My Lords, this has been an interesting debate, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, particularly the Minister, who has done well to address the questions that I have put to him. As a bit of a veteran on these matters—I have explained some of my past back in the 1980s and 1990s, not as a hooligan but as somebody attempting to deal with hooliganism, particularly through the medium of sports ground safety—I am very heartened that the safety of spectators and everybody who uses stadiums is paramount in the Government’s thinking, as it is in the thinking of the other political parties.
I am particularly grateful for the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, who was Sports Minister quite a long time ago when I was deputy chair of the Football Task Force, which came up with a series of recommendations. Some of those recommendations are relevant to another debate, on which I shall engage with the Minister over the coming weeks, on football regulation. It was a matter of great regret that the football authorities on that occasion, particularly the Premier League and the Football League, resisted the wise recommendations of the taskforce on regulation. We will come back to that.
One of the central aspects of the policy discussed in this debate is the fact that the Sports Grounds Safety Authority is clearly the lead body in making sure that all our sports grounds are safe. I had the privilege of taking through a Private Member’s Bill—it was a government handout Bill in the Commons—through your Lordships’ House which converted the Football Licensing Authority into the SGSA. The things that it could do as a result of that were, first, to make its expertise available to other sports bodies, not just football; it has been involved with rugby, tennis, cricket and horseracing. It has also been able to sell its expertise to sports bodies overseas, if they require expert advice. I am sure that, if UEFA is looking at this matter, it would be well advised to draw on the expertise of the SGSA in drawing up its plans.
I appreciated what the Minister said about the involvement of Level Playing Field. I shall report back to it on this debate—and maybe I shall need to write to him, but he has given very good answers on that
issue. We will hold our breath and hope that this new approach, or milestone as he has described it, in dealing with ground safety and spectator amenities, can work, and that people can stay safe.
We know that demand for the change is considerable, but it is important that the freedom that comes with it is not abused and that we do not go back to the sort of terrible problems at football grounds in the 1980s and 1990s that I remember so well. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Addington, the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and the Minister.