Football Governance Bill [HL]

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it might be convenient if I say a few words now. I remind the Committee that many of the people taking part today do not like regulation. I have heard that—a lot. I have a bad short-term memory because I am dyslexic, and I have got the message very clearly, so can we just leave it there?

The aim of the Bill is to create a sound framework for football. Even if you do not think those at the top are in trouble, everybody is agreed that, periodically, the other bits look as though they are going to collapse and fall away, or will have to be replaced, as well as all the little local dramas going on. That has been going on for decades, and we have all heard it.

We are going to have a regulator. The worst type of regulator is one that stands back and does not intervene until it is too late, and has to go in with a heavy hand. We want a regulator that we know will intervene and, as I put it at Second Reading, bite hard enough to leave a scar; a body that will actually do something and let people know that there will be consequences for not complying with the regulation. That is what the Bill is about—and what it has been about since the first version. I hope that we can progress on the line that we are trying to make the regulator work properly, and that we do not have too much repetition of points that have already been made.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Markham’s Amendment 71. It was criticised from all the other Benches on grounds of fairness. I just want to interrogate slightly what the critics mean when they say that this regulator will make things fairer.

We are famously a fair-minded people—you can always appeal to a Brit’s sense of fair play—but the word can be ambiguous. Does it mean equity, merit or need? Suppose that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, and I were to buy a cake together, and he spent £3 on it and I spent £2. What would be the fair distribution? Would it be a 60:40 distribution—in other words, dependent on what we had put in? Would it be 50:50? Would it depend on which of us looked hungrier—in other words, based on need? Sometimes these things are all merged together.

I find that, in politics, the word is a kind of boast; it is used to mean, “Look at me: I am a nice, caring person”. It is a way of signalling your decency: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” When applied to this particular case, we are in danger of entering into a kind of Atlas Shrugged world, where we politicians and state regulators decide what is fair, rather than leaving it to those most involved.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, says that we want a regulator that can bite and leave scars. I would rather not have the scars. I would rather have our extremely successful football system unscarred. He added that it existed for decades without regulation, which I think tells us something. I accept that we have lost that argument and will get some kind of regulator, but I appeal to the Government, at least on the other amendments in this group.

The Minister, at Second Reading and again at the start of Committee, repeatedly said that she wanted the scope of the regulator to be restricted, and I do not for a second doubt her sincerity. We also have heard lots of people on all sides already trying to extend its scope—not to limit and circumscribe it but quite the opposite. Indeed, if we look down the list of some of these amendments, we see that, even before it has come into law, people are saying that it needs to apply to women’s games, we need regulations on diversity of ticket holders, and so on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, in opening this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, expressed the hope that we would not take another hour dealing with this group of amendments. We have taken well over an hour. I find this debate very odd because we all seem to agree that equality, diversity and inclusion are of enormous importance in football. The noble Baroness, Lady Brady, rightly spoke of the great efforts that West Ham in particular has made and the great results. Many other clubs have done the same. I would be astonished if a Bill dealing with these matters did not require the independent regulator to look at equality, diversity and inclusion and to have broad powers across the scope of football to do so.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who knows how much I respect him, that I have had no contact at any point with the Premier League, unless you count occasionally buying a ticket to one of the member clubs. Far from filibustering, my intervention on the previous round was the first time I had spoken since Second Reading, and I kept it to about four minutes. I opposed this Bill very strenuously when it was proposed in the previous Parliament. I am sure he will allow that it is not exactly the same Bill. It has been beefed up in various ways, and those ways need scrutiny.

One of the ways in which it has been beefed up, even short of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, is in strengthening the EDI provisions. I have to stand back and ask whether it is proper for a regulator to tell private clubs what kind of people should be their ticket holders. Is there not a basic principle of proportionality and property here that says it is in your interest to have as many ticket holders as you can, and it is in their interest, if they are interested, to come? Does that intersection of who wants to come and how much they are prepared to pay not represent the right place in a free society? We are not some autocracy where we impose values on free-standing organisations.

In our present mood we sacralise the values of EDI but tomorrow it may be something else, and that would be equally wrong because there is such a thing as freedom. There is such a thing as a private space, and that is an essential building block of a free society. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam—he will correctly me if I get this wrong—says it is shocking that only 4% of senior management positions are held by black people. According to the 2021 census, the proportion of black people in the UK is 4.0%. In other words, without any intervention, without anyone telling them what to do, we happen to have an exactly representative number. But even if that were not the case—even if, as the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, was saying, there is a much higher proportion of black players in Premier League clubs—surely that is meritocracy. Why would it be the business of government to try to bring that number into line with the population?

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord not think it is rather odd that in a sport where something like 43% or 44% of the players are black, very few of those players make it through into management positions in those same professional leagues? Does he not think there is something slightly amiss there?

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

The figure that is out of whack with the population is the number of players, not the number of managers, which is exactly in line with the population as a whole. The noble Lord may have a problem with that. I do not have a problem with that because it is plainly meritocratic. Clubs are interested in winning, so they pay people who are going to produce the results that they want on the pitch. If their fans are not happy with it, they stay away. That is how the system works and why, frankly, I think the whole Bill is wrong. I realise I have lost that argument, but we are not some insecure South American junta that has to tell private clubs what to do and appoint commissars over sport.

I do not want to be accused of filibustering this one, and I have gone just over three minutes, so I will finish by saying that if we are to have this wretched regulator, let us at least make it as proportionate and as in line with the rest of our law as possible, on which note I will support the rest of the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, because it seems quite sensible to bring any regulator into line with the usual standards of corporate governance.