Like most people I like to think I stay abreast of current affairs. Catch the news on TV most days and read the daily papers whilst stuck on the tube. But if I'm honest I don't really pay much attention and generally start reading the papers from the sports pages forwards.
I don't, as a rule, resort to going on to Government websites to find out what they're talking about this time but fortunately at least one member of this site does.
I say fortunately because they've found the minutes of a debate recently where the topic of Safe Standing in football grounds appears to have been given an in depth, and for the most part positive, discussion.
I like many feel that by forcing the fans to sit whilst watching football has had a detrimental effect on atmosphere in most grounds. Whilst I never want to experience the pressure of the "scrum" that I used to have to deal with as a teenage steward on the terraces behind the goals at "old Wembley" in the late 80's I see no reason why we should be prevented from having a designated area in the stadium where people could stand in front of their seats should they so wish.
It appears that a majority of MP's in this particular little debate agree with me. I've pulled out some of the more interesting comments from the debate but if you wish to read the full transcript for yourself it's at - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm071024/halltext/71024h0001.htm
Westminster Hall
Wednesday 24 October 2007
[Mr. David Marshall in the Chair]
Football Matches (Standing Spectators)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Mr. Blizzard.]
Mr. Godsiff: Of course, I accept entirely what my hon. Friend says—I am sure that Northern Ireland will, as always, battle to the end.
To return to my point, the new Minister’s sporting record is dismal. The England rugby team are in demise and are no longer world champions, the England cricket team are in the doldrums, and Lewis Hamilton managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Formula 1 championship. However, I hope that the Minister might today play an absolute blinder and, in doing so, endear himself to many genuine football fans in the country.
I do not wish to make the debate too technical or legalistic by referring to the various Acts that cover safety at sports grounds or that arose from the Bradford and Hillsborough disasters. The debate ought to be about whether the provision of safe standing areas at the highest level of English football is safe and desirable, and not about the intricacies of deciding what legislation to alter. Having said that, the abolition of terracing was not included in legislation—the power to do so rests with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. If he decided tomorrow that standing areas were to be allowed at premiership and championship football matches, on a recommendation, say, from the Minister, the Football Licensing Authority would have to allow it and the football authorities would have no option but to change their rules to allow clubs to comply with the change in the law.
If legal safe standing areas were allowed at football grounds when there is a demand and when clubs wished to introduce them, the current problem of illegal standing would be resolved. I emphasise the importance of a club’s wishes, because I am not suggesting that clubs be forced or obliged to introduce standing areas. Allowing safe standing would mean that those who wish to stand would have an area in which to do so, and those who wish to sit would have dedicated seating areas.
The issue of approved safe standing areas at premiership and championship football grounds might not be of great concern to the wider public, but it is of concern to the many thousands of supporters who frequent football matches in the top two leagues. Many of them stand up during matches, such as the away support of Manchester United, and many see home supporters standing either for all or part of a match. Standing supporters are in
contravention of premiership and league rules and the safety authorities of local councils have, on occasion, penalised the home club because away fans were allowed to stand through a whole match because stewards were unable or unwilling to force them to sit down or to expel them.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, but does he agree that we need to stress the voluntary nature of his proposal? The Foxes Trust, of which I am a member, is associated with Leicester City football club. It is surveying visitors to Leicester City to find the level of support for safe standing. It is no surprise to find that football supporters want to feel that they are part of a crowd, and not a member of the audience—that is the thrill of the game.
Mr. Godsiff: I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and I shall come to discuss the issue he raised. Of course, everybody stands up when a goal is scored or when a player is substituted and applauded from the pitch.
After the Hillsborough tragedy, an inquiry was set up under Lord Justice Taylor. He produced an interim report, followed by a final report in January 1990. The Taylor report called for a major investment in professional football to improve facilities. It made many recommendations, covering a range of issues, including how many people should be allowed in standing areas and how that should be monitored. The overwhelming majority of the recommendations were welcomed by football supporters and have stood the test of time.
Lord Justice Taylor also recommended all-seater stadiums for the top two divisions of English football and the top division in Scotland. It is crucial that we read the report to see exactly what he said and the context in which he said it.
David Taylor: My hon. Friend is right that there were no specific recommendations covering the broad mass of football, but does he agree with me that one of the specific recommendations that Lord Justice Taylor did make—he could not have been clearer—was that clubs should not use the advent of all-seater stadiums to ramp up prices, yet that was blatantly ignored, which has been a contributing factor to some of the problems that we have seen in the years since? Does my hon. Friend agree that that was a specific recommendation and that it was ignored by football league clubs and others?
Let us examine exactly what Lord Justice Taylor said:
“There is no panacea which will achieve total safety and cure all problems of behaviour and crowd control. But I am satisfied
that seating does more to achieve those objectives than any other single measure...It is possible that in the early stages of conversion there may be instances of fans standing on the seats or in front of them because they are used to standing or in order to register a protest, but I am satisfied that in England and Wales as in Scotland and abroad spectators will become accustomed and educated to seating.”
Lord Justice Taylor’s expectations in respect of seating have definitely not been realised.
When the Taylor report was published and the impression was put around that any standing area in top football grounds was unsafe, it suited the owners of many top clubs to replace standing areas, where entry prices were cheap—the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor)—with seated areas, where much higher prices could be charged, particularly as the majority of the money to make the changes was coming from Government sources or the pools companies. The premiership has greatly increased the move towards higher ticket prices, with more corporate areas, and many fans of top clubs find watching premiership football live more and more expensive.
Mr. Godsiff: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point; he is absolutely right. As I would expect, and as always, Scotland leads the way. However, what he describes is not happening just in Scotland. There are owners of football clubs in the United Kingdom who support safe standing areas, but I will develop that point later.
When fans asked for safe standing areas to be provided on grounds of choice and cost, they were originally told that standing was unsafe. When people pointed out that clubs in Germany and elsewhere on the continent had provided dedicated safe standing areas, and when people asked why, if standing was unsafe, the premiership had allowed one of its member teams, Fulham, to play for more than a year with open terracing behind one goal instead of closing that area of the ground, the argument changed. Fulham is an excellent example. Its situation is analogous to that of a hospital that is suddenly discovered to have a load of viruses in it, but the health authority, instead of closing it down, says, “Well, we’ll leave it for a year because it’s going to be rebuilt in a year anyway.” The premiership was saying, “Standing is unsafe, but we will allow one of our member clubs to have standing until such time as it gets round to putting in seating.” That is just one of the many contradictions and hypocrisies in this matter.
Instead of it being said that standing was unsafe, the new line was peddled that it was outdated, not modern and not in keeping with the global image of the premiership, that there was no real demand for it, that it would be turning the clock back and that it would cost too much money to provide safe standing areas. When that argument was challenged, a new argument was added. It was then argued by the premiership and the FLA that if an element of safe standing was introduced into top grounds in England, no international or European games could take place in those grounds, because FIFA and UEFA regulations do not allow people to stand at international or European matches. However, it was pointed out that every ground in Germany has safe standing, that 24,000 people stand at each match in a single stand at Borussia Dortmund’s ground, and that German stadiums are reconfigured quite simply for European and international matches
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. Gerry Sutcliffe): I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend, but I just want to correct him. UEFA rules are that stadiums have to be all-seater to be involved in European competition. In Germany, there are flexible stadiums, and seats are put in for UEFA games.
Mr. Godsiff:It is clear that an international match must have an all-seater stadium, but in Germany, when domestic matches are played, the grounds are reconfigured and the seats are turned into safe standing areas. Furthermore—to put the icing on the cake—the World cup in Germany was played very successfully in those grounds, which have gone from seated to standing and back again.
When those arguments were put, the premiership and the FLA gave up. They did not have any more arguments. However, in the best tradition of British civil servants, a certain gentleman who was the chief executive of the FLA stated in an interview in 2002 that there was
than of the reintroduction of terraces. Some might regard that comment by a civil servant as hardly neutral and unbiased, but that is what he said—and he is in charge of the FLA.
Mr. John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD):Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the reasons for the reluctance to change back to safe standing is crowd control? Security guards who are looking at the crowd can see what is going on much more easily in all-seater stadiums. One of the ways to deal with that when reintroducing safe standing would be to have individual standing places.
Mr. Godsiff: Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman’s last point is particularly pertinent. Nobody is suggesting for a minute that we should go back to the old system of wide-open terraces with unlimited access to standing areas. In Germany, people entering a safe standing area have tickets and, more to the point, the local safety committee limits how many people can enter and how many can stand safely
Every week in most premiership grounds, fans stand to watch the match. Sometimes they stand in areas that are unsafe due to the elevation of the seats. Any Newcastle United supporter who has seen how their stands go up into the heavens will know that anyone who stands at the top is taking their life in their hands. It is highly dangerous.
When my club, Charlton Athletic, played in the premiership against Manchester United, the Manchester United fans occupied the whole away end, and they stood up to watch the match. The stewards and police were not going to eject 3,000-plus fans from the ground for standing up. All that happens in such a situation is that the FLA restricts how many seats a club can sell in the away end, thus penalising the club. Charlton and other clubs would like the option to introduce safe standing areas.
There is a clear contradiction between the treatment of supporters of premiership and championship clubs and the treatment of those who watch other sporting events and football leagues. Premiership and championship supporters are forced to sit to watch matches or run the risk of being ejected, whereas week in and week out, thousands of people stand to watch league one or two matches, rugby union, rugby league and horse racing. Indeed, in his report, Lord Justice Taylor went out of his way to say that having all-seater horse races would impact on—indeed, destroy—what horse racing is all about. He said that people must be free to move around, and that that was part of horse racing.
Recently, a big rugby league match was played at Old Trafford. I saw it on television at 5 o’clock on Saturday night—quite possibly the Minister saw it, too—at the home of Manchester United. The ground was nearly full, and fans were standing, quite legally, because the regulations do not apply to rugby league matches. The following week, when Manchester United played on the same pitch before a full house, everybody had to sit down, because the regulations apply to football supporters in the premiership and the championship. That is just another contradiction and nonsense in the current legislation.
Local safety people can lay down their own regulations, but rugby league fans can go into Old Trafford, stand up and not break any regulations. Indeed, it is not considered unsafe. That is nonsense, as I have said, and the Football Licensing Authority, which is charged with enforcing the regulations, knows that they cannot be enforced. Its chief executive, Mr. John de Quidt, who earns £72,105 plus an £8,000 performance bonus, said in his 2006-07 annual report:
“Progress on tackling persistent standing in seated areas continued to be disappointing...a vocal minority insist on standing...We have long recognised that, if a significant numbers of spectators are determined to stand, the options available on the day are limited.”
I wonder whether he got his £8,000 bonus.
In recommending all-seater grounds for premiership and championship clubs, Lord Taylor stated the belief in his final report that fans would come to accept all-seater stadiums—I have read the relevant paragraph. It is now clear with the benefit of hindsight that that prediction was wrong. Eleven seasons after the introduction of all-seater stadiums in the top two divisions, significant numbers of fans regularly stand at matches
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There is much more and all of it continues in the same direction. That standing is not unsafe and should be considered in designated areas so long as people were only allowed to stand in front of their own "seat".
In a nutshell, football supporters do not want to watch football in unsafe grounds; they do not want to see a return to the mass terraces of old; they do not want to stop people from sitting if they want to; and they do not want to force clubs to have safe standing areas, if the clubs do not want them. What I and other football supporters want is to be allowed the choice of safe standing. I want clubs to have the option, if they choose and if there is a demand from the fans, to put in a safe standing area.
In 1995, a politician, who is no longer a Member, said that safety must always be the number one criterion. He said that
“there is no reason to ignore technological improvements made since Taylor reported, which might now allow for safe standing.”
That politician was Tony Blair. Twelve years on, those technological advances have gone further still: for example, Germany staged a highly successful World cup in stadiums where everybody sits for international matches and where all seats are reconfigured to allow standing at domestic matches.
Week by week, the contradiction grows. It is all right for fans to stand in all-seater stadiums to observe a minute’s silence, to applaud the life of someone who has died or to sing the national anthem, but it is not safe to stand to watch the match. It is all right for fans to stand up when a goal is scored or for thousands of people to jump around at a pop concert at a major football ground, but you cannot stand to watch a football match. It is all right for commuters to be herded into packed carriages, standing in trains being driven around at 70 mph, because that is not deemed to be unsafe. Indeed, while we are about it, Mr. Marshall, in this hallowed place it is all right for nearly 650 MPs to try to squeeze into the Chamber, which has seating for only 400. That, presumably, is not unsafe, but no one can stand to watch a football match in a safe standing area, because it would be deemed unsafe.