Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I hope that before Report the Government will carefully consider how best to ensure post-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. That is the issue being raised here. There are many ways of achieving it and I would welcome the Government thinking about it and discussing with noble Lords who have been expressing concerns how it is to be achieved.

I also hope that, before Report, the Government will give very careful thought to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Birt, earlier about the ways in which the Bill can be amended or implemented to ensure proportionate, light-touch regulation, which I think many of us around the Committee are concerned to achieve. It is a difficult thing to achieve, but it needs to be to be achieved and, if it can be achieved, I think that will alleviate many of the concerns that have been expressed in Committee.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Goodman’s amendments and the principle of a sunset clause.

“The delegation of particular tasks to separate bodies, while a regular feature, is yet only the first step in the process by which a democracy … relinquishes its powers”.


So wrote FA Hayek in chapter five of his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Think of how much truer it is today than it was then. By one account, we have had a new quango every week since the election, and it is a one-way system. They are never undone, and they are not undone because of the dynamic that, once an organisation like that exists and is in place, its primary purpose becomes the defence of its own existence and its own budget. That is why we have sunset clauses at all. It is the only way in which, realistically, you can put in a hedge in case the calculation on which you passed legislation or created a quango turns out to be false.

In this case, it may or it may not. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, tells us that the legislation is terrifically popular and that the fans are demanding it and want immediate action; the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, says that it has been polled and everyone is in favour of it. That may be—I do not know, as I am not any kind of expert—and I am perfectly happy to accept the possibility. Equally, we should be cognisant of the figures that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, cited: 20,000 people of the 2 billion who watch Premier League games is one in 100,000—someone will tell me if my maths is off. It may be that that is a self-selecting and unrepresentative sample.

It is certainly the case, as any pollster will tell you, that people are very bad predictors of how they will feel in a hypothetical situation. If people are asked for an opinion now, and polled in the abstract on whether they think there should be some regulation of football, they might think that it would be a way of preventing rogue owners driving clubs into bankruptcy and so it seems a good idea. But what happens if, two or three years from now, the regulator does what almost every other regulator in this country’s history has done and expands its remit well beyond the powers laid down and discussed in your Lordships’ House? What if fans are then looking at a regulator that is doing things that were never envisaged? There are regulators laying down rules on net zero and gender quotas—and we have already had demands for clubs to monitor the diversity of their season ticket holders and so on. Fans will realise that, hang on, this is not what they signed up for. What then will be the mechanism and check on this legislation?

The only way of doing that is to have some kind of automatic lapsing; in other words, to allow this House and the other House to come back and say either that the legislation is working, so it should be renewed, or that it is not working, so it should be allowed to lapse. This should not be a controversial proposal. I do not doubt for a second the sincerity of noble Lords on all sides who have argued that this is a popular and necessary Bill. If it is, they should have the courage of their convictions. If it is, there will be no question—for all the reasons that my noble friend set out at the beginning—but that the regulator should remain in operation or that the Minister will keep it that way.

We must allow for the possibility that we may have got this wrong. It costs very little and would satisfy all sides. It is something that ought to be able to command consent in this Committee and beyond. I hope that the Minister will give it serious consideration.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[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?