Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Sexism and inequality in football, HC 830
Wednesday 18 January 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 18 January 2023.
Members present: Caroline Nokes (Chair); Elliot Colburn; Carolyn Harris; Kim Johnson; Rachel Maclean; Kate Osborne and Ms Anum Qaisar.
Questions 28 - 98
Witnesses
I: Shaista Aziz, Co-Director, The Three Hijabis; and Jacqui Oatley MBE, Broadcaster.
II: Anna Deignan, Director of Fans and Development, English Premier League; Kuljit Randhawa, Head of Diversity, English Premier League; Kelly Simmons, Director of the Women's Professional Game, Football Association; and Ben Wright, Director of External Affairs, Professional Footballer's Association.
Witnesses: Shaista Aziz and Jacqui Oatley.
Q28 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this afternoon's meeting of the Women and Equalities Committee and our inquiry into sexism and inequality in football. I thank our first panel of witnesses, Shaista Aziz and Jacqui Oatley, for being with us this afternoon. Members of the Committee will ask you questions in turn; they will usually indicate which of you they wish to answer. If, at any point, either of you wish to come in, please do indicate. Jacqui, if you put your hand up, either electronically or physically, I will be able to see you. Apologies, I have just referred to you as Jacqui; are you both content that I use your first names?
Shaista Aziz: Yes.
Jacqui Oatley: Yes, absolutely.
Q29 Chair: Thank you very much. As part of this inquiry, we have both heard from and taken evidence from broadcasters and players. The picture we have is that, despite the Lionesses’ success last year, football is still reasonably gendered. I am going to start with Jacqui; do you think that enough is being done to challenge the notion that football, as well as other traditionally male gendered sports, is more suited to boys than girls? Are we successfully fighting back against that?
Jacqui Oatley: Yes, it is a very good and broad question, which asks who should be doing the challenging. The simple answer is everybody—all of us: men, women, parents, teachers, governing bodies, governance and Governments as well. This is, of course, about being positive and finding solutions rather than focusing on the past, but we have to acknowledge it and work out why we are having this session now. Why is there a situation whereby women, specifically, have been discriminated against in football? We all know that football was effectively banned for 50 years and that is also the reason why there are so many sexist, outdated views held by so many people of a certain age. I do believe that it is largely people of an older generation, who grew up in that era of having wives, sisters and daughters who were not interested in football because, frankly, they were not encouraged to be. This is the case in this country and in certain others, but it is not everywhere. I do a lot of work in the United States, and it is something of an eye opener for me, having commentated for a US audience this summer; they do not see women as inferior when it comes to football. Far from it, it is almost more of a women’s sport than men’s over there. It is only ingrained in us because of our history and culture.
Yes, there are other areas of society which are sexist and where women are discriminated against, but so much can be done within the world of football to challenge that discrimination, which will have a wider influence. Specifically, in answer to your question, everyone should be doing the challenging of it. Anecdotally, I am told that fewer women will feel comfortable at an away match because of the aggression, and surveys confirm this. When those minority of women are discriminated against, we need to have male allies challenging it. When it comes to school, if there are only boys playing then, frankly, change it. I know that the FA are trying to make sure that women and girls are included as openly as boys are—
Q30 Chair: Can I interrupt you on that, Jacqui? You said “Governments”. Should the DfE be more determined, or should it be left to the schools to decide whether they are going to provide football for girls?
Jacqui Oatley: It is about equality, not just football. I have spoken to the Association for Physical Education, for example, to get a broader perspective on this; they agree that football is important, but there are 56 other sports, all competing to get that time in the classroom. We are all quite football biased, but it is a case of equality—of enabling girls to play. Lotte Wubben-Moy, of Arsenal and England, encouraged her Lionesses gold medal-winning teammates to send a letter to the Government asking them to ban inequality in this matter.
If I may give an example of how I think this can be helped; I asked my eight-year-old son, his classmates and his primary school teacher about this subject yesterday. His teacher said that she would feel more comfortable encouraging girls to play football if she herself was upskilled, in the way that the FA Tesco Skills programmes offered a few years ago. The girls themselves said, yes, they like playing, but only with girls, because the boys hare around at a hundred miles an hour. Give them those options, upskill the teachers and encourage girls to feel comfortable playing in the playground, and it will all snowball from there.
Q31 Chair: Thank you. Shaista, you have a phenomenally long history of being a fan. What do you feel are the barriers encountered as a fan, either by you or other women from different communities?
Shaista Aziz: Football is a reflection of wider society, and sadly it has been used very effectively as a tool of patriarchy for decades. Sadly, it has also been used to fuel racism, far right activity and misogyny as well. To be fair, it has also been used to fuel the bringing together of people. For example, many football clubs, up and down the country, are doing incredible work to support people in their communities who are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, with Fans for Foodbanks, etc. There are two sides to this; as a minoritised woman, as a British Muslim who wears the hijab—the head scarf—I have not always felt safe on the streets because of the rise of Islamophobia and racism. This is also because I do not very often see women in those spaces who look like me. I am really happy to tell you that I do think that is changing; it is changing very, very slowly, but it is important to recognise change. It is great that this session is happening, and alongside looking at the darker and uglier side of football, we should also recognise the change.
Two years ago, I took my mum, a British Pakistani woman who wears shalwar kameez, to her first ever football match. I took her to Wembley with my nephews, who are 10 years old, to watch the Lionesses. I will honestly tell you that I would not feel comfortable taking my family to watch an England men's match, even now, because I would be feeling very, very concerned. I would be in a heightened state of alert about their safety and wellbeing, and that is not based on figments of my imagination; it is based on well-documented evidence of what sometimes happens in football grounds. We have just had the men’s World Cup, and there are many issues around where it was held and equality, but one thing that I do think they got right was stopping the sale of alcohol inside grounds. That is a really important thing that football should implement if it really is serious about ensuring that football is inclusive for everyone—a safe space. We know that when alcohol, violence and macho-masculine cultures collide it is a disaster, and primarily it is a disaster for women. We know, for example, that when the England football team plays, very horrifically, domestic violence starts spiking, and that has not changed for decades. I am a big fan of football, and I firmly believe that all fans have the right to access football. In terms of the work of The Three Hijabis, some of the moments that make us most proud is when women, particularly minoritised women, contact us saying, “I did not think I could go to football; now I feel like I can.” This has happened quite a lot over the last year and a half.
Q32 Chair: I am going to ask you a really specific and quite current question. You have said that football can fuel racism and misogyny. How do you feel about comments that say unconscious racism is only banter?
Shaista Aziz: I am absolutely disgusted and horrified by the fact that the FA, the custodians of our national football teams, sees fit to put out statements that make absolutely no sense and are deeply offensive. Obviously, I am talking about John Yems, the Crawley Town manager, who has been suspended by the Football Association because of things that he has said. I would like to take a minute to read some of these out, because I want to make it very clear that what is being described here is so triggering and so harmful for so many people, including people in this room. This is a professional person and these are the kind of things I had to hear when I was a kid in the playground: describing Muslim members of his team as “terrorists”; deliberately mispronouncing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name to specifically focus on the N word; racial stereotypes about African players; telling Muslim players that they are possibly terrorists—“You could blow yourself up”; telling an Iraqi youth international that they might blow up a stadium; it goes on and on. One specific thing was calling one player a “curry muncher”. I used to be called a curry muncher when I was at school, when I wanted to play football; I have nieces and nephews who are still being called this.
We need to understand that, very, very sadly, racism is fully mainstream across the world, including in our country, as is misogyny. For the FA to say this racism is unconscious bias is absolutely farcical. What we want the FA to do is to start talking about anti-racism; indeed, society needs to start talking about anti-racism and not unconscious bias because that is just fluff.
Q33 Chair: We have seen that response to, what seemed to me to be, quite conscious racism. What confidence can you have, as a woman, that if the FA is not going to tackle racism, it is going to tackle misogyny?
Shaista Aziz: I do not have any confidence. I have to be very clear; we strive to be fair in our criticism. Thus far, in our work as The Three Hijabis, we have found the FA to be very problematic in relation to getting answers. We have written to them; we have tried to respond to them. The men’s EURO2022 competition was taking place in our country and England got to the finals; after the horrific levels of racism that our three young black England players were subjected to, myself and two other British Muslim women, Amna and Huda, who are sitting behind me, launched a petition calling on the Government, technology companies and the FA, to work together to ban racists for life from football. In less than 24 hours, we had 1 million signatories; we currently have 1.2 million signatories.
We have a massive constituency of people who believe that football should be an anti-racist space. We had to constantly email the FA trying to get a response from them and eventually we were given a meeting with them. To be fair to them, it was during a time when Covid-19 restrictions were being lifted, so it was not necessarily easy to organise meetings straight away, but there was a level of disrespect and deep levels of defensiveness shown in that meeting. This statement from the FA is a reflection of that defensiveness. I would not blame anybody out there who looks at what is going on in relation to this current story and thinks that the FA is institutionally racist, because an organisation such as the FA should be doing far better than this nonsense. The other thing I want to put on record is the Islamophobic elements to this story are horrifying; we must recognise Islamophobia is also a form of racism despite it often being ignored.
Q34 Chair: You were calling for racists to be banned from football for life. Should John Yems be banned for life?
Shaista Aziz: We believe in compassion, and that people should be given routes to learn and change their ways. The reason why we want to start with a lifetime ban is because, quite frankly, not enough has been done historically. In the last season alone, there has been a massive spike in violence in grounds, with goalkeepers and managers being attacked; this is completely disgraceful and unacceptable. The police have gone on record to say that this is being fuelled by cocaine and other drug usage, and we do not want to turn the clock back to the 1980s. My parents have told me that they would often not want to leave the house when the England team were playing, because they were scared that they would be attacked by violent racists; we do not want to be back there. We have to look at the cultures around the game and understand that, in 2023, the FA’s response to this incident—saying that this manager is not a racist—is just unacceptable. It does nothing to give confidence to minorities, or indeed any decent person who loves football, that the FA is going to get a grip and make changes.
Q35 Chair: Thank you. I am sorry; I have drifted away from the questions I was planning to ask. Firstly, we took evidence from previous witnesses about the challenges around making sure that enough girls from black and other ethnic minority communities had opportunities to play. How did you feel watching the Lionesses squad, which was lacking in black players?
Shaista Aziz: Very, very disappointed. I was lucky enough to go to the opening match and also to the final. It was wonderful to see families and children in very friendly atmospheres at Wembley and at Old Trafford, etc. There was diversity there, without shadow of a doubt, but there was not enough diversity in the stadium; there certainly was not on the pitch. Again, the response is always very, very defensive; there is an issue in our country where racism is denied constantly. It is being denied politically and in many other spheres of our lives as well. We need to have a sophisticated, grown-up conversation about what racism is. Sometimes people think that racists have horns growing out of their head; they do not. We have to understand that the way society has been set up means that if you are not going around holding views that are potentially racist, particularly if you are from the majority group, that is quite exceptional. We can all be on a journey; for example, as a woman of colour, of south-Asian heritage, I need to challenge anti-blackness in my community. I need to challenge myself in relation to my racist view; this is what all of us need to do.
Q36 Chair: Jacqui, coming back to you. It was a big day on 1 December, when there was finally a female referee in a World Cup match. Is there also a problem with women reaching the highest ranks of refereeing and other official positions?
Jacqui Oatley: It all comes back to the backdrop and the history in this country; why on earth you would put yourself in that situation? Traditionally, in the days when I used to go every week, home and away, fans standing on the terraces were subjected to all sorts of abuse. When you hear what the male referees were called in those days, is it any surprise that we do not have, or have not had, a huge number of female officials? We can think of what Amy Rayner, now Amy Fearn, had to put up with in the Championship when she was officiating as an assistant referee at Kenilworth Road, with Mike Newell saying, “This is Championship football, what are women doing here?” Is it then really a huge surprise that after actions such as that we did not get a huge platter of women saying, “Oh, I quite fancy putting myself in that situation”?
A lot of this is cultural; it is about how we feel being part of football. I have to say that in the 32 plus years since I started going to football, enormous strides have been made. Yes, people will say that it is not enough; okay, but we are heading in the right direction with having all female officials at the women’s World Cup and having a team of officials at the men’s World Cup. I strongly believe that it is not always where you are that matters, it is the direction that you are heading in and the rate at which you are going that really matters. The culture is certainly changing around women in football. I became a board member of an organisation in its infancy, over 15 years ago, which formed to challenge this kind of discrimination. We were all individuals in our world in those days, be it the individual official on the pitch, in the press room, dressing room or individual commentator, in my case. Thanks, in part, to women in football, that community is growing and we feel more a part of the sport. Much more is being done by the FA and PGMOL to try to encourage female officials. I commentate for Sky on the Barclays Women’s Super League matches at weekends, and seeing these groups officiate—not exclusively, men do officiate as well—can only be a positive thing. The visibility of female officials on the touchline, on television and elsewhere, will hopefully encourage more women to feel that they belong in football.
Personally, I do not agree with the saying, “If you cannot see it, you cannot be it.” I believe that if you cannot see it, you should be it anyway. This is not necessarily easy to do, but we need to keep pushing ourselves in the direction that we want to go in. If a little girl is growing up feeling that she wants to become a match official, there are now avenues for her to do so. Frankly, they do not have enough match officials full stop, so we have to get as many diverse people, from all walks of life, to fill the roles which are desperately needed, not just white males.
Chair: Thank you. Can I turn to Anum Qaisar, please?
Q37 Ms Qaisar: Thank you, Chair, and thank you Shaista and Jacqui, for joining us today. Shaista, you spoke really powerfully about your intersectional experiences, not just as a woman, but a woman of colour, and you also wear the hijab, which makes you identifiably Muslim. We have heard anecdotally, and also in Committee, that, very often, football grounds are made for male players and fans. Over the years, what facilities have you seen that have improved the football experience for women, and if you had the opportunity, what facilities would you like to see introduced?
Shaista Aziz: I have already mentioned that The Three Hijabis would like to see the Premier League and the FA working on introducing a ban on alcohol being served in grounds across the country. We believe that this is important because, at the end of the pilot, this could provide data to show that there has been an increase in diversity of attendance, especially amongst women. To be extremely clear, we have to talk about all women, not just white women. It is not good enough to say that we have women going through the ranks of football, if all the women look the same. A ban on alcohol would go a long way to building confidence and cutting out some of the ugly behaviours that, sadly, football is known for.
As Jacqui has said, in the last few years a lot of progress has been made and it is important that it is acknowledged here. A number of clubs have, for example, introduced prayer rooms, quiet spaces to make neurodivergent fans feel more welcome, and have also taken action to encourage members of the LGBTQI+ community; that is really, really important and we welcome that. When I took my mum to Wembley, who uses a walking stick, people could not do enough for her. Many of the officials were calling her “auntie,” which I thought was really lovely and she appreciated too. However, that was a Lionesses game; it had a very different vibe. This type of change should be unapologetically embraced by football across the board and clubs should go out their way to communicate that this is a type of atmosphere that they want in their grounds; they should do it in a really positive way and be really open about it.
Q38 Chair: Can I interject? You took your mum to a Lionesses game at Wembley; would you have taken her to a men's game?
Shaista Aziz: No, Caroline, I would feel too nervous to do that. To be very clear, my mum is far feistier than I could ever be, but I would not feel safe. In the back of my mind, I would be on high alert; I would be focusing on trying to ensure that nothing happened, rather than on the game.
Chair: Thank you. Sorry Anum, back to you.
Q39 Ms Qaisar: I laughed when you said that your mum is very feisty; it is a Pakistani mum thing. As you can tell from my accent, I am from Scotland, where alcohol is not sold to be drunk at football matches. I am really interested in what you said about prayer rooms, as it sounds as though this inclusivity would actually help everyone who is a football fan, not just women. Would you agree?
Shaista Aziz: Yes, I totally agree. I have been at football grounds where I have heard the most horrific racist chanting, and I have looked around to see if anybody wants to say anything; nine times out of 10, they do not. I have then made a conscious decision that, for once in my life, I am not going to say anything either, because I do not feel safe in doing so. To be fair, this was a while ago, but it still happens. It happens on the way to stadiums, on the underground and on the bus; it is not just about the experience inside the football ground. Perhaps it happened more in the 1980s and 1990s, because football stadia are getting bigger and are now being built outside of those traditional working class communities, but there are still grounds where, if you speak to any minoritised community, they will tell you that they often do not feel safe to go out on a match day. Women, both older and younger, will be told, “Be careful, the match is on today, so go and do what you need to do before the match starts.” That still happens.
Q40 Ms Qaisar: Thank you so much, Shaista. Of course, there are organisations like Show Racism the Red Card but, clearly, so much more still needs to be done.
Jacqui, I am going to ask you the same question; in your experiences over the years as a broadcaster, have facilities improved for women, and what facilities would you like to see improved in the coming years?
Jacqui Oatley: Yes, it is fair to say that facilities have vastly improved since 1990. I remember, when I first used to go to football, going to Vicarage Road, where there was one female toilet in the away end; there was no light, no lock, no toilet seat or toilet paper, and I was just grateful that there was a toilet, frankly. Things have changed hugely. It is very easy to put football into one big homogenous box, but there are the Premier League and the Championship, which are two of the biggest leagues in the world, certainly in Europe. Then, there are the lower leagues, which do not necessarily have brand-new, purpose-built stadia. Facilities have definitely changed for the better for women. I will quite often go to a toilet now, in the brand-new, purpose-built stadia, and it has female sanitary products on offer for free; that was absolutely unheard of, back in the day. I used to just be grateful for a toilet seat a lot of the time.
Sometimes, when I am dashing up to the gantry, I just have to go to the nearest toilet and it can be quite frustrating to be queueing, just before kick-off, for one of maybe two toilets in a very old stadium—naming no names—that do not have facilities for women. I also quite often hear about men using those facilities, because obviously there are many more men at these games; when the queues for the men’s toilets become long, they will dive into the women’s. Whenever new stadia are being built, there has to be a consultation to ensure that they have enough female toilets with doors and locks. Even with older stadia, there needs to be a consultation with the fans, asking what they want, what their issues are, and what bothers them on a match day. Being asked by a club, “How are we doing; what can we do to improve and to make your match day experience better?” This would go some way to making women feel better.
In terms of sexist chanting, it is different for me because I am no longer on a terrace every week. I was talking to somebody today, who is very prominent in equality in football, and she says she does not go to away matches as much anymore. I was shocked, because she is a feisty lass, so I thought she had been going for so long that she would be able to deal with away supporters, where the atmosphere tends to be better for die hard supporters. She said, “No way, it is just not worth it, it is so aggressive. It can be so unpleasant that I sometimes cannot get my friends to come to home games with me because of the way they are made to feel, filing into small areas and sometimes with men making them feel very uncomfortable, both physically and making comments, as well as the chanting, which goes unreported.”
I do not think it is an easy situation to fix. When chants about “lady parts” are used with a view to making that club and fans feel emboldened against the opposition supporters, it is not going to make the women standing or sitting alongside them feel great about life. I believe there is a lot more that clubs themselves can do on that front to embrace and communicate with their female fans.
Q41 Ms Qaisar: You were speaking about toilets. Is it common practice to go to a football stadium and find facilities there to change a baby’s nappy, for example?
Jacqui Oatley: No.
Q42 Ms Qaisar: We are talking about making football more family-friendly. Is that something that you would come across?
Jacqui Oatley: No, not very often at all. Again, some of the modern stadia have had these consultations and have thought of pretty much everything. You go to Brentford's ground—by the way, what a great club that is on every level—and it is just fantastic, with the diversity, the inclusion and the way people feel about their local club. They are a real benchmark for other clubs to follow, frankly.
I spoke to a Chelsea fan who I have been friends with for about 20 years now. She has been going way longer than that. She had a baby about 15 years ago. She was talking about this secret creche they had at Stamford Bridge that she did not really want people to know about at the time because she did not want it to get oversubscribed. Imagine that: if you have babies, on a match day, you could drop them off and then still go to a match. And for men as well, by the way; it is not just a woman's job to look after a baby on a Saturday while they go to the football.
This is important. When we are talking about issues such as parenting, it should not just be about women, it should be about dads as well. My husband could not be a more hands-on dad, and loads of my kids' dads are very similar as well. They love sport, they love football, and they still want to go. How great if their kids can play on a match day and play with each other while the parents are in the ground enjoying the football.
It is a wider situation. It is a bigger issue. It is not just about, “Let us target this situation; let us target that situation.” It is about how fans feel on a match day and how included and how welcome they feel. Also, if something does go wrong and if there is an issue of discrimination, do they know how to report it, and how will it be dealt with if they do report it?
Ms Qaisar: It sounds like there is a disparity between larger clubs and smaller clubs.
Q43 Chair: Shaista, can I take you back to the question of alcohol? In the fan-led review, Tracey Crouch recommended there should be a pilot that alcohol could be sold in the National League and League Two. Would a pilot give us some hard evidence as to whether it was causing a problem in those lower leagues, or would that be a dangerous thing to do?
Shaista Aziz: I do not think it is a dangerous thing at all. It is a wise thing to do. It is important to evidence the possibility of making constructive change in football. The abuse of alcohol is a factor in violence in society across the board. It is definitely a factor in violence against women and girls, where it is used as an excuse. Like I said, the evidence over many years shows that there is a correlation in that when the England national football team plays and they lose, there is a spike in recorded domestic abuse. I would think it is hard for anyone to dispute that.
I believe this pilot would give clubs across the board more confidence to take the steps they know they need to take but are unwilling to do so because of the potential backlash they fear could come their way. It would give them the green light to be braver and bolder in tackling the issues they must tackle.
Chair: Thank you. I was going to move on to Rachel, but I will go to Elliot.
Q44 Elliot Colburn: Thank you very much, Chair. I would like to ask a bit more about governance and regulation to you both. In the current structure of football governance, Shaista, is it clear who is responsible and accountable for promoting diversity and inclusion? If not, is creating a new statutory regulator the best way to tackle that?
Shaista Aziz: That is a very good question. In the time that we established ourselves as a campaigning group focusing on anti-racism and inequalities in football, we have seen the buck constantly being passed around, and this happens far too often. Let us be frank here. There is the Equalities Act and there is plenty of legislation out there. When there is transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, all sorts of abuse taking place, there are plenty of laws that could be used to tackle that. It is whether there is actually a will inside these institutions to move things forward.
One of the things that must happen very quickly is there needs to be an independent body to take care of these types of cases, because what we have found so far is the FA, frankly, is not up to the game, not up to the job. In terms of the way this high-profile case has been reported so far, it gives people no confidence whatsoever. There has to be action. Action needs to be taken.
Elliot Colburn: Thank you. Jacqui, same question to you.
Jacqui Oatley: About governance?
Q45 Elliot Colburn: Yes. Is it clear, and do you think a regulator would help make it clearer?
Jacqui Oatley: I hosted a session on this with Gary Neville and Rick Parry, chair of the EFL. I know they are very much in favour of an independent regulator. There are arguments on both sides for it.
You will hear from the Premier League and the FA later on this. There are a lot of people who believe football has had its opportunity to govern itself, and it has not worked. There are a lot of people who would argue for that independent regulator. It is not clear who that would be or how that would work. The issue with football is there is so much self-interest. Football is riddled with self-interest. If you put anybody in charge of anything, and they know the people that they are involved with, just look at the police situation in the last couple of days and calls for an independent governing body there. A lot of people are in favour of it in football. I have heard a lot of people who are very keen for that to happen.
You will hear the other side from the FA later. It is not something I am keen to get too caught up on in terms of governance, because as a broadcaster I work with everybody, and the FA do a huge amount of positive work which does not get reported. There is a huge amount that they do, but the independent regulator is maybe for somebody else.
Having spoken to the chief executive of Women in Football earlier, I would say there is a lack of data that we have in terms of diversity, of boardrooms, and how diverse those boardrooms are. It would be really helpful if somebody independent were to gather that data. I know clubs are inundated with surveys, and they will be rolling their eyes, "Oh, another survey. We have to tick a box here as to how many non-white straight male directors we have," but somebody needs to gather this data so that we have a better idea.
It is not about producing league tables and pointing fingers at clubs because nobody wants to be bottom of that table, but it is a case of saying, where are we in football with this diversity? How diverse are the people who are governing our game and the people who are in charge of our local community clubs? If we find that the vast majority, as we suspect, are straight white males, how good is that for football as a whole?
I would very much encourage people to look up the McKinsey report, Diversity Wins, from a couple of years ago. That provides evidence as to why diversity at boardroom level is essential for an organisation, not just for the people working in it but also for the people who have anything to do with it. In football's case, the supporters as well as the people working in those clubs would make more money as organisations, as proven in that report by McKinsey.
That is not just hearsay. It is not a case of, let us be more diverse because it is nice and it makes people feel included. It is really important for governance. That way hopefully, moving forwards, we have a diverse board in the way that Brentford does. Again, I refer to them because they have gone out of their way to specifically tackle diversity at boardroom level and to recruit very diverse but highly skilled people, not diverse for the sake of it but people with skillsets that can help that club, its supporters and the people working there. When we see a successful case such as Brentford, then it makes us think, what is happening at other clubs and at other organisations? How diverse are they? Let us improve football by taking that route initially of cracking down on asking the question, how diverse are you? Then giving clubs and organisations the tools to be able to recruit highly skilled people of a diverse background.
Elliot Colburn: Thank you both very much.
Q46 Chair: Thank you. Shaista, you have referenced some of the chanting that you have heard and some of the racist and Islamophobic abuse. How effective do you feel that football authorities have been in tackling that? As a hijab-wearing Muslim woman, how confident are you that you would know who to report it to?
Shaista Aziz: I would not know who to report it to beyond calling the police, but we have to be a little bit careful here. Cricket has done a similar thing where it produced an app where you can report abuse, but what happens when the abuse is reported? That is the question. Last summer I was at Edgbaston where there were horrific levels of racism at the England/India game. On the way out, I was racially abused. I was not expecting that. I was referred to with the P word again, so the kind of language I heard at school. Other people who were racially abused went public about it. They said they reported it on the app and nothing happened.
The point here is, we live in a society where often there is a kneejerk reaction that we must create more systems, while what we need to do is make sure that action is going to be taken. You can create as many systems as you want, but if you are not willing to go there and tackle these issues—that is really deep, hard work—then it does not matter how many apps you produce or how much publicity and raising awareness you do about reporting abuse. Not much is going to change.
One of the main things that needs to change is, if you are in a stadium and you are hearing racist abuse, it should not be left to the person who is being targeted to go and report it. Everyone should be reporting it. It is everyone's business to do this.
One other quick thing. I agree with you, Jacqui, to a point, but when it comes to collecting data on racism and oppression, this is something that happens all day long. Minorities are constantly surveyed, questions are constantly asked and reports are constantly produced. Again, I am not picking on Jacqui. I agree with all you are saying. I am just putting in the wider context. We need to move things on. If a club has never appointed a black person in a senior role in the last 30 years, why not? It does not matter how many surveys and how much information we gather; those facts still remain. Something is fundamentally wrong there.
Q47 Chair: Thank you. Jacqui, would you feel confident if you were to be the victim of sexual harassment or abuse at a football match you would know who to report it to? Shaista just made an excellent point that we all need to call it out and we all need to be prepared to report it. Do you think those around you would report sexist abuse that you faced?
Jacqui Oatley: I think so now. I feel emboldened now, as do people around. Again, having been part of Women in Football for over 15 years, I absolutely would now. Going back to 20, 30 years ago when I was travelling around to games, no, absolutely not, because there were no Women in Football and I did not know anything about Kick It Out back then. I did not know people there. Whereas now, I would pick up the phone to Troy Townsend at Kick It Out and tell them what had happened, but that is because I am lucky enough to be a journalist who works with and knows all these different people.
As a broadcaster, I absolutely would, but I would also have the confidence now to challenge it at source. That is not the case for lots of people. That is not the case maybe for people who are new to football. Twenty years ago, when I changed career to do this job, I was just grateful to work in it. I was very much a minority. Nobody else was commentating that I knew from a female persuasion. It was very much a case of, you fit in with the culture that is already there that is set, and it is a male culture.
Gradually, I have had to find a way—I can imagine it might be similar in politics, Caroline, I am not sure—to deal with a situation whereby you do not just retreat within yourself. You do not think, "Well, this is just the way it is. I have to just fit in with them." You have to challenge things. You have to try and change things. The same with reporting of women's football. It was very hard to get anybody to cover it all those years ago. Nobody was interested. Nobody wanted to know, but you do not just go, "Okay, nobody likes women's football. Nobody thinks it is worth reporting on you." You challenge it.
It is really important from a wider point of view for a fan going to football for the first time, or a female who is maybe younger or older and has always experienced it and has never felt they could report it, now needs to be the time we go, "You must report it." As Shaista says, very importantly, you need to know that something is going to be done about it. You need to know what the pathways are after that and what is going to happen after you have reported it.
I downloaded the Kick It Out app earlier to see how it works. I was not aware how it worked before, that you put in the game where you feel you saw discrimination or you witnessed it, where that person was, what stand, etc. I would hope that it is widely transmitted and that people know it is there, and as Shaista said, that there will be recriminations and that person will at least be investigated, but I have had to call the police before.
Chair: Thank you. Rachel.
Q48 Rachel Maclean: Thank you, Chair. Shaista, thank you for coming here. We understand the Premier League has recently introduced consent training for players and staff. It is now mandatory, which sounds like a really good thing, on sexual consent, bullying and harassment. Do you have a view on how effective that is? Do you think all clubs and staff, not just Premier League, should be adopting it?
Shaista Aziz: I agree with you, it is a very positive step in the right direction. We applaud the Premier League for implementing that training. The Three Hijabis alongside Violence Against Women and Girls Coalition and Level Up launched a campaign in February last year. We wrote an open letter to the Premier League and the FA calling on them to implement consent training across all Premier League clubs, including all members of staff. We also called on them to ensure that any player who is accused of sexual or gender-based violence is suspended while an investigation is carried out. We called for this to happen in a similar way to what happens in the US. The third ask we had was to call on the FA and the Premier League to work with academies.
Society has a misogyny problem. The last 48 hours, in relation to the revelations around the Metropolitan Police, have been utterly devastating, primarily for women and girls but for anyone who is a decent member of society. It shows that these cultures are part and parcel of society, and they need to be tackled. If an organisation or institution is not willing to tackle it, it will just get worse and worse.
We applaud the Premier League for introducing this consent training. The challenge we have for the Premier League is we would like to know who is going to implement this training. We have tried to find out, but there is not enough transparency around who the trainers will be. We want to ensure that they are Violence Against Women and Girls practitioners, because they are the professionals who should be implementing the training. We would also like to know which are the main clubs that are going to start rolling this out voluntarily. There are a number of clubs, which I am not going to name here, who have high-profile players who have been accused of very serious crimes.
Chair: We have to be very careful about what we say.
Shaista Aziz: Exactly, this is what I am saying. Those clubs should be vocal as a starting point, and they should be working with the Violence Against Women and Girls practitioners and the Premier League. They should be open and transparent about it. They should vocalise and articulate that this is what they are doing, because it will encourage their fan base to go off and find out more about these issues as well.
Q49 Rachel Maclean: Just to be clear, you are not aware of any club that has actually implemented this, despite them saying that they will do? Or is it not clear whether they have or not?
Shaista Aziz: We have asked the Premier League for more information about how this consent training will be rolled out and who it will be rolled out to, all the things I have already explained. As yet, we have not received a detailed response that provides us with the answers to those questions.
Q50 Rachel Maclean: That is concerning and no doubt something we should follow up on. Perhaps if they are listening they can help us. Obviously, you are going to agree with this. You think there is a link between misogyny and the behaviour of players and wider society and violence against women and girls. Could you say a bit more on why you think that football has a role in this?
Shaista Aziz: Footballers are role models. They are role models to many people in society: women, girls, boys, men, people. They are hero-worshipped. These are individuals who have a lot of power, a lot of wealth and a lot of prestige, as do these clubs. These are very powerful institutions. They have a duty of care, not only to the players, their club and their fans, but to wider society as well. There is a connection.
Footballers in our country do lots of brilliant work in the communities day in, day out. Some of them are not named, some of them are not as well-known as the big stars, but they do great work. A lot of men do not want to be associated with misogyny. They do not want people to think they are misogynist. They do not believe it is right to pedal this type of violence against women and girls. They need support as well.
Q51 Rachel Maclean: You said you had three asks, and the second one was about asking them to suspend their players. Have they implemented that?
Shaista Aziz: No, that has not been implemented. I may have this wrong, so apologies if I do, but my understanding is there would need to be a rule change. There would need to be some sort of change at that level for something like that to be implemented.
Q52 Chair: Is it feasible in any way that could be written into contracts? It is not currently written into contract, but in employment law it would be illegal to suspend somebody without sufficient evidence. Do you think there could be a move to see contracts changed?
Shaista Aziz: There are some legal implications around this, but they need to be investigated and looked into. All the options that are viable need to be put on the table. Then it is for football to decide, do they want to do this or not? One of the things we found in the last year and a half of working as three British Muslim women in this space is a lot of gatekeeping, a lot of unclear responses from people in football to questions that need answering. We could come up with suggestions. Basically, we are here to work with football. We want to see the game being safer for everyone. We want to see misogyny being eradicated from football as well.
Q53 Rachel Maclean: Thank you. On your third ask, which was the academies, did they respond to that ask?
Shaista Aziz: Again, I do not recall receiving a clear enough response to that. The academy is vital because this is where a lot of young talent—we are talking primarily boys but girls as well, aged eight onwards—is going through this system. When we talk about consent training, we also want it rolled out for women as well, because there are abuses of power going on in women's football as well, and women need protection too.
Rachel Maclean: Thank you very much. Thanks, Chair.
Chair: Thank you. Kate.
Q54 Kate Osborne: Thank you, Chair. Shaista, in the lead up to the World Cup a few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to go out to Qatar to speak to women that were working there, and men, many of whom were involved in the building of the stadiums. They were living in very poor conditions and they were suffering many forms of abuse. Do you think enough was done by the FA and other bodies to use their profile and platforms to amplify our commitments on the international stage in challenging racism, misogyny and homophobia?
Shaista Aziz: In a word, no. I have cousins in Pakistan, working-class men who are migrant workers. They work in the Gulf as construction workers. We know how hard they work. We know conditions they live in. It is horrific. There was some campaigning, some noise and some words that came out from football in this country about homophobia—it is essential that happened and that continues to happen—but there was no mention of Islamophobia or other forms of abuse, which was a missed opportunity.
We as The Three Hijabis wrote a proposal for a well-known anti-racism organisation that works in football, and we suggested they work with us to educate fans about Islamophobia. What is it? How does it manifest? What does it look like? What are the implications? We were told they did not have the capacity to work on it. The point here is, it is essential that the issue of LGBTQI rights is showcased and amplified, but it is also essential to look at other forms of racism and oppression as well, otherwise it looks like one matters more than the other.
I will wrap up on this one point by saying there are plenty of activists and people who are Muslim doing this work day in, day out. At times, the way the messaging was being framed, it was very Western-centric. It was very white saviour as well, which did not help anyone. In situations like this, what we need to do is pass the mic on and amplify those voices. We also need to connect it to what is going on here in the UK, where attacks against trans people are increasing and homophobic abuse in football grounds is increasing. Chants at very high-profile Premier League matches of "rent boy" and horrific things like that have been heard just in the last few weeks. We have to connect it to that as well.
Kate Osborne: Thanks very much. Thank you, Chair.
Chair: Thank you. That concludes our first panel. I thank both Jacqui and Shaista for having taken part. It has been very much appreciated. We now have to suspend the meeting before the next panel can be put in place.
Witnesses: Anna Deignan, Kuljit Randhawa, Kelly Simmons and Ben Wright.
Chair: Welcome back to the second panel this afternoon and can I thank Ben Wright from the Professional Footballers’ Association, Anna Deignan, director of fans and development at the Premier League, Kuljit Randhawa, head of diversity and inclusion at the Premier League and Kelly Simmons, director of the women's professional game from the FA. Thank you very much for coming along this afternoon to give evidence.
As the previous panel demonstrated, you will be asked questions in turn by different members of the Committee. Are you all happy to be referred to by your first names? Nods all around—brilliant. I am going to go straight to Kate Osborne, please.
Q55 Kate Osborne: Thank you, Chair, and welcome, panel. If I can ask my first question to Kelly, please. Could you give us an update on progress towards meeting your 2024 targets for women and girls’ participation in football and tell us about each of the age groups, please?
Kelly Simmons: You will be aware that we have an ambitious plan to develop the whole of the women's game through our strategy, Inspiring Positive Change, which starts with our campaign—which I think has been touched on already—that we are passionate about around ensuring girls have equal opportunities in schools. We think that is really important. Currently 67% of schools provide equal opportunities for football for boys and girls. As you will be aware through the Lionesses’ campaign, by 2024, we would like all schools to not only be providing high quality PE, but providing equal opportunities for girls and boys. We are working very hard in clusters of schools, school sports partnerships, to support schools and support teachers and leaders to provide football for girls. It is significantly growing, but we are calling on the Government to help us in terms of equal access.
We are then committed to making sure there are exit routes for all girls into the community. We have been looking at insight-led programmes to understand what girls want. We have introduced Wildcats sessions for fun and football right across the country that can then feed into girls’ clubs. We are ahead of target in terms of our growth in girls’ clubs. We have 30% of new teams since October 2021, and we are continuing to grow referees and coaches to support the growth of football in our communities. There is a lot of work going on to make sure the women and girls’ game grows following the profile of the Lionesses’ win. The profile of the Women's Super League is helping to drive change in opportunities for girls and women right across the country.
Q56 Kate Osborne: There has been a lot of support for the Lionesses’ call for girls to have access to football in school PE lessons which is something that I am personally amazed is not the case across the board. When I was at school, a few years ago now, I remember the boys did football and the girls did netball, and there was no crossover. Should there be stronger Department for Education direction about equal access for girls and boys around traditionally gendered sports?
Kelly Simmons: Yes. As you know, we fully support the Lionesses who, off their own back, wrote an open letter the day after the victory at Wembley. Society, and boys and girls, would benefit from two hours minimum of PE a week. That would give girls a great platform to enjoy all sports and we definitely want to see, as it is only fair and right, that, where boys have and have had opportunities to play what is our national sport, girls have those opportunities too. At the moment, 67% of schools are offering equal opportunities. We would like that to be 100%. We are calling on the Government to support us in that aim.
Q57 Kate Osborne: Do you think guidance should be that school sports are more generally mixed, that particularly in younger age groups the genders should mix?
Kelly Simmons: There are a greater number of schools providing equal opportunities in primary school because it is predominantly mixed provision, but it tends to be separate provision in secondary schools. The most important thing is equality of opportunity. We need to support teachers—who maybe have previously provided the sports that we grew up on, the more traditional sports that girls were signposted into—to be able to provide football. It is 2023, and the Lionesses and the success of the Women's Super League has shown the popularity of women's football. It is really important that girls have the same opportunities as boys. I cannot think of another subject at school that is gendered in that way.
Q58 Kate Osborne: Are you monitoring the diversity of girls attending your talent centres? Can you share any data?
Kelly Simmons: It has been well documented during the Lionesses’ success that there has been work to do in terms of diversifying the women and girls’ pathway. This is a big priority at the FA. There are a couple of initiatives we have put in place that are already seeing positive results. One is emerging talent centres across the country which are making the bottom end of the talent pathway much more accessible by having more centres in communities right across the country, as opposed to where they have predominantly been in boys’ academies that might be in more rural areas. We have put in place emerging talent centres.
We have also put in place a programme whereby anybody can signpost to talent, whether that is playing in mixed football, in different community football activities across the country or Discover My Talent. What we have seen from those initiatives is a big increase in terms of the diversity in terms of black, Asian or mixed heritage players in our England youth teams. In terms of some of those numbers, I can share, for example, that across England youth teams, the diversity has gone from 7% to 17%. In our under 17s, our young age group, it has gone from 5% to 36%. This shows we are definitely seeing some really positive changes in that direction.
Q59 Kate Osborne: How confident are you that will feed through to help increase the diversity of the Lionesses’ squad?
Kelly Simmons: I am confident because it was about accessibility. If you look at the men’s game, and we have listed this in the Government and Karen Carney’s review—the Government review of women's football—the central investment in academies from the Premier League and the professional football stakeholders is around £88 million. There are 92 professional men's clubs; it is a huge network, and they often have satellites sitting under them across the whole of the communities. In the women's game, the budget is £5 million and there is one fully professional women's league of 12 clubs. What happened there is that accessibility was not good enough into the talent pathway and the initiatives we have done in terms of the emerging talent centres, the review of the academy and the Discover My Talent programme, is providing more access, and we can see that in the results coming through in the England youth teams.
Q60 Kate Osborne: Thank you. Jill Scott and Demi Stokes are both Lionesses who were in the squad that won the Women's Euros. They both played for Boldon Girls. Boldon is in my constituency—the club is actually just on the border—but Jill has said in the media that she struggled to find opportunities to play football when she was younger. Do you believe there is enough being done by the Government and yourselves to promote provision for grassroots girls football and are the talent centres enough?
Kelly Simmons: In the Government review, we have put that, first of all, the opportunity starts in schools and if girls are excluded, then you are possibly turning off a generation of girls from playing football. Our first call is to work together with the Government to ensure that every girl, like every boy, has an opportunity to play football within and outside of the curriculum in schools. We are then working very hard with our partners to make sure that girls have local access through the work that we are doing with community clubs. Again, that will put pressure on facility stock. We are asking the Government again to back its statement that it would put £550 million into new and improved facilities, which is really critical.
There is some great work going on across the football stakeholders with the Government through the football foundation, but, of course, a massive growth in the girls’ game does put pressure on our grassroots facility stock. It was talked about significantly in the fan-led review and I would like to see a mechanism in the game, whether that is the women's game, being included in solidarity payments. There is definitely a requirement, which we articulate in our submission, for more investment in the talent pathway. That could be certain locked-in protected investment from Premier League and EFL clubs into the women's game. There has been significant investment in the women's first team whole performance environment. We have made some great progress and we are diversifying the talent pathway, but, of course, more investment would really help to raise the quality of the offering so that we prepare a diverse pool of young women for first team football in the Women's Super League and, of course, for England as well.
Q61 Kate Osborne: Okay, thank you. I will come back to you in a minute, but I am going to move on to Kuljit, if I can. What are the Premier League doing to ensure girls from lower income and ethnic minority backgrounds have access to clubs, academies and women's teams?
Kuljit Randhawa: The Premier League, as you know, invest nearly £30 million a year to our pro club community schemes that run across from the Premier League all the way down to National League. Within those structures, we support Premier League Kicks, Premier Leagues Inspires and also Premier League All Stars, which are programmes embedded within those local communities to engage with young women and girls. Currently, we are looking at nearly 100,000 participants annually, and we are looking to increase that figure.
Q62 Kate Osborne: Why do you think it is harder for people from within those groups to access those programmes and get involved?
Kuljit Randhawa: I have spent nearly 30 years trying to answer that question and, coming from an underrepresented community and someone who has worked in football and inclusion, I will give you my personal answer first, from when I was coaching many years ago in east London, in car parks of tower blocks with a couple of balls and a few cones due to lack of investment and everything my colleague, Kelly, has just said. There has been structural investment where we now have facilities, but we need to go a lot further in what we do. We need to make those pathways and structures and development programmes sustainable to show demonstrable change. We are going in the right direction, but there is more to do. We are fully supportive of funding infrastructure as we do through the Football Foundation but also through the Premier League Stadium Fund as well so we are linking those communities into the local clubs.
Q63 Kate Osborne: What else can be done and by whom? Is there anything the Government can do?
Kuljit Randhawa: The Government are always supportive. I know, through Sport England, that you fund the Active Through Football programme, which is run by the Football Foundation, and are looking at different ways of engaging in football. As we all know, playing the 11-sided game structure on a Sunday can be quite difficult, especially on a February rainy day, and I have done it many times. People play the sport in many different ways, and we are fully cognisant of that. A lot of football played now is small-sided football so we are looking at what the provision looks like, not just in rural settings but also in urban settings where a lot of ethnic minority people live, and looking at where, in those communities, we can develop spaces that are truly inclusive and are environments that are safe for women and girls and looking at that provision. We are doing a lot of work with the FA and with Football Foundation to make sure we provide that.
Q64 Kate Osborne: Thank you. Kelly, if I can come back to you with the same question. What is the FA doing to ensure girls from lower income backgrounds and ethnic minorities are getting involved in accessing girls’ teams and academies, etc?
Kelly Simmons: We have talked already about the work in schools which is fundamental because it is the starting point for girls. It is a big step to expect a girl who has not had an introduction to football in school to then just go and join a club, so the schools work is really, really critical in terms of football for all. However, we then have targets around the growth of women and girls’ clubs and to make sure they are accessible and being grown and developed in every community and in every County Football Association across the country. There is also the work we are doing around diversifying our coaching pool, working with a range of different community groups to make sure that football is accessible which is really, really important. Of course, that needs to be linked to the emerging talent centres as well to make those connections from school into club or community provision and into the talent centre.
Q65 Kate Osborne: You talk about maybe having more diverse coaches, but are you working within communities to try to encourage girls from ethnic minority backgrounds to get involved?
Kelly Simmons: My focus and my remit is the women's professional game, but I am very aware of the work that our FA education department are doing. I live in Brighton, and I have seen some of the great work that is going on in Sussex and around my local communities to identify and support a diverse pool of female coaches and support and equip them to go out and provide football in their community, whether that is local recreational offers, the Wildcats sessions or coaching in local clubs. There is a lot of work going on such as scholarships and mentoring placements to support a diverse pool of female coaches.
At the higher end, there is a leadership diversity code with targets that the football stakeholders have agreed and signed up to in order to make sure that we are not just championing women as coaches. There are targets around ethnicity and female coaches as well which are published every year, and the football stakeholders and the clubs are accountable for driving progress in that area. There is a lot of work going on right through that coaching pathway.
Kate Osborne: Thank you.
Chair: Can I just bring in Kim for a quick question?
Q66 Kim Johnson: Kelly, you mentioned earlier that you thought schools and the pathway to equal access to football was really important. You mentioned that 67% of schools offer equal access. I just wanted to know whether offering and delivering was the same thing.
Kelly Simmons: Yes, in this context it is. We are tracking schools that are offering football for girls and boys within the curriculum. I suppose the question is the quality of it, but 67% of schools are offering for girls and boys in terms of curriculum. As I mentioned earlier, that does vary significantly across primary and secondary, with primary probably being easier in some ways to deliver on because it is mixed PE provision. One of the elements that is really important to flag here, and something, I think, the Lionesses are calling for as well, is to make sure it is quality provision which is included in Ofsted in terms of checking the quality of the provision. It is not just about providing some football tick box; it needs to be a good quality experience for those young people.
Q67 Ms Qaisar: Thank you to the panel for joining us today. We have heard in this Committee that researchers found that, “One in five female football fans said they have experienced unwanted physical attention” when going to football matches. We have heard from witnesses, their lived experiences, about the realities of actually complaining and the process after that. However, this, arguably, stems from the very top level. I have spoken about the fans; I am interested about the footballers because, very often, male footballers are seen as role models, especially for young boys, up and down the country. Do you think it is right for players to continue to be able to play football when they have been arrested or even charged with criminal offences related to violence against women and girls? This is a question I am going to ask all panel members. I will come to you, Ben, because I am conscious of the fact that you have not spoken yet.
Ben Wright: This was touched on earlier. The first principle with this, if you remove footballers from the sentence, is that there is a legal framework around footballers as employees and the relationship they have with their employers. Employees, whether that is in the women's game or the men's game, have contractual protections and rights as every other employee does. Then, layered on top of that, there are regulations around suspensions etc, which are built into things such as the Premier League handbook, and they are very clearly governed. Ultimately, that has to be the fallback for these relationships. Clubs will have their own individual way they want to manage circumstances like that, but they always have to be fundamentally in line with the legal frameworks that are there to govern the employer and employee relationship.
The challenge we are faced with is, as you rightly say, players are role models who play a far greater role than the one that is just on the pitch in terms of how they represent the brand. This was a question that came up earlier about what is built into player contracts, so there will be things around behavioural aspects built into the standard contract that players sign. Whilst the governing principle always has to be what is legal, and I think you touched on this earlier, fundamentally, they are an employee, and they are protected by the same rights as you and I. There are regulations in place to manage suspensions of players and manage how you deal with that circumstance, but nobody is pretending it is anything other than difficult situations to manage for clubs as employers. It has to fall back to that principle of the employee and employer relationship.
Q68 Ms Qaisar: Of course, though different football clubs will have different practices. Can you name some good practices from football clubs that you have seen?
Ben Wright: I do not think I would name individual ones because it would then be very close to individual cases. Every club will approach this differently, and it would be dangerous for us to judge what is right and what is wrong. There is typically a healthy conversation with clubs and, like I said, these things are set out around players suspensions and things like the Premier League handbook, which govern those relationships. Other panellists might have a view on this question in terms of specific clubs because obviously we represent the players, but no one is pretending it is anything other than a challenging situation. Teams and clubs will typically approach this, whether a player may have been arrested or charged, by, fundamentally, coming back to that employer and employee relationship and how that is governed by law, and that has to be the first principle about how all clubs behave in those circumstances.
Q69 Ms Qaisar: I imagine the rest of the panel will probably give a similar answer in terms of legal advice however, what I am keen to hear about is good practice. You do not need to name specific football clubs, but can you tell me of good practice where we see football clubs ensuring the safety of women and girls is highlighted? Because the reality is, as I have said, footballers are seen as role models. What good practice can we see up and down the country? Anna, I will start with you.
Anna Deignan: You made a point about the match day experience for women in grounds, and I would love to touch on that a bit later as well, but one of the opportunities we have in the men's professional game is the contact time we have with young men and boys in terms of educational and other settings which gives us the opportunity to really drive behaviours and awareness in this space. Kuljit will tell us a bit more about that in a moment, but that is a fundamental responsibility. We have to use those opportunities. Clearly, these incidents are horrifying to hear about, but we have the opportunity to make a change early on in these people's lives to try to minimise the chance of these incidents happening, but I will not comment on specific club or case matters.
Kuljit Randhawa: We deliver a broad programme of life skills and under that banner is everything from mental health, EDI and also healthy relationship training, which all our academies deliver from age 14 upwards, all the way to the under 23s. The training is delivered by LimeCulture who are specialist consent and health relationships experts which has been going on for nearly eight years at our academies, so we are looking at how we support not just players, but also staff and parents within the wider context of how we look at good practice at clubs. The training is delivered across all our clubs and continues, and we are hoping that will be completed by the end of this season.
Q70 Ms Qaisar: What does that training entail?
Kuljit Randhawa: The training is segmented into different areas. At a younger age group, it is specific to them. For instance, under 14s, we look at sexual harassment, we look at sexual health but also, as the players grow, we look into the consent and healthy relationships aspect. Obviously, we have experts that deliver the core segments of the modules.
Q71 Ms Qaisar: When you say that you look at sexual harassment, what are you speaking about? What conversations are you having?
Kuljit Randhawa: I cannot give you the exact kind of content of the programmes, but they are very much small groups discussing those issues and, like I say, they are delivered by specialist organisations to our clubs.
Q72 Chair: If I am a 14-year-old in an academy, how many hours of this support do I get per week?
Kuljit Randhawa: How many hours do you get?
Chair: What does the actual delivery of this programme look like? How many hours over how many weeks? For example, if I am a 14-year-old and I do eight years, so I am now 22, I have had eight years of this. What has that added up to in total?
Kuljit Randhawa: I do not have the exact figures on me. I am happy to provide the Committee with those.
Chair: Please do, because I think we would be really interested to know exactly how intensive this support is.
Kuljit Randhawa: Okay.
Q73 Ms Qaisar: I would be interested to know how you measure the success of this training programme because it is all fair and well saying, “We do X, Y, and Z”. How do you measure the success of it?
Kuljit Randhawa: All our programmes are quality assured, so we have independent advisors to look and see whether we are delivering them appropriately and with the right duty of care. This continues within our framework of delivery of any part of that life skill programme.
Q74 Ms Qaisar: Do you think there is consistency in terms of football clubs up and down the country?
Kuljit Randhawa: I can speak for the Premier League clubs. There very much is consistency, but, as we look at the broader issue, I would imagine lots of clubs are at different paces with this work.
Q75 Ms Qaisar: Kelly, from the FA side, do you think there is consistency in terms of training or how you ensure the safety of women?
Kelly Simmons: To be honest, this has obviously been an issue which has so far been delivered through the men's professional game, so my colleagues are much better at commenting on it, but it is great that that training is taking place. In terms of the consistency of it, I just would not be able to advise.
Q76 Ms Qaisar: Anna and Kuljit, just ending with you both, just a quick yes or no, have the Premier League clubs started rolling out the mandatory sexual consent training?
Kuljit Randhawa: Yes, they have.
Q77 Ms Qaisar: Is that all clubs within the Premier League?
Kuljit Randhawa: Yes.
Ms Qaisar: Okay. Thank you.
Q78 Chair: Kelly, I am going to go back to your answer on that. Apologies, and I might give you an opportunity to talk a little bit more about something else, but do you think we should be confident across football, whether they are Premier League players or playing in all the other leagues, that there is a culture of encouraging the young men not to have sexist behaviour, misogynistic behaviour, and to treat women they encounter with respect?
Kelly Simmons: My focus is the women's professional game, and it has been well documented what has been happening in the elite women's game across the world; the NWSL, the league in America, has highlighted some dreadful and worrying practice in terms of sexual coercion and bullying, and so we have been really focused in terms of the area of the game that I am responsible for in doing a deep dive into our welfare and safeguarding provision. That has included questionnaires with the players and making sure that all the players are really clear—in terms of signposting—where they can report any of their concerns.
We have increased the amount of hours of designated safeguarding welfare officers within our women's professional clubs. As a board, we have a board champion, and, together, we have been going through a deep dive to make sure we are doing everything we think is possible to protect those players. We are currently in discussions around an independent reporting line on top of the FA reporting lines as well, working with UK Sport. Our focus has been around making sure that we protect and provide the best environment for our women professional players in an environment where men and women are working with those players.
Q79 Chair: I hope you will appreciate that you are the FA representative we have in front of us today, so given that the independent panel, and I understand it is an independent panel, who reported on the John Yems case, described blatant racism as unconscious bias and banter, should we have any confidence that the FA and its independent panels would regard a case where there was misogyny and sexual harassment against a woman as just being banter?
Kelly Simmons: It is important to go on record to say that the FA’s role is to investigate, and those charges go to an independent commission. We have come out with a statement whilst we have been sitting here today that we do not agree with the independent commission, and we are considering our legal position in that respect. We were shocked and disappointed by the findings of that independent commission and we will look at what we can do from here.
Q80 Chair: You are looking for future independent commissions. Will they be different? How much care goes into appointing those independent commissioners, one of whom is an expert—
Kelly Simmons: The FA’s regulatory arm is slightly arm’s length from the Women’s Super League and Women's Championship where I am focused. There has definitely been care and training and developments in those commissions, but they are independent. The FA will be looking at its position, and I am sure we will make subsequent statements on it.
Q81 Chair: I am sure they will. The FA has indicated they had requested a longer ban. Mr Yems has had an 18-month ban; the FA requested two years. It is not much longer, is it? Ben, do you want to come in?
Ben Wright: Yes. It is worth outlining the role that the Professional Footballers’ Association has played in that case before going forward. We go to clubs and work with players on EDI training. The players at Crawley Town came through to the Professional Footballers’ Association to take those charges forward. Our EDI team and Jason Lee—who would be well-known to a lot of people as a former footballer who works for the PFA in this space—supported those players all the way through to that process last week.
As we said in our public response at the time that verdict was handed down, we had placed a lot of importance in that verdict as something that is said to players who suffer racist behaviour, whether that is in the stadiums on a Saturday afternoon or in their work environment. There is a process here, and if you follow it through, you will be supported and it will get to a point where a verdict is given and real action can be taken.
We really wanted to use that as a benchmark to communicate to players who we are always encouraging not to allow these things to be dealt with in house and not to allow people to just be recycled in the system. Let us take the men's game; for a young man playing in a League Two football club, the degree of personal risk you perceive to be taking by standing up to authority, by taking that step to say these behaviours are not acceptable, is absolutely massive. The work that we all do to try and encourage players to know that they are supported in that process, is massive.
The ban was the ban. We can all argue about the length of that ban, but it was significant. I think it was reported as the longest ban that had ever been given. I cannot go into too much detail about the players' response to this because we are still working with the players as they consider their next steps. We knew what the defence was because we were representing the players and saw the ban, and you think, “Well, okay, they have not accepted the defence.” So to then read that they kind of have accepted the defence, and the defence was to be slightly flip about it, “It was banter.” People will find that very hard to stomach if 11 incidents were found and charges were upheld of “banter” or it was described as “misplaced jocularity”.
Part of the issue, and a long campaign that we have had at the PFA, is mandated EDI training within clubs, which is not the situation at the moment. Not only is it a healthy thing within football, which is a uniquely diverse industry, it is extremely international. There are massive age ranges, there are men and women working together, it is a uniquely diverse industry. To give an example, just of the PFA’s 5,000 members, we had members in 30 of the 32 squads who were at the world cup in Qatar.
It is a healthy thing to have those conversations to help you understand the people that you work with, your behaviours and your language. But by doing that, you also take away the idea that people can say, “Well, I was just joking, I was just bantering, I did not realise it was offensive.” You can stop that. It is very difficult for us to move from the point where you are trying to encourage players to come forward and talk about incredibly difficult experiences with what they perceive to be a very high degree of risk, where they feel that that defence of “I was just joking” has essentially been validated. Even though the charges have been upheld and a ban has been introduced, fundamentally, the idea that someone who is in a position of power can say, “I just cannot take a joke”, is not okay.
I cannot talk about next steps, for very obvious reasons, but this is damaging. A lot of work has gone into making sure players feel that they can follow that process. Feeling like you have to start again with them, to say they are going to be believed and the things are not going to be dismissed, is a significant barrier to overcome, and I would suggest that things like that do not help.
Q82 Chair: Thank you for that. I am just going to turn to the Premier League quickly, because you spoke about the training that goes on for young male players around conscious bias, around sexism, around misogyny. Should you also be making sure that there is implementation of training on unconscious bias if that is going to be a defence that is used?
Kuljit Randhawa: I am happy to take that question. Through our life skills programme we do EDI training, which covers unconscious bias already.
Chair: Thank you.
Q83 Kim Johnson: Good afternoon, panel. Can I just pick up on the point you have just made, Ben, about football being uniquely diverse? It might be uniquely diverse in terms of players on the pitch, but that is not replicated across the board, is it? In terms of coaches or the training staff on the board, management, it remains low.
Ben Wright: It is still a huge issue, and if you look at the proportional pathways from people going into the game, having a career in the game, and then moving from the game into executive roles or management or coaching or boardroom roles, it is very clear that there is a drop-off that is not acceptable.
As I am sure is the case with other organisations, we do a lot of work through programmes. On the board programmes, we work a lot with women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the game to train and equip them so they are able to go into those executive roles, but it is absolutely a problem in football, from management all the way through. Absolutely.
Q84 Kim Johnson: Thank you, Ben. The questions I have for the panel this afternoon are specifically around governance of football. I would like to know what active steps each of your organisations are actually taking to ensure women's representation on your board and senior leadership positions improve. I will start with Anna.
Anna Deignan: Yes, I am happy to begin with that. From a personal perspective—having been involved in football for many, many years in the same journey that Kelly and Jacqui describe—it is rather wonderful to be seeing something today that I never thought would be possible. The chairs of the two major football organisations in this country are women; I genuinely never thought we would get to that place. That is part of the story, clearly, and Kuljit will give some of the statistics around the senior levels in the Premier League, but there is work to be done throughout the industry.
Jacqui referenced Women in Football and Yvonne Harrison’s critical work in that area to help us diversify that workforce and, most importantly, make women feel like they can make a difference and they are welcome in this environment. That has been my experience, but I know it is certainly not the experience of every female executive in football.
Kuljit Randhawa: I am just following along from that with more detail: 42% of our staff are women, 33% of those make up the senior leadership and 50% of the board. We also break down the ethnic diverse community representation: it is 18% of our total staff, and we have targets to make sure that reaches 30% by July 2031.
Q85 Kim Johnson: Can I just ask how many black women are on the board?
Kuljit Randhawa: At the moment we just have one black man on the board.
Kim Johnson: No black women?
Kuljit Randhawa: No.
Kim Johnson: Okay. Some work to do, then.
Kuljit Randhawa: Absolutely, there is work to do.
Q86 Kim Johnson: And the same question to you, Kelly, in terms of the FA, in terms of women on the board and in senior positions.
Kelly Simmons: I have been with the FA for 30 years, and in terms of women, it has changed beyond recognition. Obviously, we have a female chair for the first time. The board is gender-diverse. The senior management team is roughly around 40% female; at one point, it was just over 50%. There are a number of women on the senior leadership team, and I believe 38% of our employees are women.
There is good gender diversity in that sense, but in a similar point that you just called out, there is clearly work to do in the Premier League in terms of ethnic diversity and gender. What I would say is that Football Association, with the Premier League and the other football stakeholders and the clubs, have launched the Football Leadership Diversity Code in 2020, and while it is not mandated, about 50 clubs have signed up. That is really important because there is absolute transparency in reporting year-on-year progress in terms of gender, black, Asian, mixed heritage diversity in leadership, in operations, and in coaching positions across the men's and women's games. That was a really powerful step forward, because there is absolute transparency. There has been some good progress made. There is clearly some work to do still, but that transparency is really helping drive that agenda.
Q87 Kim Johnson: Can I just pick up, in terms of “there is still work to do”, what work has actually been done now to move that forward? As a black MP, I constantly hear across the board that work needs to be done, but I very rarely hear what it is that is being done. Could you say a little about what is actually being done?
Kelly Simmons: In terms of Football Leadership Diversity Code, all the bodies that sign up set targets in terms of diversity across senior leadership teams and publish those, and then the football stakeholders work together on best practice recruitment. We have all come together with one single portal for advertisement of jobs, making sure jobs are being advertised with appropriate recruitment processes underpinning them. There are thousands of jobs. I do not have the numbers—I can provide them—but a lot of jobs have been going on that joint portal, a lot of diverse applicants coming in through being able to see greater transparency of where jobs are advertised in the industry right across the full range of jobs.
That transparency of annual reporting is focusing the mind to make sure that we are doing everything, whether that is initiative to support women in leadership—I am a member of the Women in Football board—whether that is the work that we are doing through our FA education department around coach placements, coach bursaries, or targeting a more diverse pool of coaches, there is work that is underpinning it to support the clubs and football stakeholders to improve and drive on and meet those targets.
Q88 Kim Johnson: Ben, did you have anything that you wanted to answer?
Ben Wright: Yes, I can provide more detailed statistics about the new organisation. Half of our operational board are from ethnic minority backgrounds, as are just under half of our elected players’ board, including black women from the WSL, and we have senior women from ethnic minority backgrounds across the organisation—one of whom you met in your last session, Fern Whelan—but we are in the middle of our diversity benchmarking exercise for our recruitment and making sure that goes from the chief executive all the way down. I will be happy to provide more detail on that.
Q89 Kim Johnson: Each of your organisations have launched a number of equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives in recent years. However, even in January 2023, we have had matches stopped due to misogynistic abuse and homophobic chanting. My next question to each of you is, do you need to step up your enforcement action in these areas? Maybe start with Kuljit.
Kuljit Randhawa: We align to those campaigns. No Room for Racism’s work on anti-discrimination is embedded within the match day through our match round work, but what underpins that is a range of work from the match day all the way through to our communities. We continue to deliver those, and we continue to look at those programmes and see how we can support what happens on a match day.
We are fully aware that football is not a panacea for societal issues, but it is a platform, and we know we can use that platform to put out really strong messages on that work, which we have done with what we do for Stonewall and the Rainbow Laces and the work we do around disability in their Unite for Access campaigns. We will continue to do that work. We understand that, ideally, we would like the match day rid of all discrimination, but we are mindful that we are working within the wider issues we all live with, in all institutions.
Q90 Kim Johnson: Thank you, Kuljit. We heard from the first panel about personal experiences of going to match days. What sanctions are imposed on those clubs where this chanting is increasing on a weekly basis?
Kuljit Randhawa: The “rent boy” chant, which we spoke about earlier, is now a breach of the rules and all clubs are aware of this. We are currently looking at the other chanting that happens within stadia with a wider working group.
Q91 Kim Johnson: But no sanctions are imposed as yet?
Anna Deignan: No, but there are sanctions in place, both on an individual perpetrator level and also the FA are able to sanction a club if it feels they have not taken preventative steps.
I would just like to very briefly pick up on what Jacqui said about the differences we have seen personally as match-goers ourselves. Clearly reporting is key, but if reporting does not lead to action, as the previous panel have said, then it is futile. It is a major priority for us to encourage that reporting and have visible enforcement.
In my personal experience of going to elite men's football for 38 years, it has definitely evolved, and my goodness that transformation is dramatic. Still not perfect, but it is dramatic. The last time I experienced any abuse—and it was on a matter of intersectionality, it was around my sexuality—in a stadium, I did not actually have to do anything because the people sitting around me just slammed that abusive behaviour immediately and drew a steward in. I think Jacqui described that as well. That transformation has been amazing. That is obviously not the case for everybody who experiences discriminatory or offensive behaviour in a stadium, but for me that is the way we need to be going. So very encouraged by that.
Q92 Kim Johnson: Thanks, Anna. Same question to you, Kelly.
Kelly Simmons: The FA has launched its inclusion for all strategy, and there is a big focus in there around reporting, sanctions and education. I am not sure which case it was, the misogyny one, but it was one involving our referee. The fact that the game was stopped, the fact that the game came together and found out who was guilty and that fan has been banned, just shows that the game will not tolerate misogyny in this context and other forms of discrimination. There is a big, big focus across the football stakeholders to try and make football as safe and accessible for everybody. It is great to see not just the football stakeholders, but fans in that case, coming together to help identify perpetrators. Obviously my area in the women's game is a very, very different culture, and that has been touched on in the earlier session. One of its great strengths is that it is very accessible. We see young, diverse, fans, a lot of families, coming to games and that is a really, really positive strength of the game.
Ben Wright: That is a good point. In the conversations we have with players about the atmosphere within stadiums that they face on a weekend, there is a general acknowledgement that things have improved in terms of enforcement and the seriousness with which the issues are taken. But it is why I was saying earlier about consequence mattering, because every weekend, somewhere in the pyramid, there will be a report: a player spoke to the referee or the fourth official or their manager, stopped the game, action was taken. They are dwarfed by the amount of abusive remarks that players receive on a weekend that are never reported because if you are not playing in a division or a league, perhaps, where you do not see that immediate ability to go, “Stop the game, I know who it was”, you quite often do not know who it was and so it is the classic thing of you have to develop a thicker skin.
For the women's game, you are absolutely right. It is a different atmosphere within stadiums, but within the women's game, the issue moves online and then you have to developer thicker skin if you are a woman. Suzy Wrack, who was here last time, faces abuse for just basically doing her job. We did a research report on this a couple of years ago, and every WSL club has players who are routinely facing misogynistic, sexist, racist abuse online and we are playing Whac-A-Mole with social media companies to try and address the posts rather than actually tackle the issue with the platform and the fact that this is happening.
Q93 Chair: That is an interesting point to finish Kim's questioning on. I have a really direct question for the Premier League. There are a lot more women both playing the game, reporting on the game, at executive senior board level throughout the game; are you confident that the Premier League is supportive to, of, and about those women?
Kuljit Randhawa: Yes. I can tell you a little bit about the work we are currently doing. We are developing our gender equality strategy, which we started last year. That initially involved consultation with our internal staff, but also with stakeholders across women's football, including fan groups. From that, we have looked at wider aspects of gender equality and equity within football, not just the match day, but also the workforce and our communities. We understand there are a lot of challenges, but there are also a lot of opportunities that we can see within our work.
We are currently consulting with our football clubs—we have done over 60 interviews and that will continue over the next two or three months as we develop the strategy—looking at where we can support them, where we can outline a lot of the things we have talked about today, basically. Everything from the match day, from reporting, from data and insight. We are hoping that gender equality strategy would really frame this quite broad conversation about women and girls’ football and the future. We are hoping we will do it justice by looking at the depth and breadth of the work and the opportunity, but also making sure we have the right capabilities and capacities. We have just hired a new senior gender equality manager to lead that work, so we are looking forward to developing that strategy.
Chair: Women's views on the game are as valid as men's views.
Kuljit Randhawa: Absolutely.
Q94 Chair: You would be absolutely confident that no executive in the Premier League had ever referred to my esteemed colleague, Tracey Crouch, who led the fan led review as, “The girl”.
Kuljit Randhawa: I cannot comment on that. I don’t know. I am not aware of that comment.
Chair: Tracey Crouch is aware of the comment.
Q95 Carolyn Harris: The question is for Kelly, but it builds on something that Kuljit said about football having a platform, and what a wonderful platform football had last year at the World Cup. To be able to think that the captains of the English and the Welsh national teams were going to be wearing the one love rainbow armband, I personally was delighted for that, but it seemed that the chorus of we would be happy to pay a fine really did fall flat when, shortly before the game kicked off, it was decided that, as Harry Kane was likely to get a yellow card, they were not going to allow him to wear the armband. What message do you think that sends to the LGBT community?
Kelly Simmons: First of all, it is important to acknowledge that the England men's and women's teams, and professional footballers, have used their platform on many occasions to champion equality and champion LGBTQ rights. In this situation, we were prepared to pay the fine, we had written to FIFA months in advance to indicate that we wanted to wear that armband, but unfortunately, just leading into the match, we were threatened with unlimited sanctions. We did not feel that we could put the players in that position and took that decision away from the players. But they have, in many, many cases, gone on to, and previously supported and championed, LGBTQ rights.
Q96 Carolyn Harris: What is the difference between the pay and the fine and the sporting sanction to the LGBT community?
Kelly Simmons: Sorry, the difference between?
Carolyn Harris: How do you think the LGBT community felt that the FA were willing to pay a fine, but they were not prepared to have a sporting sanction?
Kelly Simmons: It is a really tricky and emotive subject. Because there was no clarity around what those sanctions might be and how that might play out in the context of us going into that first World Cup game, that decision was taken away from the players.
We work with Stonewall, we, including the Women's Super League, back the Rainbow Laces campaign and we work with a whole range of stakeholders. We are a very inclusive and diverse employer as well. We are involved in London Pride. We can draw to many examples where we have been supportive in terms of working with LGB communities and stakeholders and promoting and attacking anti-homophobia.
Q97 Carolyn Harris: But that was, possibly, a once in a lifetime opportunity to put that message on a global stage in a country which has a history of appalling behaviour towards the LGBT community. That was the one thing that we could have done, which would have been a tremendous message. It was a huge, missed opportunity, but if the England players and the management had been prepared to accept the sporting sanction, would the FA have allowed them to do that?
Kelly Simmons: I cannot comment because I was not in Qatar. Obviously my remit is the women's professional game and those discussions were going on in Qatar with those that work in the England men's side of the game. What I can say is that, as an organisation, we were very vocal about how we wanted to wear the armband and we lit the arch of Wembley as a symbol to show our support. But I cannot comment on the sorts of discussions that went on with the players I am afraid.
Q98 Carolyn Harris: I would like to put on record that we had a UK Minister who actually did wear the armband in the stadium. That is the only person I actually saw wearing the armband, and that was a Conservative Minister, so well done to Stuart Andrew. Do you believe that this has seriously damaged your work and you have lost the trust and the faith of LGB communities over that?
Kelly Simmons: Without doubt, of course. That was a very difficult time and, at that point, the FA and those involved made what they thought was the best decision with everything in front of them taken into consideration. Going back to the commitments that we have made in terms of our strategy, of underpinning football for all, we work with a range of groups, we are involved in a number of campaigns, and the work that we are doing across different community groups is to make football as diverse and inclusive as possible. We will continue to build on the work that we have done in terms of tackling homophobia in football and making football as inclusive as possible for all communities.
Carolyn Harris: Thank you, Chair.
Chair: Elliot.
Elliot Colburn: Carolyn made my point, Chair. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much. Can I just take this opportunity to thank the panel for your contributions? They have been hugely appreciated. It will be useful if we could have some of those statistics in writing to follow up, but I will now bring this meeting to a close.