Football Governance

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his passion for all things football, but I would not want to underestimate the complexity of what we are trying to do here. The need for a White Paper is not an unusual part of the parliamentary process. In fact, I suspect that if we had not proposed a White Paper, I would now be accused by the Opposition of not bringing one in. It is an important part of the process. We can announce the regulator and the scope of the regulator, but we then come to the complexities of its scale, where is it located, what its roles and responsibilities are and what the sanctioning regime and appeals process should be. All those things still need to be thought out, and we have to ensure that we do it carefully because we have one chance to get this right.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) for a fantastic piece of work. I know that football fans across the country will be thrilled today. I am thinking about Leek Town, in the eighth tier of the pyramid, which will be very pleased to see the pyramid being strengthened by this work. I want to ask a question about the regulator. In my experience, regulators do not always deliver what Government Ministers want them to deliver. Given that this is an issue of finance, may I urge the Minister to look at successful financial regulation and perhaps base the regulator model on that?

[Nigel Huddleston]

I thank my right hon. Friend for those comments; I know that she has deep expertise and interest in this area. She is absolutely right, and we will be looking at models as we develop the regulator role. We have seen the Financial Conduct Authority, for example, and its role with the integrity test. There are a lot of things out there that we will genuinely try to learn from, so that we do not have to start from scratch. We will leverage expertise—there is considerable expertise at DCMS and throughout Government on establishing regulators—but we will also learn the lessons of the past.