Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Goodman of Wycombe and Lord Goddard of Stockport

Committee stage
Monday 2nd December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will follow my noble friends Lord Moynihan and Lord Markham in their references to the Delegated Legislation Committee.

I hesitate to disagree with anything my noble friend Lord Moynihan says in any way, but he described me as a senior member of the committee, and I am afraid that this is not accurate. I am, in fact, the most junior member of the committee, having arrived only very recently, but certainly in time to consider this Bill. When I joined the committee, I found that it was very worked up about the rise in secondary legislation, as it set out in its key document, Democracy Denied?, published in 2021—I will come to the significance of that date in a moment. It criticised the use of Henry VIII powers, disguised legislation and skeleton legislation, saying:

“The abuse of delegated powers is in effect an abuse of Parliament and an abuse of democracy, and this report will, we hope, be a prompt to strengthen Parliament in the coming years”.


I find myself in an awkward position here with my own Front Bench, because in 2021 a Conservative Government were in office. The committee clearly feels that this tendency for skeleton legislation, Henry VIII powers and so on has carried on from 2021 to the present.

My noble friend Lord Moynihan will remember that at Second Reading, he drew attention, as I did, to Clause 92(3), which states:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations amend …the definition of ‘football season’”


and

“the definition of ‘serious criminal conduct’”.

Such is the exquisite moderation of the committee that we did not follow that matter up in the report, but we did concentrate on the issue, raised by my noble friend Lord Moynihan, of the leagues not named in the Bill. He has read out the relevant sections of the report, and I have no intention of reading them out again.

However, I reinforce the closing point made by my noble friend Lord Markham and put it to the Minister in the form of a question. Can she confirm or deny that if the leagues in the pyramid were to be named in the Bill, the Bill would therefore become hybrid? She is nodding, and she will doubtless amplify on that nod when she responds to the debate, but that is a very important point. If that is the case, did the Government refer to that in their discussions with the committee clerks when they were drawing up the report?

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, nobody faint, but on this issue I fully support the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. I bear the scars of Democracy Denied? It was an excellent report that it took us quite a long time to bring through. The Government cannot have it both ways. We say that the purpose of the Bill

“is to protect and promote the sustainability of English football”,

yet it does not explain what English football is.

That is the nub of this. We spent hours on the first part of that, but the second part we seem to want to leave to the Government, because it is seemingly easier to amend delegated powers than primary legislation powers. That is not the point. What is in the tin should be on the front of the tin. It should name what it is doing, which is the Premier League and the Championship. It could go down the tiers and include leagues north and south. You would then have a full list of what this legislation is covering. It is probably just bad drafting, and no more than that. This could be done very simply. Everybody would then understand what the Bill is about.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Goodman of Wycombe and Lord Goddard of Stockport

Committee stage
Wednesday 27th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend on the Front Bench, and those spoken to by my noble friends Lord Maude and Lord Hayward. I will also offer some expression of sympathy to the Government, because it is not altogether clear what the origins of this word “sustainability” may be. I suggest that they go back to the original so-called fan-led review produced by Tracey Crouch, which I have here and which noble Lords will have read. The Bill is drawn expressly from the so-called fan-led review.

I say in parenthesis that “fan-led review” seems a strange title for it, since Dame Tracey emphasises in the report that its conclusions are hers alone. Although I pay tribute to the work she did and the consultation she undertook, she received 20,000 responses and there are some 33 million football fans, but we will leave that for a moment.

I will read the very opening of Dame Tracey’s foreword as it sets the tone for the Bill as a whole and for an element that is missing from it. She wrote in her introduction:

“For those who say that English football is world leading at club level and there is no need to change I would argue that it is possible simultaneously to celebrate the current global success of the Premier League at the same time as having deep concerns about the fragility of the wider foundations of the game. It is both true that our game is genuinely world leading and that there is a real risk of widespread failures and a potential collapse of the pyramid as we know it”.


So Dame Tracey made two points. One was about the success of the game and the other its fragility and the potential failures, but the oddity of the way the Bill is presented—my noble friends all picked this up and elucidated it in their speeches—is that the first part of the Bill refers only to the fragility of the system by using this word “sustainability”. There is nothing about success in it. I suggest to Ministers and to noble Lords that some reference to success would be a better reflection of what was originally in Tracey Crouch’s report and the balance that she gave between the fragility and the success of the game—for the two, after all, may be bound up together.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for missing Second Reading. I feel like I am coming on at half-time into this debate, but sometimes if you come on at half-time you have a little bit more energy.

I want to address the sustainability issue, because it is fundamental to what we are trying to do. I am not sure whether any other Member of this House has been in the unenviable position I was in as a leader of a borough, when the local football club came to me and said, “We’re going to go bankrupt and go bust unless you financially support us”, which I had to do at Stockport. We offered all our support, and we did it for a reason. It is more than just a football club, as other speakers have said; they are part of the fabric of society and of communities. They are economic drivers for towns. Most of these football clubs were built in town centres. They kick off at 3 pm on a Saturday because men, predominantly, used to work Saturday morning and they would go to the football in the afternoon. As we watch global football now, we see football matches at 5.30 pm, 8 pm and 10 pm. No one cares about the supporters. When Newcastle played West Ham the other night, the last train home from Newcastle left before the final whistle.

There is a bigger picture at stake here about how you regulate and control football, so my opening comment is that the sustainability bit—the bit that says a football club must be able to sustain itself—must be core to what we are trying to do. On all this saying, “The Premier League will look after itself”, I wish people would not keep bringing the Premier League in as the golden egg. It is the Championship, League One, League Two and the non-league teams—that is your pyramid. That is part of the regulator’s job: to secure their sustainability.

I say to all Members when they go through the Bill —some things in it are quite laudable and supportable—that the aim is not to get into the situation we have got into before, where the six that were going to join the European league could have collapsed the pyramid. That needs to be stopped again. Owners buy a football club like somebody buys a yacht or a hotel. That has to be stopped, as does changing the colours a team plays in and changing the ethos of a club. That is regulation, but at the heart of it is sustainability. That needs to be woven into the Bill somewhere, if not on the face of it: sustainability absolutely must be included in the regulator’s remit.