Football Governance

Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Tom Greatrex (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will endeavour to do as well as the right hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) in keeping to time.

I declare an interest as a founder of the Fulham Supporters Trust, which was long before I ended up in this place. I have knowledge and awareness of the issue from being involved in and running that trust, with a huge amount of support and guidance from Supporters Direct, which is a superb organisation that should valued. I hope that when the football authorities respond to the Minister, they will properly have taken into account its proposals on licensing, which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) dealt with in some detail—I will not repeat them. I unashamedly stand here to talk about the interests of supporters. Whatever the future licensing regime, it is imperative that it involves and incorporates the views of supporters, who are in many cases the lifeblood of the clubs in which they are involved.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), and the other Committee members on the report; it is fantastic. He is obviously chairing a very high-profile Committee, which has lots of other issues to deal with. The report is at least as important as—if not more important than—anything else that the Committee has done this Parliament. It is crucial that we deal with the issue, and I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to Alan Keen. I knew him for a long time before I entered the House; I used to see him when Fulham played Middlesbrough, and he was unfailingly cheerful even after we had beaten them. His work for the all-party group on football in years gone by helped to develop the awareness in Parliament of some of the issues in football ownership that have led us to where we are now, so it is absolutely right that those tributes have been paid.

There have been ownership issues at many clubs. I was thinking earlier that we could go through a list and find very few that have not had concerns about ownership to deal with at some point, but it is striking that, with very few exceptions, most have survived. I contend that in many cases they have managed to do so due to the involvement of supporters, not all the way through in running the clubs, but because they have got involved when everyone else has walked away. We see that again and again through football history. The most prominent early example of that is probably Charlton Athletic in the early to mid-1980s, when they were effectively left homeless and nomadic. It was the fans’ involvement in the Valley party and everything else that eventually got them back to the Valley and into a sustainable position where they became a very renowned community club, as they still are, even though they have fallen a couple of divisions on the field.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

Another club in a similar situation in 1986 was, of course, Middlesbrough, which was fortunate enough to have a very wealthy supporter in Steve Gibson, a local fan and local businessman, who is highly regarded across all the English football leagues. Has my hon. Friend looked at paragraphs 43 and 44 of the Government’s response to the report? There are quite a number of points of consensus across both sides of the House on Supporters Direct’s proposals, but the real issue is whether Supporters Direct has adequate funding to ensure that there is a network to help supporters’ trusts in future.

[Tom Greatrex]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I have raised it with the Minister in relation to Supporters Direct’s previous funding difficulties. It does a huge amount of valuable work and we should be able to come up with a way to enable it to continue its work supporting and guiding supporters’ trusts, often when clubs are in crisis and trusts are seeking to maintain them at very difficult times.

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[Damian Collins]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that it is a good thing for supporters to have that interest, but if they do not control the club, and the controlling interest lies with another party, they should have the right to understand who that is, and the source of the finance. That is crucial. I made some inquiries of the Football League about the ownership of Coventry City. It transpired that it is owned by an investment trust—a private equity firm. It is not known who the investors in that trust are. The Football League had to concede to me that to this day it does not know who owns the club.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point and a valid argument. I want to praise the Government, who talk in points 40 to 42 of their response about allowing supporters to have representatives on club boards, but there would be a trigger point. What type of trigger point would he see as tenable, in allowing more clarity and transparency in club boards by allowing the fans in?

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I shall come on to my views on the solution to the problem, but many clubs in Coventry City’s position will have a management company—a holding company that runs the club—and a supporters’ trust may have a seat on that board. However, that is just a holding company. The ownership of the club is somewhere else completely, and that management company may not know who the owner is. It may deal with a businessman who represents the owners, but it may not know who the owners are.

I recently had conversations with a businessman who was involved in running Sheffield Wednesday from the moment it went into administration through to the period when it was taken over by Milan Mandaric. He described a series of potential investors coming forward, some of whom used fake names and identities. When non-disclosure agreements were signed, it turned out that the principal investors were based in the far east and were not who they originally seemed to be. The impression is created of a murky world where no one is quite who they say they are. People running clubs in this country who seek to sell them to a foreign investor to raise funds for the club may not know who they are dealing with.

When I wrote to the Football League about Coventry City, I had a reply from Nick Craig, the director of legal affairs, who made a telling point:

“We have for some time expressed our concerns as regards investment vehicles (often offshore) and the issue of the lack of transparency surrounding ownership of them. Indeed we have previously sought assistance from DCMS and HMRC in that respect but to no avail. We are left in a position where we can regulate and seek to require clubs to comply but are reliant on self-declaration with no official means of independent verification.

That the proliferation of offshore investment trusts means we will never always be 100% certain in all cases but we continually assess the appropriateness of our rules in a changing environment.”

There is not very much comfort there for any football fans concerned, because the Football League is saying that if a company is registered offshore and it buys a British football club, it does not have the authority or power to know who owns the club.

The Select Committee report contained a request to the Government for a retrospective examination of the Leeds United case. That would require powers beyond those of the football authorities to inquire what was the source of the finance to purchase the club out of administration, how much Ken Bates paid for it and where the money went, so that we could determine who controlled the club’s source of finance, even if it was impossible to determine who the owners were. The source of finance will take us to the owner of the club.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford]

That is absolutely right. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. What we want from governing bodies, who support Supporters Direct, is not just to hold meetings when fans can investigate decision-making processes at their club, and the decisions made, but the opportunity to interrogate the board members. If they identify something that is going wrong, they should have the means to raise that at the most appropriate level. We are not asking just for a fan on the board, or for a meeting every year when fans can come along and ask questions. We want to know what the governing bodies will do and how they will respond when fans ask questions and receive answers that cause them concern. If we do not empower fans, and allow them to investigate the sort of things that my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn described about Blackburn, how will we ever have an early-warning system? The fans are the early-warning system to tell us what is going wrong at a club.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

Guisborough Town football club in my constituency—I am its president—has an excellent supporters group network. I am also a fan of Middlesbrough football club, which has a disabled supporters association, an official supporters club, and Middlesbrough Supporters South, which organised an event last night with parmos provided to make sure that exiled Teessiders had some food and fare after the Sunderland game. For all those good intentions and good endeavours, paragraph 37 of the Government’s response states that consideration will be given to the establishment of

“an informal expert group to report on the degree to which there are other issues that create genuine barriers and to provide recommendations for practical action”,

which would allow groups to make informative and informed decisions, and to be able to see what is happening at their club.