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Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. For a review of FIFA to have any meaning, there needs to be a fully independent investigation into all the allegations made. Transparency International, which conducted a report for FIFA, said that this should be the first step towards cleaning up FIFA. It should involve people from outside the organisation and from different walks of life—perhaps judges, people in politics and people with experience of governance in other sporting institutions—who could take the lead and have the power to initiate their own investigations, produce their own reports and do so in public. FIFA has set up a taskforce to look at good governance within FIFA. I think that that needs to move faster and that it should consider commissioning people from outside the organisation to lead the investigations internally. That is absolutely key. We know of the concerns expressed by some of the judges who have served on FIFA's ethics committee. In January one of Germany's most respected judges, Günter Hirsch, left the committee in disgust and said:"““The events of the past few weeks have raised and strengthened the impression that responsible persons in Fifa have no real interest in playing an active role in resolving, punishing and avoiding violations against ethic regulations of Fifa.””" These are legitimate areas of public concern, and it is legitimate for Parliament to take an interest in them too. FIFA has taken some steps forward in the past few weeks. The idea that the location of the World cup should be decided not by an elite few people in the game, but by representatives of every FIFA member, is a step in the right direction. However, widespread investigations are needed into all the allegations of corruption made so far, so that there can be a clean slate. There has to be greater transparency in the work of FIFA and in how its money is spent, particularly in developing football countries around the world, so that it can be audited and publicly accounted for, just as the work of Parliament or the Government is. The backgrounds of people who serve on international bodies such as FIFA should be clear. If they have any conflicts of interest those should be made clear, as is the case for a member of the Government or a Member of Parliament. If they have financial interests, or their family members have financial interests, in football, it should be on the public record. Any pounds spent by FIFA anywhere in the world should be accounted for. We should know where they go. That is what is required to put football's governing body back on an even keel and to restore faith in it. However, because of how it is constituted, that change has to be driven by FIFA and Sepp Blatter. The pace of that change and reform must be greatly accelerated, and it must have a degree of transparency that it simply does not have now. The Council of Europe, and the UK's chairmanship of it, could consider that matter as part of the work of the Council's sub-committee on youth and sport. We should debate those issues within that forum, alongside its work on other areas of ethics in sport, particularly match fixing, as I mentioned earlier. It should produce its own report and view to add to the external pressure that must be placed on FIFA, if the necessary reforms are to be put in place and we are to have confidence in FIFA as a world governing body. That would be an incredibly important and popular thing for the Council of Europe to do, and a great way for the UK's chairmanship to demonstrate its commitment to ethics and sport, as well as the other important areas of work that the Minister outlined.