Counties hosting professional women’s teams will be strictly monitored to ensure the England and Wales Cricket Board’s multi-million pound investment is being used to achieve gender equality, Beth Barrett-Wild, the ECB’s director of the women’s professional game has warned.
Should counties fail to deliver an equitable environment they would risk having their funding withdrawn.
A new national women’s player and staff survey is being introduced to encourage whistleblowing as the ECB seeks to ensure that the £1.5m provided to 10 of the first-class counties is being invested appropriately.
Eight counties – Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey and Warwickshire – won the right to host professional tier one women’s teams next season after a competitive bidding process earlier this year, while two additional teams will join tier one in 2026 (Yorkshire) and 2027 (Glamorgan).
Other sports have struggled to ensure funding intended for women’s players is correctly ring-fenced – the Carney Review in 2023 found that money intended for women’s football was in practice often diverted back into the men’s game – and there were concerns that the ECB might struggle to hold the first-class counties accountable for promises made in their winning bids.
But the new County Partnership Agreement (CPA), which comes into force on 1 February 2025, will provide the ECB with unprecedented leverage over how the counties treat women’s sides.
“This isn’t us just giving them a big cheque,” Barrett-Wild said. “The funding is ring-fenced to the women’s programme, and we will be tracking that. I will know how every single pound is being spent. If it did go wrong, it would trigger a non-compliance event and we would have the chance to withdraw or suspend funding.”
The women’s game would be a “key agenda item” within the County Partnership Review Process, Barrett-Wild added, and that all aspects of county activity would be audited to ensure equal treatment of women’s and men’s teams.
“For tier 1 counties, how they operate and deliver their men’s team will be exactly the same as how they operate and deliver their women’s team,” Barrett-Wild said. “The standard of facility that the women’s team will be playing at has to be the same. They have to give equal levels of coverage across [marketing] channels to their men’s team and their women’s team.
“The new women’s player and staff survey will give us a really good insight into those tier 1 and tier 2 dressing rooms in terms of how it’s going on the ground.”
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A new player movement framework will permit players to move between tier 1 (professional), tier 2 (semi-professional) and tier 3 (recreational) counties via a loan system, though anyone moving up into tier 1 would need to have a contract in place.
Meanwhile, England players are expected to be available for the early weeks of the Women’s Metro Bank One-Day Cup in May as well as the inaugural Women’s Vitality Blast Finals Day on 27 July. “We have tried to look at the women’s domestic schedule and the England Women’s schedule to make sure there are those opportunities.”
Barrett-Wild called England’s early exit from the T20 World Cup at the hands of West Indies “disappointing”, but she was confident the changes in the domestic structure would help tackle the lack of depth in English women’s cricket.
“It drives me to want to create that overflow of talent coming through, so that there is real competition for places,” she said. “I think we will start to see that. There will be a few growing pains through this initial implementation phase. Everything will not be perfect in 2025, but we’re going to have so much more depth by 2028.”
