Durham County Cricket Club

Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) for raising this important issue. He has always been a firm advocate for his constituency, his county and his region, and on this issue he is no different.

I have a deep love for the game of cricket. I played to county level as a teenager, and I know what cricket can do to unite communities. Cricket is a sport of which the UK can be proud. It is enjoyed by schoolboys and girls, and by spectators who may be immobile in their home. I am proud to be talking about such an important issue today.

From what we have already heard, we can agree that the situation surrounding Durham county cricket club is serious and has ramifications beyond the club. Nobody disputes that the club found itself in difficult financial circumstances, but it is fair to say that the rescue package offered by the England and Wales Cricket Board has satisfied few people. It will not be lost on people involved with the club that the ECB has said openly that it hopes that its action will serve as a deterrent to other clubs. Although the club’s immediate future appears safe, it has been stripped of the ability in the long term to generate additional revenue through prestigious test match fixtures under an ECB-mandated ban, depriving up to 15,000 people per match across the region of the opportunity to see English cricket at the very top level.

As we have heard, the knock-on effect to local businesses will be substantial. Businesses benefit hugely from the test series, which brings sell-out crowds and overseas visitors. Publicans and hotel owners have already remarked how their businesses will be hit due to lower footfall, at a time when people in the local tourism industry are already concerned about what will happen post-Brexit.

It is welcome that one-day and Twenty20 international cricket will still be played at the Riverside ground. I also welcome Sir Ian Botham as chair of Durham county cricket club, and I wish him the best of luck in restoring the club’s finances and rebuilding it as a leading force in county cricket. However, for many, that is scant relief for a club that has already built an enviable track record in cricket through a much-vaunted academy system and first-class infrastructure. It is highly valued. Despite being the youngest county club in first-class cricket, it has produced excellent former and current England test players, including Paul Collingwood, Ben Stokes and Keaton Jennings, to name a few.

The points deductions for all competitions mean that the club will start in the second division on minus 48 points, which will hamper its ability to be competitive in future as it struggles to keep its star players. In competing at the highest level and providing the ground and infrastructure required by the ECB to host test cricket in the first place, the club appears to have been a victim of its own success. Some may say that it overreached itself in order to compete with Lord’s, the Oval, and Headingley, but questions have been raised about how the ECB has encouraged clubs to blind-bid for test matches, while guaranteeing a quota for London grounds; ultimately, it has not been an equitable or transparent process.

Can the Minister push the ECB to be more open about how county clubs bid on test cricket, to ensure that it is available to everyone throughout the country and not concentrated at a few clubs? Can he also get assurances from the ECB that it is still committed to maintaining first-class cricket in the north-east of England and making it accessible throughout the country? Furthermore, can he also ask the ECB to detail how it came to decide on the severity of the sanctions taken against Durham county cricket club? Given that other first-class clubs have significantly higher debts than Durham did at the time, will the ECB ensure that rules to maintain the stability and competitiveness of the league are evenly applied in future?

As I said from the outset, we cannot ignore Durham county cricket club’s situation. We must have a sustainable financial model for our top-class cricket clubs. However, many top-flight clubs have high debts that would be unsustainable without test matches or wealthy financial backers, while others have experienced financial problems and required local authority backing to sustain them.

The ECB should take action to ensure a more transparent and equitable funding model for top-class cricket, to keep it accessible to all and fair to our clubs. I hope that the Minister has taken note of the many great points made in this debate, and I urge him to give answers that will be satisfactory to everyone here and those who enjoy Durham county cricket club.