Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Pannick and Lord Maude of Horsham

Report stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, has said. I too have greatly benefited from the constructive engagement of the Minister and the Bill team, and I am very grateful to them for the time they have taken and the listening they have done to the concerns that were raised during Committee. I should declare my interests for today. One of my areas of practice is as a barrister of sports law; I represent Manchester City in disciplinary proceedings —and I am a supporter of Arsenal Football Club.

I have one lawyer’s point on Amendment 1 from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. His proposed new Clause 1(1A) and (1B) would put on the face of the Bill that the Secretary of State and the IFR, in exercising their functions, must have regard to the purpose of what will be the Act. That is entirely unnecessary because one of the basic principles of modern administrative law is that powers conferred under an Act may lawfully be used only to advance the objectives of the Act. That has been the law since the statement of Lord Reid in the Padfield case of 1968. It would be unfortunate if this Bill included something that is otherwise implicit in all legislation; it would cast doubt on Bills that do not include such provisions.

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, I rise merely to add my support to what has been said, and to commend the Government for having been on a journey to recognise some of the points made in Committee, which, as my noble friend Lord Parkinson said from the Front Bench, was some two months ago. I hope I will not be thought ungracious if I simply comment that it was mildly irritating for us to be criticised for submitting this Bill to the scrutiny that we did in Committee, and to be accused of filibustering, when the Government were all the time listening to what we were saying and moving in the direction we were advocating.

I would merely comment that a number of us across the House advocated in Committee that an obligation to pursue growth in English football should be a key part of the purposes of the Bill. That was rejected by the Government at the time—almost contemporaneously with the Chancellor of the Exchequer using her bully pulpit to advocate that all the other regulators should be doing precisely what we were proposing.

We welcome the conversion and the journey, and we hope that more concessions will be made towards making the activities of this regulator less damaging than seemed to be the danger in the way the Bill was originally constructed. There will be more for us to discuss on that subject later.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Pannick and Lord Maude of Horsham

Committee stage
Monday 16th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Markham, puts his case very powerfully but I for one am not persuaded, because the delegation of functions to competition organisers would frustrate the very purpose of independent regulation. The whole purpose is that regulation is done by the independent regulator. As I said in considering the previous group of amendments, it is of course vital that the regulator consults those affected and takes into account their concerns and expertise. But to delegate the responsibility to those who are being regulated, or to the competition organisers, would be an abdication of regulatory responsibility.

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Markham and strongly disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. We constantly hear that the purpose of the Bill is for the regulator to be agile, to be as light touch as possible and not to impose unnecessary additional burdens on football. Every million pounds spent on the cost of running the regulator, as well as the additional compliance costs for football clubs themselves, means there is less of the pie to be distributed under the redistribution parts of the Bill.

Surely one of the key ways in which we can do our best to avoid that cost burden being excessive is to avoid duplication. The reality is that the competitions, the leagues, already exercise a self-regulatory function—not regulating themselves but regulating the clubs that are members of the leagues. That is in their nature: there are conditions of belonging to those leagues that they rightly enforce, and they are going to be obliged to carry on doing that anyway. It is possible that not all of them have done that perfectly, and that not all of them will continue to do it perfectly in the future, but it is also possible that the independent regulator will not do its job perfectly. We should consider that possibility at this stage of consideration of this really important Bill, given that many clubs—not just the Premier League clubs but right down through the pyramid—have concerns about the costs, imposition and impact that creating the regulator will involve. When we move on to the next group, we will be looking at the really big, crunchy part of the Bill that covers the regulator’s operating licensing powers.

If we are to be sensitive to these genuine concerns of football clubs—which, by and large, have been pretty successful over the decades—this is a good way of showing it. If this amendment is passed and accepted by the Government and goes into the Bill, none of it says that the powers have to be delegated to any particular competition organiser; but at least giving the possibility of avoiding this overburden of new regulation, cost and impositions on something which is already very successful would be a very good signal for the Government to send.

I hope the Minister when she responds to this amendment will not rule it out out of hand but will take it away and say that we should now be looking for ways to address some of these genuine concerns. This would be a very good way of doing it.