footballing fraternity might think it is not necessarily Parliament’s place to opine in the way that we are doing. Not only do we have an interest on behalf of our constituents, but we have a fundamental financial interest. The British footballing industry was on its knees during the mid-1980s after a series of disasters, hooliganism and, ultimately, the Bradford City fire, which led to the Taylor report. A huge amount of public money has gone, and continues to go, into the game. That is one of the reasons why it is appropriate for Parliament to have a say on the matter.

[Damian Collins]

I agree with my hon. Friend. When we have foreign ownership and we do not know who the owners are; when we have a largely unregulated transfer market bringing billions of pounds into and out of the country, which is largely unknown and uncontrolled at its source; and when communities bear the cost of the financial failure of a football club and taxpayers bear the loss through unpaid tax bills, Parliament should take an interest. We do not seek to take away someone’s right to run their football club badly. That is beyond the control of Parliament. The report of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the debate have thrown up legitimate public interest concerns, however. The events of the past seven days demonstrate that the Football Association has an obligation to be the moral guardian of the game in this country, not simply the administrator of football.

I am sure that hon. Members support teams in their constituencies at all levels. I am a lifelong supporter of Manchester United, but one of the most exciting football matches I have ever watched was when Hythe Town beat Staines Town last season to qualify for the first round proper of the FA cup for the first time in its history. That was the first time in more than 50 years that a side from the Kent league had qualified. That is a single competition in which a club in the Kent league can compete alongside clubs that are competing in the Champions League. When multiple clubs are playing in multiple formats and competitions, there must be a single governing body that can have some oversight over the whole of football in this country. That can only be the Football Association, which is the guardian of the game in all competitions.

I praise the chairman of the Football Association, David Bernstein, for taking a stand on the John Terry affair. David Bernstein rightly accepted that the captain of the England football team has a position in public life in the country, and millions of sport fans look up to him as a role model. If his position is put into question by a criminal charge that has been made against him, although he is not guilty of that charge, while doubt remains about his role it is not appropriate for him to be captain of the England football team. If the manager of the England football team, Mr Capello, could not accept that ruling, it was right for him to stand aside. Although we might not have wished for the outcome of the past seven days—the removal of the captain and the manager—the course of events was inevitable. It was right for the Football Association to take a moral lead on the case, and I commend it for doing so. There are real financial concerns about the administration of football and clubs in this country, and a real concern about the lack of powerful oversight and intervention. There are many areas of concern, and hon. Members have touched on a good number. I will limit my remarks to three issues—club ownership, the football creditors rule, and player ownership and the player transfer market.

During our inquiry the fact that Leeds United was owned by a trust whose investors were not known was highlighted, together with the fact that Mr Ken Bates was employed by that trust to be chairman of the club, but did not know who the owners—the investors in that trust—were. No one in football in this country believes that Ken Bates did not always control that club. There is no other way in which he could suddenly have completed the purchase of it within days, without any kind of tendering process, and assumed ownership. He blamed the political obsession of the Select Committee, which was simply standing up for the legitimate interest of Leeds United fans to know who owned their club, for its interest in Leeds United. Many hon. Members have spoken about the role of the fit and proper person test. How can that test be applied if we do not know who the person is? That has been a recurrent problem for the football authorities, and shows that the test, which should function as a guardian, works only if the person who is being investigated is the owner, and if that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) and his Committee on producing such a detailed and comprehensive report on the state of governance in our national game. I am the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary football group, and I associate myself with the comments of other hon. Members about our late friend Alan Keen and all the work that he did.

I am a lifelong football fan, and in the past 20 years since the foundation of the Premier League, English football has undergone a massive transformation. Rather than continually attacking FIFA—I am glad that we have not really spoken too much about the national game, but there has a campaign against FIFA, particularly in the aftermath in December of the Football Association’s failure to secure the World cup, either in 2018 or 2022—we need to examine seriously the governance of the domestic game. There should now be a pledge from both the Football Association and the Premier League to put their houses in order urgently. True fans of the national game have become increasingly dismayed—as we have heard from hon. Members—at the cynical culture of illegal payments, opaque ownership and disregard for the grass roots of the game in recent years, as global TV money has dominated.

As has been said, half, perhaps slightly more, of all premier league clubs are now foreign-owned, and an increasing number of sides in the championship are attracting wealthy investors from overseas. However, as the report points out, a majority of clubs are still owned by a local business man on a philanthropic basis. Foreign ownership itself is not a problem if we have a robust fit and proper person test. Many will recall that Manchester City has not had an easy path in this regard. In 2007, they were bought by the disgraced former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), Portsmouth had no fewer than four owners in a single season before entering administration in 2009-10. Manchester United and Liverpool have both been subject to highly leveraged buy-outs from US owners. That model is highly risky and is not supported by the vast majority of fans or, indeed, by the Premier League.

There is a risk of chronic overreaching by clubs. I fear that the reckoning—the same can be said for much of the rest of the economy—is yet to come. Under all types of ownership model, this has led to a massive inflation in the cost of running a football club, which has usually impacted most profoundly on loyal, long-standing fans who find themselves priced out.

Asset stripping is highly detrimental. The separation of a football club from the ownership of their ground often spells long-term financial disaster. We have heard that that was the genesis of many of the problems for Wimbledon in 1991. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) is not here, but one of the lessons of the phenomenal success of AFC Wimbledon is that the franchising model need not necessarily be one to which we should aspire. It took eight long years—in the scheme of things, quite a short period—for Wimbledon to move their way right back up that pyramid into the Football League. If there are to be such instances as Milton Keynes—a new town with a large population that is not traditionally served by a nearby football club—I hope that that will be a lesson for the future. Outside the Football League, Darlington have high-profile problems, having fallen into administration only this season. They are now subject to a bid for a community takeover.

It must be acknowledged, as other hon. Members have, that on occasion the football authorities are faced with the choice between allowing a bad owner to complete a takeover, or a club simply no longer existing. Football League clubs tend not to disappear, with the exception of Aldershot 20 years ago. However, often when they lose league status oblivion follows very quickly—one thinks of Maidstone United, Scarborough and Rushden & Diamonds. With that in mind, the Football League, rather than the Premier League, has led the way in recent years in improving the good governance of football in this country. Many measures that began in the Football League have since been adopted across English professional game.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned the owners and directors test, so I will not go over old ground. On players’ wages and the issue of debt, average wage spending per club at the advent of the premier league in 1992-93 was £4.5 million, which was 44% of turnover. That has since risen in the past 20 years to an average of £1.3 billion—68% of turnover. Deloitte and Touche suggests that 60% would be a prudent number. Wage spending is at its most corrosive in the championship, where it amounts to 88% of average club turnover. Championship clubs together made an operating loss of £133 million in 2009-10, and their aggregate debt hit £875 million in summer 2010—£36 million for each club.

Premier league clubs generally make an operating profit until financing and player trading costs are taken into the account. By contrast, each division in the Football League—championship, league one and league two—has collectively lost money. In total, debt across the 92 clubs stands at a £3.5 billion. Those staggering numbers really do put in doubt the future sustainability of our game outside the premier league, with all its wealth in its current format. Football League clubs are a vital pillar in all our communities and they play a vital role in developing young players, not just for our national team, in a professional and competitive environment.

One problem is parachute payments, which make getting into the premiership such a strong financial inducement. The pressure on clubs to succeed is perpetuated by parachute payments, which are paid over a four-year period after a club is relegated from the premier league and are worth £48 million in total. The justification is that it provides insurance to promoted clubs to allow them to be competitive in the premier league. The downside is that clubs have to be in the premiership only one in every five years to have such untold wealth coming their way. It therefore provides a perverse incentive, providing artificial support and allowing clubs to spend money that they have absolutely no hope of raising naturally. That distorts and undermines the integrity of the championship and, by extension, the rest of the football pyramid. There is no provision forcing clubs to use parachute payments to honour existing player contracts, for example, or to pay down debt. They can instead be used, and often are used, to finance the purchase of new players in a winner-takes-all gamble to win promotion.

On financial sustainability, currently, all clubs must include divisional pay clauses in player contracts that indicate what the player would be paid in each division, if he were to play in them, in each term of his contract. A salary cost management protocol was introduced as long ago as 2003 for league two, limiting club spending on player wages to 60% of turnover. That limit was reduced to 55% this season. Clubs provide budgetary information to the league, which is updated as the season progresses. Any player registrations that take clubs beyond the threshold are refused. The protocol has proven successful, with the vast majority of clubs in the division spending less than 45% of turnover on players’ wages. League two’s operating losses fell from £9 million to £8 million in 2009-10. I am very pleased that league one clubs are shadowing the protocol this season, with a 75% limit of turnover in place, although at this juncture there are no sanctions for clubs. Next season, the threshold will reduce to 65% with firm sanctions in place. The limit will fall again in future years.

I understand that the Football League is in discussions with clubs in the championship regarding the introduction of UEFA-style financial fair play measures based on a kind of break-even model. That is much needed if championship clubs are to bear the brunt of some of the premier league-induced wage inflation without the requisite TV money to absorb it.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend mentioned the UEFA scheme. Does he share my concern that a report published by FIFPro this week, based on a study of players in the former Soviet republics in eastern Europe, showed that the salaries of 40% of the players it surveyed were paid not by the clubs that they play for, but by another party?

[Mark Field]

Yes, I share many of those concerns. I suspect, I am afraid, that at some level, even within our own professional game, there are similar problems.

Other hon. Members want to speak, but I hope that I have a few moments to say a little about sporting sanctions, which have caused considerable angst within the footballing community. The Football League pioneered the use of sporting sanctions, with a mandatory 10-point penalty applied to any club that enters administration. I strongly support the sanction, because it protects the integrity of the competitions by ensuring that clubs do not gain a competitive advantage, not just by going through insolvency, but through overspending in the years before that.

I understand why many fans are upset by the sanctions, particularly fans of clubs such as Luton Town and Plymouth Argyle, which have dropped rapidly through the divisions as a result of not just a 10-point penalty, but often more punitive penalties. In a sense, the new owners and loyal, much put-upon supporters find themselves left to pick up the pieces, although they are not responsible for many of those past misdemeanours.

We have not discussed agents’ fees to any great degree today, and there is also the issue of publication. The abolition of the minimum wage 51 years ago and the Bosman ruling, fundamentally, in 1995 have so massively tilted the power away from clubs to the players. It has gone from one terrible extreme of indentured play to the other, where the players have the whip hand. They have so much power that their agents can now extort huge fees. Although it is easy for the footballing fraternity —the FA, the premier league and even the Football League—to accuse agents of being at the core of all these problems, they often have a symbiotic relationship with agents, some of whom may be on their side, as the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) said specifically in relation to Blackburn Rovers, although that applies within many other clubs as well.

I am keenly aware that other hon. Members want to speak. Payments to HMRC have already been discussed by other hon. Members. On FA governance, as we know, the Football Association was created in an Olympian, Victorian age. In fairness to Oxford university, it won the FA cup a few times in the 1880s, which is probably why it still has representation to this day, but clearly this is not a sensible body to go forward as a 21st-century model for running our national game.

Given the commercial explosion over the past couple of decades following the emergence of the Premier League, which I have mentioned, one has to wonder how the FA in its current form can have any influence. In many ways, the Premier League has, again, been complicit in this and has colluded and been happy to allow the FA to take quite a lot of flack for elements of the governance concerns that we have addressed today.

The FA will need to change its culture to understand that it alone is there to enforce the rules and policy agreed by the whole game. The overall direction of football in this country should now have significant input from the Premier League and the Football League—not as a takeover, but as a partnership. Just think how much more successful even a relatively traditional FA could be with more input from the acknowledged day-to-day leaders in the leading tiers of global club football. A change in the culture will see the FA participate alongside the rest of the football family in creating policy with more of a focus on oversight, which is close to all our hearts.

Hon. Members have mentioned having more independent directors. Such directors would have an important role in examining the game’s policies at a board level. More power should be handed to them and to expert executives who will initiate the policies.

The Government are keen to avoid having an independent regulator for our domestic national game. Football must accept that, if many of these proposals are not acted upon, working together with footballing organisations, an independent regulator may be a sanction. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. This subject has probably been a headache for him, knowing that he is, in truth, much more of a professed player of cricket and rugby—more than just a fan—but I suspect that football takes up a huge amount of his time.

This report will play an important role as a stepping-stone to ensuring that the national game, which all hon. Members have close to our hearts, will thrive in the years to come.

Sport and Youth Crime

Debate between Mark Field and Damian Collins

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. Today’s debate on the effects of sport on youth crime falls, in some ways, in the shadow of last summer’s riots, and from his appearance yesterday on “Newsnight”, I know that the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice is up to speed with the subject. This debate is set against a longer-term concern about the rising problem of disengaged youth, which has disturbed Governments of all persuasions for decades, and a belief by many in the sporting community that sport can and does play a positive role in re-engaging young people and refocusing their lives.

Nelson Mandela has said:

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire… It speaks to youth in a language they understand. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down social barriers”,

and I want to use this debate not just to say that sport is good for its own sake, although many people believe that numerous benefits come with it. Studies of the benefits of youth participation in sport suggest that sport in and of itself is not enough to refocus or turn around the lives of disadvantaged young people and that what is required is a structured programme of support alongside the sporting activities. It is not simply a case of putting on ad hoc sporting events or creating new sporting facilities, but about how programmes are managed.

This is not simply a way of saying that Government intervention is necessarily a bad thing, or that Government agencies and public bodies are unable to deliver programmes that successfully intervene in young people’s lives. Support, including financial support, from the Government and their agencies is incredibly important to the success of such projects, but a good deal of new evidence suggests that sporting organisations and brands that have credibility in the eyes and lives of young people are often more successful in achieving the breakthrough that we all seek.

There has been a debate among people with an interest in sporting interventions in the lives of young people. People instinctively feel that such interventions are the right thing to do, and they have anecdotal evidence that they make a positive difference, but if there is any criticism, it is that there is perhaps a lack of robust data about exactly how they reduce criminal behaviour. I want to highlight some case studies that show the positive impact of such interventions on reducing crime and on antisocial behaviour and in improving the general well-being and educational performance of young people. The studies, of necessity in some ways, focus on relatively small numbers of people in relatively small geographical areas, and I would like the Government to consider some broader research that would seek to demonstrate the value for money and the performance of sporting interventions with young people.

I want to thank a number of sporting and other young people’s organisations that run such programmes and have provided information about them for the debate today—in particular, the Premier League, with its Kickz programme; the Manchester United Foundation; Charlton Athletic Community Trust; the Rugby Football Union; Sky Sports; the Sport and Recreation Alliance; First Light, which works in the arts; and Catch22. Their formal programmes are largely delivered by volunteers from the communities that they serve, and so I also want to thank the many volunteers who make them a success and the hundreds and thousands of people who work every day to deliver youth sporting projects, not just for disadvantaged young people but for all young people across the country. Their work is incredibly valuable and important to us all.

I want to look at four important areas that are of relevance to the debate: sporting programme interventions that help to reduce crime and antisocial behaviour; interventions that engage young offenders, both in young offenders institutions and after release; programmes for improving school attendance and attainment; and initiatives that help to rebuild young people’s self-worth.

We must consider costs; none of these programmes is delivered for free, although many are delivered with the support of the private and charitable sectors. We must also consider the costs of doing nothing, of maintaining the status quo. Based on 2010 figures, the National Audit Office has calculated that more than 200,000 criminal offences a year are committed by people aged between 10 and 17 at an annual cost to the country of up to £11 billion. It costs up to £100,000 a year to keep someone in a young offenders institution, and the number of 15 to 17-year-olds in prison has doubled over the past 10 years. During the five days of riots in August, 26% of the rioters were under 17, and 74% were under 24. There is not a male bias in the programmes and activities—they are open to boys and girls—but it is worth noting that 90% of the rioters were male.

First, on reducing crime and antisocial behaviour, one of the longest running and most successful projects is Kickz. It has been run by the Premier League for five years, has involved contact with more than 50,000 young people across 113 projects in some of the UK’s most deprived areas and has been supported by 43 professional football clubs. Kickz targets 12 to 18-year-olds, and its projects are football-led but include other sports and programmes designed to encourage young people’s awareness of health issues. The schemes typically take place three nights a week throughout the year, which is important in that they are frequent and have a very fixed structure. Kickz and the Premier League believe that one in 10 of the young people who initially attend the programmes as participants go on to volunteer, delivering the programmes for other young people, and they say that 398 people have gained full-time employment in some of the professional football clubs that have run the projects.

A report published last year by the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and New Philanthropy Capital, entitled “Teenage Kicks”, looked at a project run with Arsenal football club in Elthorne park in London and discovered that the investment in the project potentially created £7 of value for every £1 spent, with the savings coming from the reduced costs to the state of the reduction in criminal behaviour, with less police and court time needed to put people in detention. One participant said that he thought that 25% of the kids on the estate would be in jail without the programme, and he highlighted the nature of the problems that many young people face. He was someone who came home from school to find not a fridge full of food and people waiting for him, but nothing for him at all and an empty time in his day.

Interestingly, the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation also commissioned a report looking at the role of sport in gang culture. Young people involved in the research gave reasons why they might get involved in activities that would keep them out of trouble, and the top reason was that the activities would simply give them something to do. We should not underestimate the importance of that.

Returning to the study of the Elthorne park Kickz project delivered by Arsenal, it suggested that there had been a 66% reduction in youth crime within a one-mile radius of the project. Even taking into account other interventions—through community policing, for example —and after looking at national youth crime reduction trends for that period, the study’s authors thought it reasonable to suggest that at least 20% of that reduction was directly related to the project.

The Manchester United Foundation has delivered similar projects, with its star footballers working with youth workers and volunteers to deliver football-based recreational projects for young people in Manchester. Some of its research suggests a similar pattern of behaviour to that found in other research. It believes that in its Salford project there was a 28.4% reduction in antisocial behaviour during the session times when the foundation was working, and a 16.3% reduction in Trafford.

There are other smaller projects that in some ways work with people with more challenging needs, and I want to highlight—this has been highlighted in the Laureus report and by other people—the work of the Tottenham boxing academy. Members who know more about boxing than I do might take part in this debate, so I will not dwell too much on this. The project was designed for 14 to 16-year-olds. Physical impact sports—boxing and rugby—seem to be particularly effective when working with people from troubled backgrounds and certainly with those who have been involved criminal activity. There were 17 people on that project. Eight of them were known to have been offenders in the past, and based on normal intervention programmes, two thirds of those young people would normally be expected to reoffend within a year. However, in that instance, only two did. It is a small project, but it suggests that sporting projects help to re-engage people. They engage young people through a sport and then allow the youth workers delivering the project to engage with them about the other issues that they might have.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He has spoken a bit about curing those who have committed youth crime. Does he accept that prevention is also an issue with youngsters who might otherwise be attracted into criminality?

May I make a quick plug for the club that is probably nearest to where we are sitting now? About 300 yards away is St Andrew’s club at Old Pye street. The club has been around for 130 years, runs 12 football teams on a weekly basis and has an indoor gym. It works well with Westminster school, which has put a lot of money into ensuring that the gym is up to the highest standards, and it makes an impact in the vicinity. St Andrew’s club operates not too far away from what would otherwise be a quite troubled area of social housing.

[Damian Collins]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. St Andrew’s club is indeed a great success. I know that it has his support as well as that of previous lord mayors of Westminster, who have made it their annual mayoral charity. Its work is greatly appreciated by people in central London.

The project Hitz is delivered by the Rugby Football Union, the premiership rugby clubs and the police across 10 London boroughs, and has 750 participants. Again, the sessions are led by youth workers and run frequently, twice a week for 50 weeks of the year. In the Haggerston park area of Hackney, where the project was delivered, the fall in antisocial behaviour calls was calculated at 39% during the project.

Such projects often encourage people not just to take part in the project itself, but to take their interest into a more structured environment and perhaps into full-time participation in the sport. The Hackney Bulls rugby club recruited six new players from people involved in Hitz, and overall, the programme has taken 41 young people into full-time participation in rugby.

In my area, Kent, the Charlton Athletic Community Trust has done excellent work with young people over a number of years. Certain projects that have sought to re-engage young people and refocus their lives have caused similar falls in antisocial behaviour, including a fall of 35% in Aylesham and 59% in Buckland. The trust also does good work on alternative curriculum provision to re-engage young people with their studies, and I will come to that in a moment.

Good work can be done in the community to help direct young people away from the path of criminality, as my hon. Friend highlighted. There is also some evidence on work being done to engage young people in the prison environment, often at low cost, as many prisons and young offender institutions have good sporting facilities, and it is a question of bringing in the right people to engage young offenders. Those programmes use sport to help bridge the gap between life inside an institution to life outside it afterwards.

A project called 2nd Chance has worked in the Ashfield young offenders institution. Drawing on professional sports clubs around Bristol, such as Bristol Rovers and Bristol rugby club, it has worked with 400 offenders a year and is a low-cost provision. It has been calculated that, if just one offender with whom the programme works is kept out of prison, that will pay for the delivery of the entire programme for a year. When we consider that the current reoffending rate for young offenders in Ashfield is 76%, it seems a risk worth taking.

As part of the study of its work, 2nd Chance has asked that it and groups like it have access to information about reoffending rates for people who have engaged in such programmes, to demonstrate whether they offer a value for money return. At the moment, it is difficult for those groups to access that information, as all sorts of data protection issues rightly surround information that can be traced to individual offenders. However, could general information be given to make that link and demonstrate the payback of such projects? The project within Ashfield was delivered for less than £80,000 in a year of operation and worked with more than 400 young people.

The Rugby Football Union has a programme called Try for Life that has worked with young offenders in numerous institutions, and a programme called Prison to Pitch that trains young people in prison to play rugby and then helps them gain placements with rugby clubs outside prison. As with the programmes run by the Premier League, individuals who do not go on to work within the sport go on to volunteer to help deliver programmes for other young people.

School attendance and attainment is particularly relevant to a case from my own constituency that I want to cite: the work of the Charlton Athletic Community Trust in New Romney. It is worth noting in the data from the riots that 30% of rioters were persistently absent from school. In New Romney, the Charlton Athletic Community Trust has taken over alternative curriculum provision, a mainstream piece of provision offered across the country. Charlton Athletic won the contract to deliver it. It uses its role as a football and sport club to re-engage young people, but it also delivers studies in maths and English, as well as a broader basic curriculum.

The project opened in New Romney in September. I attended, along with my hon. Friend the Minister for Sport and the Olympics. During the two or three months since it started, the rate of attendance of the young people involved has improved significantly. The project gave me statistics. The attendance rate of one of those young people went from 1% at their previous institution to 55% now. Another student’s attendance rate went from 26% at their previous institution to 100% now.

Such projects help to reduce antisocial behaviour, as some statistics demonstrate, and a broader, fuller study by the Government would be welcome. I have cited examples showing how they can intervene successfully in the lives of young people in prison and re-engage those who have had trouble at school with their studies. There is also much to be said about the projects’ ability to help rebuild young people’s sense of self-worth and make them feel happier in their working and school environments.

The charity Greenhouse does a lot of work across London. It was supported by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their wedding guest list and by The Times’s Christmas appeal. In the research based on its 41 full-time sports and performing arts projects across London, some things that stand out strongly are improved school attendance, improved timeliness for the projects and increased happiness in school. An evaluation commissioned by Greenhouse from external valuers showed that 87% of the young people with whom the charity worked reported being happy at school as a result of the new programmes in which they were taking part, compared with just 52% before the start of the programme. Those might be softer measures of improvement, but they are important when we consider that we are dealing with people who are, on the whole, quite disengaged from their environment and from formal learning areas and practices.

The Manchester United Foundation calculated that its project had worked with 500 young people. Of those 500, seven got jobs with Manchester United, 14 were recruited as volunteers, 30 gained accreditation in music and IT production projects, eight completed football level 1 and 2 qualifications, 12 won boxing tutor awards and 30 became junior football organisers. That is not a bad rate of return for engagement with 500 young people, and the project was delivered at relatively low cost, for less than £50,000 a year.

In conclusion, I ask the Government to consider the issues raised by my remarks and the case studies that I have mentioned. The Government should shift their priorities generally—they have already signalled a shift—so that they do not just increase participation in sport for good but consider how targeted intervention by sporting projects can help change the lives of some of the most hard-to-reach young people. They should consider how to create a unified approach to delivery across Departments. The work touches on the role of the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Education and the Department for Communities and Local Government, all of which have some interest in the delivery of such projects. A unified approach is needed, probably with a lead Minister to take responsibility for and an interest in how those projects are delivered.

There should be a review of some of the rules and regulations about the delivery of sporting projects on the ground. Many sporting clubs cite problems with Criminal Records Bureau checks and other forms of bureaucracy that make their work more difficult. We should certainly look at that. All the national sporting bodies should prioritise the development of coaching qualifications and the training of people to help deliver projects.

To return to what I said at the beginning of the debate, a good starting point would be to build on the work that is being done by many sporting and charitable organisations, take up the research that they have done, complete a fuller study and analysis of the benefits and the rate of return from this type of intervention, and then consider the potential basis of further Government support via Government agencies, local government and the police—through crime prevention strategies—to make this a fuller programme for the country. The need to re-engage with young people is strong and evident, and the riots over the summer demonstrated that clearly to us all. Through the fog of this despair, there is evidence of some incredible and successful interventions that are turning around the lives of young people. We should draw from that and build for the future.

Local High Streets

Debate between Mark Field and Damian Collins

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on his excellent speech. I now know considerably more about Kingswood than I did about 45 minutes ago. He clearly has a great passion for the area he represents and has done a tremendous job. He made an interesting speech, which I hope other hon. Members will develop. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) has just left his seat. I know he did not wish to say too much about Boris Johnson, given that it is Christmas. I am not sure whether he meant that Boris Johnson was either the Messiah or a very wise man. No doubt he will have the opportunity to tell us at some later stage.

My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) made an interesting speech. He developed an issue to which I had not given much thought—dealing with long-term voids in high streets to boost the private rented sector. My experience as an inner-city MP is that nothing is more important than a vibrant and stable residential population to ensure a boost for such areas.

Many Members may wonder on what basis I am speaking. Are there any high streets in Cities of London and Westminster? There are many of the most traditional high streets, such as Cheapside, in the City of London, where one of the largest shopping developments in central London in recent years has opened. Oxford street was once Westminster’s high street, though it perhaps has more profound resonance now. Other residential shopping areas can be found in Marylebone high street and Elizabeth street. I accept that those two are in the relatively wealthy areas of Marylebone and Belgravia, but their vibrancy and success are due fundamentally to having a relatively stable, single landowner, which makes a big difference to the choice of shops available. To an extent, the Howard de Walden and the Grosvenor estates in each of those cases—the same applies to the Portman estate, which does a tremendous job around Edgware road—have realised the importance of variety in a local shopping centre. Although I do not know all the statistics, there is little doubt that there has been an element of having loss leaders, allowing particular shops to pay considerably lower rates or to get a rate rebate.

I accept that that is not necessarily a panacea that can apply throughout the country. I am lucky in that there are great pockets of wealth in my constituency. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the drab Marylebone high street that I first walked down only 25 years ago, when I worked in London between school and university, has been transformed. It has become much respected, with people coming from beyond London to shop there, even though it is less than half a mile from Oxford street. Having traditional, independent restaurants, bookstores and small specialist food stores such as bakeries and cheese shops, makes a tremendous difference.

[Damian Collins]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one interesting idea in the Government’s Localism Bill and White Paper on local growth is whether councils around the country might take on the role of some of the big landlord estates in London? They could try to stimulate economic growth in their areas by supporting certain types of business, which might in turn lead to other business growth.

[Mr Field]

I agree. That would be a useful way forward. One difficulty is often the disparate freehold ownership on a lot of high streets. I certainly do not think that there is a need for a centralised plan, but there needs to be a vision that goes beyond simply ensuring that tenants are paying rent this year and next, and the one after. There needs to be a vision for 15 or 20 years. We always need to take into account what my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury rightly said, which is that it is hard to put a finger on how high streets will look in 20 years’ time. They have certainly changed every decade since the 1940s, due to different shopping habits.

I am sorry that the two Members representing suburban London seats who were here earlier have gone. There are specific problems in suburban London, which I would not wish to put to one side. I have a great passion for London as a whole and recognise that there are certain advantages in representing a very central London seat. In Orpington, where my wife’s family came from, and in Harrow, there are some fundamental problems, partly as a result of out-of-town shopping centres. A slight irony of the recent snowfall is that many people have not been able to get out in their cars to do that sort of shop, and have therefore been forced back to see the offering in their own high street.

There are no easy solutions to all this. One possibility is to have a single landowner who can perhaps make an area special, look at flagship stores and, where possible, consider loss leaders.

I want to touch on business improvement districts. In fairness, they are greatly to the credit of the previous Labour Government, who introduced elements of the legislation, and they have been a great success. In my own constituency, the New West End Company, which operates around Regent street, Bond street and Oxford street, has been a great success. We have seen various other business improvement districts around the Paddington Basin area, and demand is increasing. However, the money that has been spent by business improvement districts tends to be focused on aesthetics and on increasing the number of policemen to ensure that shoppers feel safer and that shops are less subject to crime.

With local authorities facing difficult financial settlements not just for this year and next, but probably for the rest of this decade, I worry that this should not be seen just as a matter of substitution. I encourage town centres to consider going down the business improvement district route, although they will still see money being taken away by way of what should be the normal local authority responsibility. We need to bear that in mind, as we do supplementary business rates.

I want to mention supermarkets, which have been touched on by other hon. Members. It is easy to criticise supermarkets. I have stood up for them previously in this Chamber, and I think that they do a tremendous job in many ways. They provide phenomenal choice that was unseen a decade or two ago. None the less, I accept what the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) said—I think he referred to an oligarchy of sorts being adopted, although I cannot remember how he phrased it. I also worry that the grocery ombudsman route may not be an entirely sensible way forward.

If we are to have a vibrant shopping centre, a flagship supermarket is almost always needed. Waitrose is in Marylebone high street in my constituency; we also see various Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores, particularly some of the smaller ones. However, I would like to see newsagents playing a part in the high street, for example, and I would like supermarkets to show some responsibility by, for instance, not selling newspapers. That would ensure that newsagents within 50 or 100 yards of the supermarket had a chance to thrive. If there was a long-standing fishmonger nearby, let us hope that the local Sainsbury’s or Tesco would not sell fish. In other words, we need to ensure that people do not have to do all their shopping in a particular Sainsbury’s or Tesco—an all-singing, all-dancing supermarket—at the expense of the smaller stores. That would present the supermarkets, which do a tremendous job, with an opportunity to show a certain amount of self-restraint, rather than having to be bossed around by an all-powerful ombudsman. Thank you, Mr Gray, for allowing me to speak. I look forward to other contributions to the debate.