Football Governance Bill [HL]

Baroness Brady Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will make some brief comments. As I read the Bill, the Secretary of State providing some finance might be necessary, particularly in starting up. One of the things we do not want is an underresourced regulator blundering around making mistakes. A bad regulator is the worst outcome you can have, and that is usually because it lacks resources. When the Minister responds, can she give us some idea about when the power to give extra money would be used? This being done badly would be the worst result.

When the noble Lord, Lord Markham, talked about regulation, I am afraid I kept thinking about Fulham and Al Fayed. Are your internal control structures right? Are you doing something wrong? The damage that could be done by bad organisation immediately catches in the back of my throat. The regulation will not be straightforwardly financial; it is also about reporting structures, the care of your workforce, et cetera. Surely that should be covered by the Bill. These are questions about where you draw the line. If we have a regulator, does it regulate the whole thing? I think it has to; it cannot be just financial. If these are socially important structures—this is what we keep coming back to—we have to look at this question.

The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, has a point about the costs involved. I hope that we will get an answer when the Minister responds—at least a rough ballpark figure—because it will clarify what we will do. Those of us who approved the idea of a regulator think that it has to be properly resourced and that it has to cover the whole thing. I hope that the Minister can give us a little more guidance about what will happen and what the Government’s thinking is at this point, because they should have an answer by now.

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords, my understanding from the Premier League is that the Government’s estimated cost of the regulator is £10 million a year, and the Premier League considers that to be very low. We have heard a lot about how the regulator has been based on banking regulation, but the FCA costs £762 million a year and Ofcom costs £127 million a year.

It is worth noting that there are two critical but unrealistic assumptions in the impact assessment. First, it assumes perfect compliance, and, secondly, it focuses solely on ongoing compliance costs, such as information-gathering and engagement with the regulator and supporters. It does not account for the potential costs associated with, for example, licence conditions enforcement action that may arise through the commitments procedures. I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hayward.

In earlier debates in Committee, I read out what Mark Ives, the general manager of the National League, said:

“We are concerned about the costs … The expectation of how much it is going to cost clubs at a National League level is a huge concern—it may be a small amount of money, but it is a lot to the clubs”.


He went on to say that many clubs in the National League are run by volunteers. We should give the clubs an idea of what it will cost, so they can work that into the budget. Each club should know whether it will be fully funded and fully staffed, so it can do the right job.

We have heard throughout Committee that the powers will be extended. The more that the powers are extended then the more complicated the Bill will be, the more staff they will need and the more costs there will be. Each club has to pay that cost because it has to have a licence. The way that you discharge the cost of the regulator is to add it to the licence. All 116 clubs, even though they are not listed in the Bill, will need to obtain one of those licences to operate.

Cost is a huge concern. It appears from what has been said that the Premier League would be picking up the majority of that cost. There is a big difference in the Premier League between those at the very top and those at the very bottom; they have very different pressures on their finances. I can only endorse what my noble friend Lord Hayward said and urge the Minister to give us an indication.

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

I am curious. There have been a lot of detailed discussions over the last three years with the Premier League and with Premier League clubs—I was involved in many of them. The Premier League was suggesting—it was not the only one—that for people in the Premier League, and the Premier League as an institution, a model of self-regulation would be a lot better. It would be helpful to know what costing the Premier League has built into its model of self-regulation, as it was certainly thrown around as an alternative for quite some time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

There have been extraordinarily levels of dialogue between the Premier League and the Government over a long period on this. The suggestion that the Premier League does not have some idea of the likely potential cost and has not spoken to clubs in relation to that is simply nonsense. I have spoken to clubs which have given specific estimates of what they anticipate it will be. Whether that is accurate or not, the idea that those figures have not been discussed at length is something of a fantasy.

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

I am sorry to intervene on the intervention, but I have not seen the noble Lord at any Premier League meetings; I have been to them all. I can assure him that we have never had a discussion about the potential costs, because we have never known what the potential costs are; no one has told them to us. We have looked at the impact assessment and that has given us a vague estimation, but to suggest that we have had a long, detailed discussion and debate, and that we understand and know what the costs are, is not correct.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, and the noble Lord, Lord Mann, for his intervention. He seemed to think I was talking about Premier League clubs. I was not. I was saying that the Minister had said that she did not want to specify in the Bill which clubs were going to be regulated, so the club does not know whether it will be regulated, and it certainly does not know how much it will cost it. The noble Lord might shake his head, but that is a fairly obvious point. We do not know who will pay. We also do not know what it will cost. I believe the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, talked about an estimate of £10 million—I beg your pardon; it was the noble Lord, Lord Markham.