Football Governance (Supporters’ Participation) Bill

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Friday 4th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

I certainly will. Jimmy Mizen was, sadly, murdered in a street attack. His mother and father, Barry and Margaret, have set up the Jimmy Mizen Foundation, which aims to create community safe havens in which young people can seek refuge if necessary. Millwall football club and Charlton Athletic both support the charity, and there will be an event at Millwall tomorrow. I will be there in my usual seat in the stands, supporting Jimmy Mizen Day and cheering on Millwall football club, which is not doing too badly this season.

As I have said, some of us have heavier crosses to bear with the sides we support, but we are no less passionate about them. I could not change my football club. Charlton Athletic’s training ground is in my constituency. Millwall’s training ground used to be there, too, but it has moved to Lewisham now. The team’s fortunes dipped when it moved there, but they seem to have picked up now. People were surprised that I remained open about the fact that I was still a Millwall fan and they asked me, “Won’t you switch to Charlton because it’s the local club?” Fans cannot switch like that, and even if they attempted to do so, they would lose the respect of other football fans. It is imprinted on people from a young age. Fans are not like any other customer. They are passionate about their clubs, and their relationship with them lasts a lifetime. That needs to be stressed to football club owners and to the Premier League.

Stadium occupancy rates are often mentioned, and those for weekend premier league matches are very high. Last season’s annual report states that the occupancy rate was nearly 96%, so the grounds are full. The Premier League is a huge commercial success. It pays £2.4 billion to the Exchequer, and its gross value added is £3.4 billion. It has become an enormous success and one of our greatest exports. In the next three-year deal for its domestic rights, it expects to receive in the region of £6 billion. The international rights will take that figure up to more than £8 billion over three years. That money will go to the Premier League and British football, so it is an enormous success, but, with those sums of money floating around, it is essential that we do not lose sight of what exactly created those football clubs in the first place and why they exist today: the communities in which they are based and their fans.



There are many examples of such communities coming together to protect their football clubs. At the moment, Blackpool’s is fighting hard to get recognition from the owners to protect their football club. One of the greatest examples is that of Portsmouth. The club was in the FA cup final only a few years before it went into receivership and had to be saved by the local community and local fans. People came together to save a great football club, which has some of the most passionate football fans to be found anywhere in any country.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that for every AFC Wimbledon, FC United of Manchester or group of fans who have refused to let their club die, great and noble clubs such as Clydebank exist no longer? It would have been far better if clubs such as Clydebank had had fan representation on its board, because it would not then lead to people going through the agonising process of defending their clubs. The process would be much more automatic, and we would be able to keep the full gloriously rich panoply of names in English and Scottish football.

[Clive Efford]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I will come on to some of the recommendations of the expert working group, which may address his point.

When football clubs are in distress, we can see how the communities have rallied round to save them. Sadly, Hereford United went out of existence for a short period, but it has been recreated because the fans, refusing to let the name die, were determined to save their club. Let us look at the success of Swansea City, 20% of which is still owned by the fans. Where would it be if the fans had not stepped in to save it? Wimbledon—what a tragic story—was let down badly by the football authorities. The community’s club was stolen away from them, but the way in which they have recreated a club, AFC Wimbledon, to thumb their noses at football’s ivory towers is fantastic.

My Bill is not about giving the fans a veto over what goes on at their clubs. I am not suggesting for a moment that the involvement of football fans is somehow a panacea for all the problems in football. There have been times when football clubs have gone into receivership even though the fans had all along cheered every decision that put the club into financial jeopardy until the receivers turned up and locked the doors. Fans cannot provide the solution to every problem, but they care passionately about their club and they can be an early warning system to alert authorities to existing problems in our clubs, particularly such as those at Hereford.

More recently, clubs have come into conflict with their fans in ways that might have been avoided if there been better communication or if the fans had had a voice on the board when decisions were made. Liverpool comes to mind, as does the Football Supporters Federation’s “Twenty’s Plenty for Away Tickets” campaign. Because of the pricing of tickets at Liverpool, 10,000 fans walked out in the 77th minute to say to the club, “We’re not putting up with this”. That brought about a change, but the conflict might have been avoided if the fans had been at the table when the board discussed ticket prices and the board had put its views to the fans. A more ridiculous example happened at Leeds, where a “pie tax” has been added to the tickets. When people pay for a ticket, they get a voucher for what is probably a very unhealthy pie, and that has been ridiculed. I wonder whether the board would have come up with such a marketing ploy if it had talked to the fans. Similar things have happened at Hull City, Cardiff and elsewhere that I could go into, but I will cut through that because we are short of time.

I want to talk about the expert working group. I welcome its recommendations as far as they go. They will require football clubs to meet fans at least twice a year so that the fans can air their views, but that is not enough. There needs to be a regular dialogue and exchange of information. This does work in clubs already, so there is nothing to fear from fan representation on the boards. The Government should look at what the expert working group says about social investment tax relief to make it easier for bona fide fans groups to take over their football clubs. I wonder why we are saying that we will help fans to take over their clubs only when they are in financial difficulties. If the fans are good enough to have a stake in their clubs in the bad times, they must be good enough to be able to buy shares in the good times, if they wish to do so.

We need to ensure that fans are represented. The expert working group says that the FA must address the lack of representation of fans at the higher levels of the game. I want to hear from the Minister what the Government intend to do about that.

My Bill, as I said, is not a panacea that would solve every problem in football. One of the things that is fundamentally wrong in football now is that fans are not being spoken to and they are not being listened to. Where they are, and where clubs encourage it—Millwall has a fan on the board, who is elected by the fans and is party to all the discussions that go on around the table—that does not create a problem for the club. Where representation exists, the relationship between the fans and the club is improved, as is the exchange of information between them.

My Bill would do three things. It would require the fans to set themselves up as a single bona fide body. I have suggested that that should be an industrial provident society, but that can be discussed. That body would be responsible for electing two members to the club board— two members so that they are accountable to one another— and they would report back to the fans about the board’s discussions. They would need to be trained and taught the responsibilities of being a board member—for example, when they may or may not divulge confidential information when they report back. Where the board is larger, there should be a minimum of two fans or up to 25% of the board, whichever is the greater number.

That bona fide fans body would be empowered to buy shares when there was a change of ownership. I have been advised that in the City that is recognised as occurring when 30% of shares or more are on offer, so when 30% of the shares were exchanged or sold, the fans would have 240 days in which to buy up to 10% of those shares which is 3%.

Those are the three elements of my Bill—it would put fans around the table when the issues that affect them are being debated, and allow them, where they have the will to do so, to take a stake in their club. Clubs have nothing to fear from that. At a time when football is increasingly seen as a global business, it is important to recognise the people who identify with that club and who give it its distinctive character, which comes from the community and has sustained that club for generation after generation. Those people are the fans, and it is time we gave them the recognition they deserve.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on bringing a first-class Bill to the House. It is truly bizarre that here we are, in the most exciting ever premiership season, when the reputation of football and football clubs has never been lower, and there is a profound disconnect between what is happening on the pitch and what is happening in the boardroom. Much of this is to do with the ownership of clubs.

The ownership of football clubs may not be as it was once perceived in the glorious sepia days of jumpers for goalposts, when northern clubs would be owned by some Alderman Foodbotham out of Peter Simple, with his iron watch chain, who was a sort of philanthropic local industrialist. Fulham, without doubt the finest football club in west London, was owned by Deans Blindmakers of Putney, and Chappie d’Amato was the chairman. There was a wonderful tradition with those people. Nowadays, people from the middle east and America, consortia, strange groups miles away, distant people own football clubs. I do not see that as ownership. They may have the shares, the keys to the boardroom and an executive car park, but that is not owning a football club. The ownership of a football club is in the hearts of the community and the fans. That is why my hon. Friend’s Bill is so incredibly important.

Football is not a fad. A football club is not something that can be picked up and put down. A football club is not something that just happens to be a feature of a local area. It is a part of the community. It is the living, breathing reality of a local community. When one sees clubs such as Brentford and Charlton putting up candidates in local elections and the degree of local concern when a club is under threat, one realises that this is more than just sport. This is about our culture and our community. Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that many people in your constituency are West Ham fans. I am sure that you are a regular on the terraces of Upton Park. You are probably one of the better behaved ones, I hasten to add.

The important thing about my hon. Friend’s Bill is that we need to reconnect the people, the fans and the communities with the clubs. Sadly, that will not happen organically. It will not fall as a gentle rain from heaven. We need some legislation. That is why the right to buy shares—I never thought that I, an honest socialist, would ever plead for the right to buy, but I do in this specific case only—and the mandatory placement of fans on boards are things that we have to go ahead with. Alistair Mackintosh at Fulham meets Danny Crawford and the Fulham Supporters Trust on a regular basis. That practice is good where it is good, but it is not mandatory or statutory and it needs to be.

I could speak for so long on this subject, but I will not because others wish to speak. I simply implore the House, I plead with the House, to support my hon. Friend’s Bill. It could be the saviour of football—the game that we invented in this country and gave to the world. It is now seen in a pretty poor light because of the great disconnect. We have an opportunity to regain that supremacy, that primacy and, above all, that link, and to make a reality once more of the working man’s ballet, representing our local communities.