Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Grey-Thompson and Lord Hayward

Committee stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 19 and 22 to 25 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, to which I have attached my name, and I thank the Minister for sparing time to discuss these. I said when we met that there are a number of sports organisations that are feeling a bit unloved at the moment. These are events that have a global reach and help cement our standing on the world stage.

The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, mentioned the London Marathon. I think I competed in 17 of them—it is quite hard to remember when you get to that many. I know I did one more than my husband. I also commentate on the wheelchair race for the BBC. The marathon is not just the race itself. Anyone who walks up the Embankment at 6.30 pm on the Sunday will see people valiantly keeping going, to try to make it to the finish line. On Westminster Bridge the next morning, you also see the hundreds of people who have competed standing there with their medals, wanting to take a photo in front of Big Ben.

Beyond that, the impact is quite significant. It puts London on the map as a city, and it brings a huge amount of tourism. People stay in London for days afterwards, thanks to the many good deals that the marathon has negotiated with various restaurants and different companies around the city. We need to think about this in a slightly different way. That is positive chemistry and association that you cannot buy. It is because people feel amazingly good about putting themselves through 26.2 miles around the city.

I will speak briefly to Amendment 25, because it is really important. Mostly, athletes will mention something they saw at another event that inspired them to do sport. That is probably because they are asked about it a lot. But we cannot underestimate this—it is not just about people seeing these moments in time and doing sport. They will do lots of other things, and 2012 was a brilliant example of that, such as people who have gone into the creative industries because of what they saw.

The Minister talked about wanting to change the health of our nation, which is incredibly important. To quote a bunch of statistics, Women in Sport has said that 80% of women in the UK are not fit enough to be healthy. That has a massive impact on jobs, pensions, life—everything. It means hitting frailty at an earlier age. ukactive has said that we have a generation of children who are more likely to die before their parents because of inactivity. This is really worrying, and we have to do something quite radical.

It is not necessarily the Bill’s responsibility to do that; we need some joined-up government. We need to look at physical literacy in primary schools and progression steps. We also need to look at the cost of the pathway for athletes who aspire to compete at the highest level. SportsAid data, which is probably a little bit out of date now, shows the average cost of the pathway for a teenage athlete is £10,000 a year. I imagine that is significantly higher now. There are a lot of families who cannot afford that, but what we can do is broaden the base of participation.

I am particularly interested in Amendment 25 and what we can do to encourage more disabled people to be active. Activity Alliance has said that disabled people not only find it hard to be physically active but that they are actually quite worried about how it is perceived if they are physically active, so we need to look at this in a different way. I was not a product of special education—thank goodness, because it meant I actually received an education, when a lot of children who went through special ed did not. As much as the world has moved on in many ways, that was actually really good for enabling disabled children to be physically active. Mainstreaming, which is much better for education, has actually made some of those things much harder. I receive emails at least monthly, often weekly, about how disabled children in schools are not able to take part in PE.

That is not a problem for this Bill—it is an issue for the Department for Education. But unless we are more explicit about what we are trying to do and how we are trying to change some of these stubborn inequalities, we are never going to move it on. In Wales we are incredibly lucky that we have the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which gives us a very useful framing for what we are trying to do to encourage young people to be active. The Sport England campaign, This Girl Can, was ground-breaking. For the first time, it showed real women doing sport—as opposed to Olympians or Paralympians, who look slightly different. But we cannot expect just an advertising campaign to radically change what we do, so any way we can think differently about developing a fit and healthy nation that truly stays engaged in physical activity is really worth exploring in more detail.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the comments of my colleagues across the Chamber in relation to this set of amendments, although I tend to disagree—or will clarify—in relation to one of the amendments. This is an enabling Bill. Surely, therefore, it should provide the opportunity, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has said, for major sporting events which wish to make use of the Bill—whether it is the RFU, the LTA or whoever—to be able to come forward and say to a Government, “We wish to use this Bill for the following reasons”. Surely that is the objective of this legislation.

The point has been made a number of times already that sporting frameworks change, and we cannot guarantee that the Olympic Games, European Championships, et cetera, will be the same in 15 or 20 years’ time, or whenever it may happen to be. Structures of international competition change. If ever there was an example of one—and I am surprised that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, did not refer to it—it is the announcement in the last few days that the London Marathon is going to move from one day to two, with the objective of having 100,000 participants.

It is about the level of attraction from around the world. Most people look at the London Marathon and say, “Oh, it’s just the London Marathon”. It is not; it is part of an international body of marathons, a set group of them. If there are 100,000 participants next year, we are going to have many hundreds of thousands of visitors. There are transport and all sorts of other implications. Surely, if this legislation is anything, it should be available to that sort of sporting evolution, because it is so positive both for this nation and for fitness in general.

I wish to make a brief observation in relation to the amendments, where they cite certain categories of people. I just ask, for reasons most people in this Chamber would recognise and which I identified at Second Reading, that where there is specific identification of women, girls, the disabled and ethnic minorities, we either use the classifications of the Equality Act or just stop at

“removing barriers to physical activity”.

I speak, as I identified on previous occasions, as the founder chairman of the world’s first gay rugby club, a structure that now has 100 clubs around the world and an international structure where we compete on a regular basis. Certainly, I know only too well the difficulties and the challenges associated with bidding and with organising international competitions, with people coming from other parts of the world.

We had the European championships in Birmingham less than a year after the Commonwealth Games. The competition, the Union Cup, was the largest sporting competition in the Midlands after the Commonwealth Games over the following 12 months. There are international competitions all the way down—they restructure and they reorganise. But I ask that we remove barriers to physical activity for underrepresented groups and stop at that point, rather than trying to cite specific examples, because we risk excluding some groups or others, and I know that is not the intention of those who have proposed these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I disagree with the proposed amendments for a number of different reasons; first, because the terminology “free to air” is a complete misdescription. You have to pay £180 for your TV licence. It therefore is not free—that is, for the 88% of the population who choose to pay for their TV licence. The number of people who choose not to pay for a TV licence has been rising for many years. I say 88% because the latest figures published say that 12.5% of all viewers do not pay for a television licence.

Secondly, there is the question of competition. The essence of sport is competition. It is a very odd state of affairs whereby one says that broadcasters can compete but, by the way, we will restrict the competition in certain fields. We were debating in the previous set of amendments the question of assisting people who face disadvantages in society. Again, it is a very odd state of affairs whereby one broadcaster might be willing to pay much larger sums to broadcast a particular event, and in that process guarantee substantial funds to the underrepresented groups, but they are not allowed to because the event concerned is a crown jewel. So not only do you lose out because the broadcasting may be inferior; the funding might be inferior as well.

Thirdly, my concern is that the crown jewels were a product of a different technological era. Sport is now broadcast on a whole range of different platforms, and none of us in this Chamber knows what the platforms are going to be in five or 10 years’ time. Therefore, to decree in this piece of legislation that you can have certain sporting events, and I noticed that it suggested that they might be extended only on—I will use the jargon although I have indicated that I do not agree with it—a free-to-air basis, when multiple levels of platforms will probably be available in a few years’ time does not recognise the changing technological world in which we live and which the sporting world will have to adapt to.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 26. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, makes an interesting reference to free-to-air. As well as not knowing what platforms are going to be available, we do not know even what events there are going to be. The Olympics and Paralympics are going to change radically in the next few cycles, not least because of the impact of global warming. In quite good timing, there was an article this morning online on the Broadcast Sport website which talked about the changing world of events. Rights holders have more choices about where to go to put their events on, and they can ask for more money. It has been estimated that FIFA is going to make about £3 billion from organising the World Cup. Where is that money going to go? If you look at something closer to home such as Wimbledon, it puts a considerable amount of money back into the grass roots, which is incredible.

How people watch is going to change as well. The same article on Broadcast Sport was saying that even if you are watching a live event, you are probably checking your phone at least 10 times during that event to see what else is going on and what other comments are being made. We should be looking at how we make available these major sporting events. A number of people are disappointed that the Commonwealth Games is not going to be readily available, certainly on BBC TV. Everything that Team Wales does is going to be shown on S4C. There will be two hours’ live coverage a day, which is amazing—in Welsh, which is really important in terms of continuing to develop the Welsh language. I am sure there will be lots of other home country athletes competing who will be seen within those time slots. I do not think we can underestimate the importance of being able to watch the Games.

If we look back through history—we have been talking about this today—when the BBC covered the Sydney Paralympics in 2000, one of the decisions behind putting the Games on at teatime was so that schoolchildren could watch the Games. That developed a much better understanding of disability and the Paralympics. It got an age group of children watching sport that they probably would not have been able to see before. Whether it is free to air or however we define that, it is important that the public in the widest possible sense are able to watch these events in real time without spending some quite significant sums sometimes on monthly fees.