Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Moynihan and Lord McLoughlin

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, I will very briefly support my noble friend Lord Parkinson’s Amendment 19. I do so as chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, although the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, chaired the relevant meeting in my absence. My noble friend’s amendment addresses a serious issue. I would have thought that, given the committee’s report on this, the Government would have at least considered the arguments and sought to alter them.

As noble Lords have noted, our committee’s eighth report highlighted that this Bill, as drafted, does not make the fundamental definition of English football clear. The committee was concerned because this Bill leaves us wanting. It leaves us with no definition in primary legislation of what it seeks to address; it is a Football Governance Bill that does not define what part of football it will govern and leaves such a key part of the definition of the Bill to come later in secondary legislation. As my noble friend has pointed out, certain parts of it say that the secondary legislation, if it were to be hybrid, should be ignored as hybrid. That gives a very wide-ranging power which we should be cautious about.

The memorandum explains that

“the rationale for regulatory intervention is based on market failures in the professional men’s game, and problems or harm that most typically and markedly arise in clubs of a certain size and type (typically professional clubs)”.

It then gives four different reasons why the Bill does not explicitly state that it intends to regulate the top five tiers of the professional men’s game. These reasons have been covered by other Members, so I will not go over them.

The Government argue that they need to define the scope in secondary legislation to allow them to change it in future. However, should they need to amend which leagues are in scope, they could still amend primary legislation to alter those leagues by statutory instrument. There is no change to that in my noble friend’s amendment. We have seen hybrid Bills before. I took one through the other place as Secretary of State for Transport, dealing with a rail link from the West Midlands to London. They are more complicated, but people know how to do them and know what regulations need to be abided by.

This amendment is not asking us to decide whether the Bill is hybrid; the Government are being asked to accept that there is inherently a form of hybridity in this Bill regardless, and that they must therefore allow it to go before the Examiners to see what they find. The Government should give very careful consideration to what the amendment says.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord McLoughlin has made an incredibly important point. While I do not think that this is the moment for us to test it, we should give due consideration to whether this ought to go before the Examiners after Committee and before Report, particularly because the Minister has today said that the leagues are not confused about which leagues this legislation applies to.

We are grateful to the Minister for writing to us today. She stated in her letter that:

“The initial intended scope of the top five tiers of Men’s English football is built on a strong evidence base and extensive consultation with all key stakeholders”.


Nothing could be clearer about exactly who this Bill is meant to refer to. Yet, in this whole long Bill, there is no reference to the five tiers of men’s English football and we have no idea whether the Secretary of State will ultimately keep to that or not. We are going through legislation about which we have no clarity to whom it refers. That is, if not unprecedented, extremely rare. It is important that we heard from my noble friend Lord McLoughlin, not least because, to repeat what his committee said in its report:

“The argument that something should not be fixed in primary legislation because it might need changing in future would be an argument against having any primary legislation”.


I urge the Minister to listen carefully to my noble friends and to make sure that the Government at least place what we are talking about in the Bill, so that we know which clubs it refers to and where the onerous powers contained in it for the potential state-appointed regulator will fall. Without that, we are talking in a vacuum.