Football Governance Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in case everyone thought a bout of consensus had broken out, I beg to differ. I have some reservations about this group. I find myself at odds with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, which neither of us will be surprised by, but I also find myself at odds with the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, which is perhaps more surprising having been through Committee.

Let me raise some of my reservations. We have been consistently told that this legislation is necessary to protect football clubs precisely because they are such intrinsic parts of our community and interwoven into our society. It is those authentic, organic relationships with local areas and generations of fans I am worried this Bill could undermine. I am not convinced that the clubs need a regulator to add something that could become a performative and unnecessary corporate governance duty. That is one of my reservations.

I was also somewhat surprised to see the Government’s Amendment 32, making a club’s contribution to the economic and social well-being of its local community part of its corporate governance. That was somehow quite insulting, as though clubs need officialdom to tell them to be socially responsible. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, indicated, that is very much the ecosystem of connectedness that is in clubs’ DNA. There is a danger of overregulation here.

In a later group on regulatory principles, the Government’s Amendment 18—which I do welcome—states as a regulatory principle that the independent football regulator should have regard to whether any requirement or restriction is necessary before it imposes it and asks the IFR to consider

“whether a similar outcome could be achieved by less burdensome means”.

Amendment 32 seems to fail that test. I am worried about putting in the Bill a regulation that could be interpreted as asking football to take on responsibilities far removed from football in a regulatory fashion that makes them behave somewhere between social engineering and social work. I would like some reassurance that this will not contradict or add a burden of regulation on clubs in what they already are doing. Why do we need to have it written down in the Bill?

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, I think there is a severe danger of there being a consensus around the sentiments, at any rate, reflected in this group of amendments. The point has been made by a number of your Lordships that this is what good clubs do. Successful clubs are deeply rooted in, and serve, their communities, act as a focal point for social action and social activity, and can do enormous good.

On Thursday evening, I shall go, in hope, to watch Tottenham play in the Europa League. The following morning, I shall attend the governors’ meeting of the London Academy of Excellence Tottenham, which is a brilliant sixth-form academy that serves disadvantaged young people with academic promise from across the community. Its principal business sponsor is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Its premises are in the Lilywhite House, which is the office headquarters of the club. It is brilliantly successful. Tottenham, like most successful clubs, is deeply entrenched and embedded in the local community.

I therefore have some sympathy when the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, asks about whether this is necessary. The clubs that take their social and community responsibilities seriously because that is what they need to do as part of their success and their obligations—it is part of the debt they owe to the communities they are part of—will not find it a regulatory burden, because they are, as the noble Baroness said, doing it already. While I am generally allergic to new regulatory powers when the case for them is not overwhelmingly proven, I am willing to make an exception in this case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Ranger of Northwood, as well as my noble friend Lord Maude’s earlier point about the individual who will become the regulator. While we are discussing Manchester United, I note that I am a season ticket holder of the club; my noble friend Lord Ranger made a point about the recent increase in ticket prices.

This regulator will be answerable to supporters, while at the same time—as my noble friend Lady Brady said—making it clear what the owners of the football clubs can expect for investment purposes. This independent football regulator will be located in Manchester. Given the sheer size and scale of the protests—75,000 people go to Old Trafford week in, week out, and they may be minded to go to the location of the regulator— I would be interested to know what calibre of person, he or she, will be able to cope with those protests, which will inevitably end up outside their premises. How will they interact with those supporters, while at the same time making sure that they act professionally and responsibly so that the owners of the football businesses can carry on with the investment that we all want? Ultimately, this is about the future success of the Premier League.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I welcome government Amendment 24, which reduces the minimum frequency of the revised football governance statements from every three years to every five years. That is a positive direction of travel, reining in a disproportionately burdensome bureaucracy. I was fearful that clubs might be in a perpetual state of having to fulfil the paperwork rather than improve governance, let alone improve football. I am glad to see that amendment.

Another worry that some of us have raised is the need to rein in politicised mission creep, so I oppose Amendments 12 and 13. Amendment 13 seems to be the focus, linking this Bill to the Climate Change Act and linking environmental sustainability to economic sustainability and making climate and environmental impact reduction part of the IFR’s objectives. I think this is incredibly unwise for a number of reasons. It goes against the Government’s Amendment 14, debated earlier, which all sides of the House lauded and I agree with, which is a commitment to avoid any adverse effects on the financial growth of English football.

Let us be honest: outside of football, even the Government are now acknowledging that net-zero targets and environmental regulations are often expensive and burdensome barriers to economic growth. They do not allow the Government and whole swathes of the corporate world to pursue, for example, infrastructure projects such as building houses. I do not think that it is uncontentious to say that, because “environmental sustainability” and “economic sustainability” will appear in the same provision, there is no tension between them; I think there is. I also think that this would really be an example of scope creep, which the Minister has assured us will not happen; UEFA and FIFA have been promised that it will not happen, as we were told earlier.

In Committee, I spoke against adding football clubs into this ever-greater, non-football-related political territory, setting essentially politically driven environmental hoops to jump through. In Committee, the Minister assured us that the Government had no intention of accepting these Green demands into the legislation, and I was reassured. But I want the Minister to promise, if she can, that the independent regulator will not—once this Bill is passed, which undoubtedly it will be—simply slip them into the governance remit. I am worried because the green lobby is very active, persistent and wealthy and, to be honest, has an interest in pursuing this after this Bill is long gone.

Larger clubs with lots of money might well be able to go along with a lot of these things that this Bill demands. We know that there are all sorts of Premier League football clubs at the moment that are more than happy to have sponsorship by green energy companies and so on. We have seen a lot of that happen. I think this could amount to eco-virtue signalling that ticks the social responsibility boxes of the big clubs and a sort of greenwashing that we know the corporate social responsibility industry does so well. But I fear that it will distract smaller clubs from their core role of thinking about financial stability and improving their governance so that we have better football clubs, and it will drag them into this extraneous environmental sustainability world.