Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Lord Addington

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.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Lord Addington

2nd reading
Wednesday 13th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, to what problem is this Bill a solution? That should be the first question we ask of every piece of legislation but, not for the first time, I find that I am the only person —so far, at least—who has asked it. Here we are, a revising Chamber conceived as a check on the necessary radicalism of the popularly elected Chamber. It is precisely our job to uphold the principles of proportionality, propriety and property. As my noble friend Lord Goodman said, of course people are going to be angry about individual market failures now, but it is our job to foresee that their anger will be all the stronger when there are worse failures, as assuredly there will be once the entire business is taken into state regulation.

I ask again: to what problem is this a solution? Are we facing national bankruptcy as a result of the terrible failure of football? On the contrary: every speaker so far has acknowledged the success of English football. The Minister called it our greatest cultural export. I understand that not only is the Premier League the most watched in the world but the sixth most watched is the English Football League, and they are the first and second in terms of takings at the gate. So to what problem is this a solution?

There are plenty of things that need reform—we have a Civil Service that has stopped bothering to show up at the office since the pandemic and a healthcare system that is delivering fewer and fewer procedures despite getting bigger and bigger budgets—yet we seem to be going after all the things that work, whether it is the City of London, private schools or now, outstandingly, what everyone agrees is the most successful football league in the world.

What are we going to solve by doing this? The Bill talks about the one notional problem of clubs closing and being allowed to close. The one that everyone keeps mentioning is Bury, but I cannot help noticing that Bury is still there. It is a wonderful example of what Joseph Schumpeter would have called spontaneous order. Without any regulation, that was solved. Can we be certain that, with the full force of coercive law, we would have improved that situation and made it more likely that we would have had the investment to come back?

I used to work at the Sunday Telegraph—in fact I still write a column for it, as did my noble friend Lord Goodman for a while. We had a former colleague there who is now, sadly, deceased, Christopher Booker, who had the wonderful phrase, “using a sledgehammer to miss a nut”. I am afraid that is exactly what I can see this legislation doing. It is not going to succeed in its declared notional goal but, my word, it is going to have a lot of unintended and unforeseen secondary consequences.

Who has ever known a regulator to say, “Actually, our job is done, we’re going to dissolve ourselves”, or even, “Do you know what? We’re probably doing a bit too much. Let’s take a step back”? Has there ever been an example of any regulator that has volunteered to relinquish its power? Once this one gets going, who can say for sure that we will not have gender quotas, net-zero policies, ticket price fixing and any manner of things beyond the remit originally foreseen? That is what regulators do. One more time, what is the terrible crisis that is so severe that it justifies bringing in a measure of this magnitude?

I was very impressed last week during Questions by the responses of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross. Those who were here will remember that there was a debate about boxing and about male-presenting boxers in female boxing rings. Despite a great deal of moralistic fervour in the Chamber, the Minister quite properly stood by the principle that it was not for Governments to tell independent sporting federations what rules they should follow. That has been a pretty good principle in this country.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, if the noble Lord will take an intervention, it was actually about two rival bodies with different definitions of what they were, one of which was corrupt.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

None the less, the principle surely applies that these bodies, whether they are for boxing, football or anything else, exist to serve their members, and they have done so extremely well—this is something that sets us apart from a lot of other places in the world—without needing state regulators. It would not occur to somebody setting up a sporting federation now to go to the Government for a licence, and that is in keeping with our common-law traditions, in keeping with the principle of free contract and property and in keeping with the history and temper of this country.

Let us not abandon what should be those core principles that have served us extremely well. Let us defend the freedom of private organisations, which have never asked the Government for a penny in support, to do what they do well. Let us not intervene in something that is working extremely successfully. There is a basic principle that is often attributed to Edmund Burke, and in fact I think you can trace it all the way back to Confucius, but I am going to express it in the words of the third Viscount Falkland, a Civil War royalist who, if he was not exactly the first Tory, may reasonably be said to be the forerunner—let us say the morning star—of Toryism: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”.