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Football Governance

I will endeavour to do as well as the right hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) in keeping to time. I declare an interest as a founder of the Fulham Supporters Trust, which was long before I ended up in this place. I have knowledge and awareness of the issue from being involved in and running that trust, with a huge amount of support and guidance from Supporters Direct, which is a superb organisation that should valued. I hope that when the football authorities respond to the Minister, they will properly have taken into account its proposals on licensing, which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) dealt with in some detail—I will not repeat them. I unashamedly stand here to talk about the interests of supporters. Whatever the future licensing regime, it is imperative that it involves and incorporates the views of supporters, who are in many cases the lifeblood of the clubs in which they are involved. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), and the other Committee members on the report; it is fantastic. He is obviously chairing a very high-profile Committee, which has lots of other issues to deal with. The report is at least as important as—if not more important—anything else that the Committee has done this Parliament. It is crucial that we deal with the issue, and I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to Alan Keen. I knew him for a long time before I entered the House; I used to see him when Fulham played Middlesbrough, and he was unfailingly cheerful even after we had beaten them. His work for the all-party group on football in years gone by helped to develop the awareness in Parliament of some of the issues in football ownership that have led us to where we are now, so it is absolutely right that those tributes have been paid. There have been ownership issues at many clubs. I was thinking earlier that we could go through a list and find very few that have not had concerns about ownership to deal with at some point, but it is striking that, with very few exceptions, most have survived. I contend that in many cases they have managed to do so due to the involvement of supporters, not all the way through in running the clubs, but because they have got involved when everyone else has walked away. We see that again and again through football history. The most prominent early example of that is probably Charlton Athletic in the early to mid 1980s, when they were effectively left homeless and nomadic. It was the fans' involvement in the Valley party and everything else that eventually got them back to the Valley and into a sustainable position where they became a very renowned community club, as they still are, even though they have fallen a couple of divisions on the field.