Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when it comes to being part of the wind-up on a Bill like this, you are trying to look at some of the central themes. I think that, maybe with one or two exceptions, noble Lords are in favour of this Bill. Anybody who has done any of the many Acts we have talked about, such as those for the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, will know that a great deal of what happens has to be repeated, at least in principle, every time. It might have been quite exciting to do it once, but that was probably enough for one lifetime. So the Bill is a good thing.

It is such a good thing that most of us are asking why it does not apply to a wee bit more. The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, will, undoubtedly, be up for the challenge, but it is quite important that, today, we ask why there is this limitation. Why does it not bring in cultural events? What about the big regular events?

Transport is the one that really gets me. I know the gritty fullness of the experience at Twickenham. Have you ever tried to get a late train out of London from there? I can tell you, some planning is needed there. And that is ignoring the burger I was once foolish enough to try to eat on the way in.

If we are going to look at this properly then we have to look at it in the round. The Bill is definitely written for the current world of big international sporting events. They are funded by big sponsorship deals. There is a little list in Clause 1(2), running from paragraphs (a) to (e). Paragraphs (b), (c) and (d) are all about the preservation of rights and sponsorship, and what is going on. These are the things around which, when we did the Acts for the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, we got absurdities.

My noble friend Lord Foster did his usual job of picking out a particularly good little absurdity about sausages being arranged in the shape of rings. You could have got quite creative, with the odd black or red pudding in there—you could have done quite a lot with that. I remember that, during the passage of the Olympics Bill, the Olympic kebab shop, operating somewhere down in the East End, objected to being removed. It was serving the staff from three scrapyards that were about to be destroyed, but that does not really matter. There were always these little things going on, and local communities always feel hard done by.

I hope that, at the very least, we can put something into the Bill that says that you have a duty to explain how this happens whenever you get to the affected group, or put greater emphasis on that, because it is an irritation that we can do without having to suffer again and again. If a little bit of compensation is required for one of these big sponsorship deals, then why not? Let us have a look at that.

We are talking about championships here. Championships are different from Games because the teams are not all based in the same place. The teams and the participating athletes for a Games should be, by design, in one place—a village. We do not have anything about infrastructure planning on that scale in the Bill. I say this with a degree of temerity because people who have experienced living in such villages are in this Chamber today. I am still breathing so I cannot have done too much wrong, but how do you put them together?

In this country we have excellent experience. We have a magnificent planning process. With the Olympic Games, half the bid was about getting that structure in place, planning for what might happen and doing it really well. That raised the bar. Disability access was brilliant. It was mainly the Lords which did this. We sat down and made sure that everything was as good as it could be. We had a Minister saying, “I can do no more, I have given you everything that you want”. That was in the Moses Room. I hope that we can look at what is required for that.

The other example was when Birmingham stepped in at the last minute and created a village out of student accommodation. It was refurbed for the Games and then went back to being student accommodation. We have done it both ways. Glasgow has not been involved in that. When you do not have a ready-made village, you cut down on the number of events. Rugby sevens is not in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this time because they cannot afford to accommodate the teams. Fortunately, they have kept the one team sport that really needs it—it is its big showcase—netball. I hope that we can look at putting in that infrastructure, which can be part of legacy, and ensure that it really does work.

We have had fun today with thorny things such as ticketing and ticket touting. We started at Oral Questions with the problems of America and its models for the current World Cup; it is facing legal challenge from its own internal states over this issue. So I hope that we do not get too enthusiastic about this model and that FIFA does learn. We need a process where people know what they are buying. In the States, what have they got out of this? They have empty hotels, because people cannot afford to get there, meaning that potentially some of the economic benefits will not be available. We must have a good long hard look at this and ensure that people know that when they are buying, they can spend on travel, on nights out, et cetera, and that it is not some sort of “I went there, slept in the airport and got back” hair-shirt event. If we do that, we will not get as many people going and the economic benefits to the community will be far fewer. Let us look at this in the round.

One of the things that we learned from London was that the one thing that we did not do was encourage more people to play sport. It was the big failure, albeit the only real failure. “People will be inspired by watching you”—no, people get used to watching very good sport on TV. You encourage people to play by creating events around it, getting people involved—especially young people. You create the habit of being involved in sport, particularly outside the educational establishment. That is how to keep people involved. We have proved it many times. I hope that we can look at where we can encourage that to happen through local organisations and sports clubs and take those to the events that are taking place and that people are watching. It goes with the education programme. We must involve and encourage. You do not do it just by flicking on a TV screen. We have proven that.

I think everything else has been covered by other noble Lords. There is a tendency when you have a little time left merely to go through all the points that were made and praise everybody, but that is the Minister’s job and not mine.

There is a great deal of enthusiasm for the basic principle, but there are a couple of big questions. The Minister said that this is the start of a process and that other things will happen in respect of culture. If we are not going to do it here, where are we going to do it? What is the framework for this? Let us be brave. Let us ask for a timescale that is not “soon” or “possibly in the near future”. The questions about cultural activity and what we are doing about domestic events—whether we will learn from this and take some of them on—really need to be asked.

Will we get a better definition? The noble Lord, Lord Mann, raised this. What is an international sporting event? Is it something we bid for? Another thing he raised was something I overheard one of his colleagues talking about in the House, and that I thought I should raise: the Rugby League World Cup. It happens fairly frequently here. Surely that is big enough, and with enough nations involved, to qualify. If not, we need to know, because if the benefit is very small and potentially never happening—you can get outbid on anything you bid for; we are in a strong position at the moment, but somebody else might get better at it—the question is, will that apply to everything we are doing here with an international element? We need to know these things.

Very few Bills in which I have been involved in this House have had this degree of a wind behind them. We wish it well, and we wish its aims well. But I hope the Government will be flexible enough and confident enough to accept constructive criticism for what it is. We want this Bill to work; let us see whether we can make it work just that little bit better.