Policy background Football Banning Orders
Football banning orders were introduced in their current form in 2000 as a response to violent and public order offences at football matches. Available court sanctions against low level offences had limited impact preventing repeat offending in a football context. Football banning orders prevent attendance at prescribed matches, can be tailored to address offending behaviour such as setting an exclusion zone or preventing use of the rail network on match days, and the enforcing authority can require a banned individual to surrender their passport to police during a designated time period thus preventing their attendance at overseas matches and tournaments. Following the disgraceful online racist abuse directed at England players after the Euro 2020 Final the Prime Minister committed to legislating to change the football banning order regime so that it would be possible for a court to impose a football banning order against a person convicted of an online hate crime offence against a footballer 2 .
	Prior to the changes made by this Act, following conviction for a relevant football-related offence a court was required to consider whether the individual met a two-stage test of (i) past involvement in football-related disorder (evidenced by conviction for a relevant offence); and (ii) posing an identifiable ongoing risk of such involvement.
	Football banning orders were designed to respond to and prevent violence and disorder related to football matches before widespread online communication and the advent of engagement with football through online platforms. Section 190 adds relevant communications offences with a hate element, such as racist or homophobic hate speech, against football players, managers and match officials as well as certain offences relating to race or religion to the schedule of relevant offences for banning order purposes on conviction. The objective of this is to prevent such offenders from exporting their online and remote hate crime to real world football matches and deter such behaviour.
	Due to the potential for the committing of online and remote hate offences at any time, Chapter 5 of Part 10 removes the geographic and temporal proximity for such offences within the Schedule of relevant offences, by not requiring the offence to have occurred at, on a journey to, or within 24 hours of, a regulated football match. Instead, section 190 establishes a power to prescribe by secondary legislation "relevant football organisations" and persons with "prescribed connections" to a football organisation, to enable hate offences which are football related to be properly covered by football banning orders. For example, a racist tweet against a player, sent two weeks after a match, could be captured. Section 191 includes a power to add, remove or modify the Schedule of relevant offences exercisable by secondary legislation.