Free-to-air Broadcasting: Cricket Participation

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Stephanie Peacock)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I am pleased to be responding to this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) on securing it. His passion for cricket was incredibly clear in the speech that he gave.

Cricket is one of our nation’s most beloved and cherished sports. Whether it is played at Headingley or in a village’s local cricket club, it builds character and brings communities together. Indeed, I visited Darfield cricket club in the village where I live last weekend for one of their community events. Barnsley is the home of Dickie Bird—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Indeed: hear, hear. Cricket is how he became lifelong friends with one of Barnsley’s other famous sons, Michael Parkinson. For those who want to hear more about Michael Parkinson’s views on cricket, he wrote a book on it and was a lifelong fan himself.

Cricket is an enduring part of our social fabric, played and loved by millions. It is right that we take the time to recognise the importance of cricket participation across the country. Grassroots cricket reaches a broad and diverse range of communities, with a third of recreational players coming from south Asian backgrounds, who otherwise make up just 8% of the overall population, a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra). I am also delighted to see the strong growth in women’s cricket, with participation in England and Wales up by 22% last year, as the Liberal Democrat shadow spokesperson, the hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke), outlined. It is also great to see the ECB youth programmes, such as All Stars and Dynamos, providing fun and engaging ways for young women and girls to participate in inclusive cricket.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) asked if I had ever played cricket. I remember the predecessor to the youth scheme from when I was at school, Kwik Cricket, and I also grew up with my grandad, who was a huge fan of Warwickshire county cricket club, in the West Midlands. I did have a go a few weeks ago when I had the pleasure of visiting the women and girls cricket festival at Sheffield collegiate cricket club, just down the road from my constituency in Barnsley, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake), to hear about the impact that grassroots cricket clubs have in their local communities, particularly on young women and girls. Of course, it was also a pleasure to cheer on England at Edgbaston back in July—I think the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton and I were at different matches.

I recognise that the hon. Member for Cheltenham has chosen free-to-air broadcasting as the subject of today’s debate, so I hope he will allow me to begin by touching on the wider investment into cricket participation, as it is essential to understand the position relating to broadcasting. The Government are committed to supporting cricket, from the elite game down to grassroots participation. The Government provide the majority of support for grassroots sport through Sport England, which annually invests over £250 million in Exchequer and lottery funding. That includes long-term investment to the ECB, which receives £11.6 million over five years to invest in grassroots cricket initiatives in local communities, to get people more involved in cricket.

I recently saw some of the great work that Chance to Shine does to provide opportunities for children to play, learn and develop through cricket, at its impact report event here in Parliament. I was delighted to see that in action myself when I visited the Chance to Shine project in my constituency, in Worsborough in Barnsley last year. Initiatives such as the ECB’s Chance to Shine, Premier League Kicks, the FA’s Comets and Premiership Rugby’s Hitz programmes are transforming young people’s lives through the power of sport, particularly those under-represented groups such as girls, those with a disability and those from ethnically diverse or lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

I am particularly proud of the Government’s recent commitment to invest £1.5 million in capital funding for two new state-of-the-art cricket domes. This investment, which is in addition to the funding that Sport England provides for the ECB to support grassroots participation, will see new domes at Farington cricket club in Preston and in Luton. These facilities will serve as community hubs focusing on women, girls and under-represented communities, and will form part of the legacy plans for the 2026 T20 cricket world cup.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns), as I am sure all hon. Members do, in wishing the England women all the best. I echo the points of the hon. Members for Glastonbury and Somerton and for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) on women’s sport. It was an absolute pleasure to be in Brighton this weekend to launch the Government’s women’s sports task force—in the interests of time, I will perhaps write to the hon. Lady to share some information about that.

The investment that I touched on aligns with our key strategic priorities on place-based policy, because Luton and Preston are poorly served by cricket facilities. In June, we announced that a further £400 million will be invested in new and upgraded grassroots sports facilities, which will remove the barriers to physical activity for under-represented groups, including women and girls; it will support more women and girls to take part in the sports that they love, particularly by ensuring that funded sites across the UK provide priority slots for them. That funding is in addition to the £1.5 million for the two cricket domes.

The hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup says that the previous Government invested £34 million, but they did not as the money was not there. I direct him to the parliamentary written question that he posed to me, which I answered on Thursday 3 September 2025. That commitment was simply unfunded, and I made that point when I appeared in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The Government are now working with sports and local areas to decide how and where the £400 million will be spent, to ensure that more people can access a wide range of sports in the places most in need of investment. Cricket will clearly be part of that conversation.

I will now turn specifically to the impact of free-to-air broadcasting on grassroots sports participation. Sport has the power to inspire people to get active. Evidence suggests that viewing infrequent major events, such as the Olympics, that feature a range of sports, including sports that appeal to the inactive, have a greater impact on participation than regular broadcasts of professional sports. Evidence also shows that those events need to be followed up by the right grassroots facilities and programmes to support people to harness that inspiration and get active.

Watching elite sports inspires young people to engage in participation. At the same time, broadcasting rights deliver revenues for sporting bodies, which are often invested in activities to promote physical participation. It is therefore important that governing bodies consider access to live sports and maximising much-needed revenue. It is important to get that balance right, and that balance is for each sport’s governing body to determine.

The balance is demonstrated well in cricket, where certain fixtures are behind a paywall, including live television coverage of test and one-day matches. However, some fixtures, including the Hundred competition, radio coverage of test matches, coverage of some T20 fixtures and highlights of test matches are broadcast by free-to-air broadcasters. The ECB has considered the impact of free-to-air and behind-a-paywall broadcasting over the years, and has proceeded with this balanced approach. Approximately 75% of the ECB’s £310 million annual revenue comes from the sale of broadcasting rights.

The ECB is a signatory to “Broadcasting of major sporting events: a voluntary code of conduct for rights owners” in the UK. Signatories of the voluntary code should endeavour to ensure that broadcasting coverage of all major sporting events under their control should generally be available in the UK through free-to-air television in live recorded or highlights broadcasts and that a minimum percentage of broadcasting revenue should be reinvested to support the long-term development of their respective sport. That is why, between January 2024 and January 2025, the ECB invested £77.5 million—37% of total broadcast revenues—into activities to support the recreational game and the development of the game.

The listed events regime is designed to ensure that such events of national significance are available to as wide an audience as possible by prohibiting exclusive broadcasting of the event without prior consent from Ofcom. However, listing an event in either group A or B does not guarantee that an event will be broadcast live or on a free-to-air channel. Rights holders are not required to sell live rights for listed events and free-to-air broadcasters are not obliged to purchase them, because all UK broadcasters are operationally and editorially independent of Government.

The list of events works well to strike an appropriate balance between public interest and income generation for sporting bodies and includes a varied cohort of events that have had an enduring popular appeal. The Government have no plans to review the list at this time, but we listen carefully to people’s representations and developments continue to be kept under review.

In closing, the debate has been a brilliant opportunity to discuss the continued success of cricket. I recognise the strong desire to see more cricket on free-to-air television, but I hope I have been able to set out how the Government are supporting that directly as well as the balance we seek between free-to-air audience reach and commercial viability. I thank the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) once again for securing the debate.