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11.3 am
Mr. Joe Ashton (Bassetlaw): I shall try to be brief because many hon. Members want to speak, and I shall not respond to the remarks of the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Jones). I intended to congratulate the Tory Front-Bench spokesman, the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), on his return to the House after five years, but after listening to his speech I think that if he had been playing in a football match he would have been substituted by the manager half way through and sent off to the Back Benches. However, he has now left the Chamber so I shall begin by issuing a genuine vote of thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for National Heritage, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks).
My hon. Friend started off in some controversy in the newspapers, but within two weeks of taking office he delivered something that the whole of football had wanted from the previous Government for at least two years. I thank him on behalf of the Football Trust for what he announced literally two weeks after the Queen's Speech. He said that a total of £55 million would be available for essential work at football grounds at all levels throughout England, and that the Football Trust would receive £35 million--£5 million a year for the next four years
from the Premier League and £5 million a year for the next three years from the English Sports Council--and £2.5 million over the next four years from the English Sports Council and the Football Association for non-Taylor ground redevelopment work.
I do not want to get too technical, but people are probably aware that after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989--I will not go into it because there is to be a statement on Monday--the Taylor report said that football grounds had to become all-seater. It said that football grounds were dangerous and in a terrible state. The House agreed. Unfortunately, the Conservative Government did not agree to put any money towards the necessary work. Not only that, but they punished the football pools, which were paying towards ground improvements, by increasing the tax on the pools from 40 to 45 per cent. They generously reduced it back to 40 per cent. in order to make available a bit of cash for football ground improvements. They then allowed it gradually to dwindle to 35 per cent., even though the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), the Member of Parliament representing Nottingham Forest, happened to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. The best that he could do was to reduce the tax to about 27 per cent. over the years.
Then along came the lottery. What was the tax on the lottery? It was 12 per cent. Was it any wonder that people started betting on the lottery and stopped betting on the football pools? The income available for improving football grounds went down and down and ground improvements sank into disaster, even though they had created many jobs since 1990. Tarmac in my constituency made all the concrete steps for the Anfield ground in Liverpool and for West Ham's ground. Practically the only building taking place in towns in the north of England was at new football stands. Girder work was rapidly put through for Euro 96. The money came from the pools, but the lottery knocked the pools sideways.
We begged the Tory Government to put something in place of the pools money, but they did nothing. My hon. Friend the Minister, despite abuse from the Opposition, immediately announced massive help funded by the lottery, the Premier League and others to keep the valuable work going and maintain the Football Trust. The whole sport is grateful to him.
If my hon. Friend would like to become a lot more popular, he might go down to Wimbledon this afternoon and announce some money to put a roof over the courts. The tournament is run by the Wimbledon whingers. Year after year, they moan and groan about the weather. With all the profits that they have made, it is not as if they could not put a glass roof over the courts. They maintain the tradition of making people queue all night. If people do not get in, it is hard lines. There was eight minutes of play the other day and people did not get their money back.
In professional football, when matches were cancelled because of snow, under-floor heating was put in. When they were cancelled because of fog, floodlights were put in. Some people market their game and go for sponsorship. That is why the Premier League is successful. Others in cricket and tennis, I am sorry to say, wring their hands and moan about the weather.
Perhaps my hon. Friend might like to suggest such a measure to the tennis people in Wimbledon and get some lottery money put towards it.
With £670 million over four years from Sky, people might ask why football needs help to develop grounds, but it is not premier league clubs that are asking for help. It is smaller clubs such as Halifax, which went out of business because it could not survive the pressure. Only four Conservative Members now represent a constituency which includes a professional football club in the football league or premier league. That may be the trend and the Conservative party may not be too bothered about football, but the little clubs are struggling and they drastically need the money that my hon. Friend the Minister has given to them.
The future for football, with the Sky cash rolling in, is phenomenal. So are the wages that the clubs have to pay. I meant to declare my interest at the beginning of my speech. I am a director of Sheffield Wednesday football club and the chairman of the all-party football committee of the House, so I have a close knowledge of the costs of running a football club.
It is quite common for the top stars of the game to ask for £500,000 a year, which they are paid even if they get injured. They get paid £10,000 a week, not £10,000 a game. Given the crowds that they attract, however, that is rather like paying Pavarotti or some other international opera star to appear. When one thinks about the cash that such players can bring in from television, the select few who are good enough can command those wages and fees. It is a precarious business, however, because a player paid that much could break his leg next week and never be able to play again, as happens to many professionals.
I have heard many hon. Members complain that players are paid too much and that the tickets for a game are too expensive. They should remember that when British players got low wages, all our best players played in Italy. Trevor Francis, Liam Brady, Kevin Keegan and Gazza went abroad to play. Now that players are getting big money, the foreign players are coming here and our youngsters are learning from them. Those wages have created a quality improvement in the game.
I appreciate that people often say that they cannot afford a dish to watch football on Sky. I must say that when a match on Sky is shown at my local pub, people cannot get in. In the north of England the beer is a pound a pint until the first goal. The match is often followed by karaoke or perhaps even a stripper, so it is a big night out. When local clubs are on television their gates often drop by 10,000.
Sky broadcasts are available to the poorer members of the community--indeed, games other than those on Sky are also seen, and I know that the Premier League is worried about that. When I was in a taxi the other week the driver said, "That was a great game at Hillsborough on Saturday against Liverpool." I asked him whether he had gone; he said that he had watched it on television. I said that it was not on television, except in Scandinavia, where their teams do not play in January. He told me that he watched it half a mile up the road at the pub. One of the lads went in, used his card, turned the aerial, jiggled it about and tuned it in. They all watched the game for free at the pub. The poor are very ingenious and there are very few top level-goals that are not shown on terrestrial
television. Football is seen by the hard-up supporters, even if we do have to pay fantastic amounts of money to our top players.
My hon. Friend the Minister for sport has already said that his season ticket for Chelsea cost £480.
Mr. Ashton:
My hon. Friend could get one for Sheffield Wednesday for £280. We have a system whereby kids can get into the ground for as little as £3. We must invest in the future. If we let children in at rock bottom prices, they will get bitten by the bug and the clubs will get their money back 100 times over. I very much regret the fact that some of the top clubs have said that they cannot find room to let children in at low prices.
Despite the cost of going to games and the broadcasting of games on Sky, attendances are up. Grounds are now 89 per cent. full. In fact, one cannot get in without a season ticket at Newcastle or Manchester United because their games are always booked up in advance. The marketing of the game has been phenomenal and has been a marvellous combination of private enterprise, self-control and self-regulation. The Football Association has done a wonderful job in stamping out hooliganism, and players who give the game a bad reputation are disciplined immediately--Cantona was immediately sentenced to a six-month ban.
We should also give credit where it is due to the all-party football committee, which has more than 100 members from the Back Benches and the Lords. It, too, has helped to improve the game and such partnership has been superb. I hope that the Football Association and the Premier League can extend that partnership by offering coaching to young people, which is badly needed. I regret that, years ago, many teachers opted out of taking school football on a Saturday morning or in the evenings after school. I know that, at the time, teachers had a row with the Government about pay. They said that their contracts did not cover refereeing games and that they would work only their contract hours, but we all learnt about sport at school and afterwards, when we kicked a tanner ball on the streets in the evening. Those days have gone. Now, schools have to rely on the enthusiasm of parents, but many are enthusiastic only while their own kids are playing. We must revive the sport at school.
In a couple of weeks I will meet my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment with other members of the football community to see how we can encourage football at school. We have many, many ex-professionals in all sports who cannot play their game any longer because they are too old, but they are still only about 35 or 40. They would love to have a job teaching kids in school. I suggested that to high-level representatives of the Premier League, who have expressed a certain interest in that proposal. They have said that they would not mind putting millions of pounds into that.
The Professional Footballers Association--the players' union--has said such a scheme would be a godsend to ex-players looking for jobs. Imagine that there were a couple of ex-pros in each town. They could go to one school on a Monday afternoon and visit another on Tuesday morning and give a couple of hours of coaching. They would be revered by the kids, who would see them
as gods. Their names would be remembered and their dads would tell them what great players they had been. Those kids would listen far more to those coaches than they would to dear old Mr. Chips, who might watch them kick a ball about when he had a spare hour.
I know that, as always with education, any such scheme would run into some bureaucracy. I am sure that local education committees would say that such a scheme would need to be overseen by a secretary, that it would have to be recorded on the minutes and so on. That is the one thing that the people in football are scared of. They do not want to be bogged down in the bureaucracy of local government, where everything has to be approved by a committee. If a school does not want a coach to talk to its kids, fine, it does not have to have one. It would be entirely voluntary. The people in football are willing to pay for such a scheme if schools would only say that they would co-operate.
I am pretty certain that those who have played tennis or who have competed in swimming, who have now given up their sport and miss it tremendously, would jump at the chance to receive a small payment or regular wage for coaching kids. Teachers have too much on their plates already. Indeed, schools do not have the money to employ a sports master. Many sports have money and I am sure that if coaching was offered to schools many of them would accept it. It is just a matter of bringing the strings together. I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment is trying to introduce such partnerships and I hope that they will go ahead.
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