TER0036

Written evidence submitted by the England and Wales Cricket Board

Introduction

1. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) welcomes the draft bill and views this as an opportunity to raise standards across our professional cricket grounds. We fully support the spirit of the legislation and the Government’s desire to make all venues as safe as possible.
2. However, we want to work with the Government to ensure that new measures are proportionate and deliverable for all levels of cricket venues.
3. We have worked with the Sports and Recreational Alliance (SRA) and other sports to ensure our views as a wider sector are also represented. This submission should be viewed as supplementary to the SRA submission.

Recreational, volunteer-led cricket venues

4. The draft bill provides a qualifying criterion for the enhanced duty of 800 persons within a defined boundary. This will bring into scope large numbers of recreational, volunteer-led premises within the scope of enhanced duty.
5. This could place considerable financial and administrative burden on volunteers where there is no history of risk and may deter them from their integral involvement in running local cricket clubs. We estimate at least 3,500 cricket clubs could fall within the enhanced duty under these proposals, many of whom are already immensely stretched in terms of what they deliver with a small volunteer workforce.
6. We would like to work with Government to explore whether premises of this type could be exempted, given the unintended consequences it would create and the low level of risk.             
7. Moreover, we would encourage the Government to provide clarity where there is multiple use of venues at one time. Many of our professional cricket grounds are also used for conferences and events, albeit with attendance usually below 800. It would be difficult for the financial viability of cricket clubs to adopt enhanced duty measures where the events are designed to generate income, not delivering major events.

Major event venues

8. The ECB delivers major international matches and world tournaments. As part of this, we use existing regulatory bodies – such as the SGSA and SIA – to ensure our standards of stewarding and wider security are as high as possible. We would encourage the Government to ensure that any regulation introduced by Martyn’s Law sits alongside this existing body of regulation.
9. Major events of this nature have complex risk management across different areas – finding the skills and experience required to manage and regulate are rare. Any regulatory body needs a good understanding of major international sports events to avoid increasing risk.
10. We are concerned about the provision in Clause 15 (1)(a) referring to “at or the immediate vicinity” of a venue. As we understand it, this clause creates a legal duty for areas that are outside the control of a venue and over which they have no jurisdiction. We work with stakeholders to support in these areas, but stewards have no powers and we require support from police and local authorities.
11. The guidance also refers to the need for a single risk assessment. However, as risk varies widely between our events each is subject to an event specific assessment, with attendances varying from a few hundred through to full houses of over 30,000 spectators at major international matches.
12. Security plans at these events are living documents subject to constant review and are highly sensitive. We have concerns about a requirement to submit these to a regulator and prefer they are available on request for inspection for major events.

Relevant worker definition

13. The ECB currently sets the standard for anyone involved in security or stewarding, involving the relevant training required.
14. However, our venues often use a large number of casual staff at major matches, often employed from a range of contractors. We would always seek to extend training to as many staff as possible, however it is not always feasible both financially and logistically to provide full training for areas such as catering and hospitality.
15. Recruiting staff of this nature is an ongoing struggle given the current labour market shortages, so we would ask the Government to provide clarity around the definition of relevant worker.

Competent worker scheme

16. In its application to sports venues any person working in this area should have relevant knowledge and experience of the sector to avoid conflicts with other areas such as crowd safety.
17. We encourage the Government to extend the existing Level 4 National Occupational Standards in Spectator Safety to cover any additional regulation introduced by Martyn’s Law. We also encourage the Government to recognise experienced individuals with a proven record of professional competence to be covered by the competent persons scheme.

June 2023