Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con): I am a Huddersfield Town fan, and my club is very much at the heart of my community, raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Yorkshire ambulances. Mark Robins has recently moved to Huddersfield Town as manager, so us fans feel a close kinship with Coventry City, and we went through our own financial problems in the previous decade. Also, only on Friday night, I spent the evening at a charity dinner with Brian Kilcline, who lifted the FA cup for Coventry City in 1987; I told him about this debate and he, too, sent his best wishes to all Sky Blue fans. Good luck with the quest to save the club for the community.
Mr Ainsworth: I thank the hon. Gentleman. For Coventry, 1987 was the pinnacle so far of what can be achieved by a football club on behalf of a city, and it was the entire city; whether football fans, rugby fans or whatever, they were lifted for such a long time by that magnificent occasion, and we want to see many more of them. We all fear, however, that we will not see such occasions unless there is a new settlement, a new realism and a new acceptance of community responsibility by the owners of the club, with a constructive approach to settling the dispute that they appear to have deliberately prolonged. They are not stupid—we are dealing with clever people—so one has to assume that their motives are not good for the community, the city or the club and its fans.
Will the Minister respond to the need for the reform of governance and for transparency in our national game? Has he looked at the reform programme of the Football League, and does he believe it adequate to the challenge faced by the game? My reading is that it would not have helped us to any great extent with the existing problems in Coventry, but if the Minister can say otherwise I will be pleased to hear it. Have the Government looked at the licensing proposals of Supporters Direct? Could those proposals provide sustainability and accountability for what is overwhelmingly our biggest national sporting game?
To the club, I say that there has been a reduced rent offer. If the owners want to be taken seriously, the time is long past for them to respond clearly by accepting or putting a definite counter-proposal, rather than the deliberate obfuscation and delay, for whatever motives, that has gone on for month after month. A reasonable response to the proposition for binding arbitration, which my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) mentioned, would have been an opportunity for the club to win trust. If it had accepted the proposition, it would have seen the supporters’ trust, me and I do not know how many others prepared to join it and say that that was a reasonable way forward; my hon. Friend raised the issue independently today, so he would have been minded to get behind such action. In its response, however, the club has failed absolutely to grasp the opportunity to get with the parts of the community that care so much about the football club and economic development in the city. Instead of all the deliberate talk, innuendo and attempts to destroy reputations that have gone on, the club should come clean about its threats over the 2002 rental agreement. If we had some kind of straight response from the owners, even at this late stage, some good will would rally to their cause. They must start to examine the behaviour that we have seen for far too long.
5.14 pm
Hugh Robertson (Minister for Sport): I have no statutory power as a Minister to intervene. The hon. Gentleman, however, is not asking for that; he is asking if I could use my good offices to effect a solution. As long as my powers and the limitations on what a Minister can achieve are clearly known, I have enough respect for the Opposition Members present, in particular the right hon. Member for Coventry North East whom I have dealt with over many years, to say simply that if there is a stage at which my intervention might be helpful, I am happy to do so. The danger is that that card, once played, might be the final card, so it might be better to try some other avenues first.
Mr Ainsworth: I would be wary of asking the Minister to become involved in mediation, because the proposal has been made by the club, and there are grave worries that it may be just part of the prevarication that has gone on for some time, whatever the motive.
Hugh Robertson: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that helpful intervention. I leave the matter with him, but if he thinks I can do something to help, I am happy to do so. I suspect that a more obvious target might be the chairman of the Football League, who is supposed to be independent in these matters.
Mr Robinson: The problem is exemplified by my right hon. Friend’s intervention. Assuming that it is impossible—the people involved are bitter, and are at it like that all the time—someone should go in with a cool head, look at both sides without taking a prejudiced position, and try to bring them together. That would be the role to take, but I appreciate that the Minister has no statutory power.
Hugh Robertson: The hon. Gentleman puts the issue well. That is the role that should be carried out by the Football League in the first instance, but if for any reason that proves impossible, I would be happy to look at any sensible proposal.
The right hon. Member for Coventry North East asked about supporter representation on the board. I will come to the bigger ticket way that that is being dealt with in a moment. I have worried about this, having looked at it during most of my three years as a Minister, and it can become a bit of an Aunt Sally. It is not much use having one supporter on a board, if there are 10 others who can vote him or her down on each and every occasion. It is about the message it sends out. The drift from the Government and the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is that this is an area that needs to be addressed, and that until now supporters have been under-represented in and under-consulted on the running of football clubs, and their views on how football clubs are run have not been sufficiently taken into account.
The football authorities—I will come to the process in a moment—have been invited to make proposals. It remains to be seen precisely where they get to. If this area was working well, different solutions would probably work for different clubs, depending on their ownership structure and the history of their involvement with supporters. If that does not happen, the Government will have to take action, and I will come to that.
The fourth question, which wraps all this up, is whether the Government are happy with football governance. The honest answer is no. That leads to a question about what we have done about it. There has been some progress over the last couple of years. All 92 professional clubs are adopting the financial fair play proposals—I will come to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s process in a moment—and the Football Association has finally set up a regulatory authority that will have power to determine applications under FA and Football League licences and directors’ criteria, and to look after moves.
Soon after I became a Minister, I turned up for a Wednesday morning debate in Westminster Hall to find the best part of 60 Members of Parliament wanting to speak, and it is clear that football governance is an area that is causing concern throughout the House. To try to maintain a cross-party position, we asked the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to look at it. In the middle of 2011, it produced a report, which I am sure the right hon. Gentleman has seen, with a series of recommendations for the football authorities. They were challenged to go away and work together, which was something they had not done very successfully until then. There is often friction between the Football League, the Premier League and the Football Association. They have worked much more constructively together in this instance, and produced an interim response to the Committee. They agreed that there was a need to change, and that they would bring forward new regulations by August. With our encouragement, the Select Committee invited them back to review progress at the end of last year or the beginning of this year, and produced a report that basically said that some progress had been made, but not quickly enough. It contained a straightforward recommendation to the Government that if further progress was not achieved by the middle of this year, the Government should not hesitation in legislating.
Those of us who have been in government would be properly wary of that move, but if it is the only to achieve proper progress, we are prepared to do it, albeit that I would want it done on a cross-party basis. There would be little point otherwise because if the Government changed, the regulations might move about. An absolutely key part of any legislation would be the regulations on supporters’ involvement in their football clubs.
Those were the questions the right hon. Gentleman asked me. Time is running out, so I will not read my script. If he is happy with that and does not want to ask me anything else, I will simply finish where I started and thank him for the debate. I wish him and his local MPs well with Coventry football club. It is a great club, and it does not deserve to have got into its present position. I wish him and others every success in their efforts to bring about a brighter future for it.
Question put and agreed to.
5.25 pm
Sitting adjourned.
