Football Governance Bill [Lords] (Fourth sitting)

James Naish Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th June 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Betts]

Absolutely. I accept that the Government have been listening to the arguments—not all Governments do, but this one clearly have. That is an important step forward. One of my worries, which we will look at further when we come to later clauses on the distribution of funding, the effect of parachute payments and the role that they may play and for how long, is that unless we give the regulator slightly stricter time periods, we could get to the end of this Parliament and find that nothing has changed.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

My concern when I read the legislation was that five years is one Parliament. One report per Parliament feels like the regulator is being quite lackadaisical when it comes to producing reports. I hope that there can be a more regular publication on the state of the game, given its centrality to life in our country.

[Mr Betts]

Absolutely. I ask the Minister just to think about it. As my hon. Friend just said, the current provision is one report per Parliament. We can look back over the past five years and see that a lot has changed—there is a lot more money in the game—and if the regulator is going to be there, its main role will be to look at this issue. Allow, encourage and make it do that a bit more quickly. If the Minister cannot accept the amendment today, could she at least indicate that she might give it further thought and have discussions about it before Report stage?

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[Mr French]

The hon. Gentleman liked that.

At the heart of the Bill is the ambition to secure the long-term sustainability of English football clubs across the pyramid. That is a commendable—perhaps even noble—objective. However, plain as day, as we have discussed, it will increase costs for every single fan across the country. We need to know how much that cost will be. As the Government attempt to deliver that goal, we must not lose sight of a fundamental truth: regulation is not free. Every new obligation, every form to be filled and every audit to be passed has a cost, financial and operational, that ultimately lands at the door of our football clubs and is then passed on, I am afraid, to fans.

As I have said in previous clauses, many clubs, in particular those in the lower leagues, already operate on a knife edge and in certain circumstances on a shoestring budget. For them, even modest extra compliance burdens can pose fundamental, existential challenges. Those in the lowest leagues—the National League and below—would welcome the improved odds of, for example, perhaps being able to compete in the EFL. As things stand, however, the National League 3UP campaign has been ignored.

The National League clubs that I have spoken to are keen for the 3UP campaign to be included, because they believe that closing the gap on competition should be a conversation not just between the regulator and this Committee about closing the gap between the EFL and the Premier League—a constant theme of our discussion—but about closing the gap at the bottom of the pyramid. Clubs in the National League would have an increased chance of getting into the English Football League. Given the number of clubs in the National League that were previously in the English Football League, we can all understand why the campaign has grown in momentum among the National League clubs. For any Members who were not aware of it, that is the 3UP campaign.

That is not helping the financial sustainability of the clubs that are fighting hard to return via promotion to the Football League or to be promoted for the first time—those that have lofty ambitions to go further up the pyramid. Those in the National League that are, as a direct result of their situation, most impacted by some of the new bills that have been imposed by various actions of the Government, deserve to be able to see why they have those costs and who is causing them. The amendment gets to the heart of that.

At the moment, most fans have an owner they can point to—and blame, if they wish, for their financial failures, as well as their successes on the field. They can campaign to get them out, as Manchester United fans continue to do regarding the Glazer family, for example, or they can sing their praises from the rooftops, as Newcastle fans have done in recent months after their historic success on the pitch. However, this Government’s regulator will blur the lines about who has caused financial instability, because the actions of the regulator will not be as transparent as we believe they could be.

[James Naish]

I am conscious that we will have several more days of discussion, so I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman could clarify exactly how this body would have been funded under the legislation of the previous Government. He keeps talking about the costs of the regulator under this Government, but how did he think it would have been funded under the previous Government?

[Mr French]

That is obviously not what this amendment is about. It is about transparency. It is not about the overall cost, but about the transparency of the cost. The hon. Gentleman asks about how things would have been funded before, but we have to accept that we are in different economic circumstances. A number of costs have impacted clubs already. I am talking about the cumulative impact of Government policy—the Minister has heard me say this in a number of debates, including in the debate on swimming yesterday—on clubs from the elite level all the way down to the grassroots level. The point is that there are now extra costs from the regulator, on top of the national insurance increase, which we think has probably been the biggest change, the changes to business rates calculations, which have negatively impacted a number of businesses, and wage increases. Hon. Members may or may not agree with those costs, but we are talking about their cumulative impact.

Because it is ultimately funded by the clubs, the regulator will increase those costs. The hon. Gentleman talks about how we perceived it would be paid for. The clubs will pay the costs of the regulator—that has not changed—but we are trying to get at the cumulative impact. We want transparency about that impact on clubs, including for Parliament, so that we, as hon. Members who represent constituencies around the country, can have informed debates about the impact on English football of the decisions that we make in this House. As Members of this House, it is not unreasonable to want to understand the impact of our and the regulator’s decisions. Whether or not hon. Members agree with the amendments, they make it quite clear that we are calling for transparency on the costs of the regulator.

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[Lincoln Jopp]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Butler. Subsection (3)(c) of clause 16 is an absolute Trojan horse; it gives carte blanche to the regulator to demand whatever it wants, regardless of whether a club produces such documents or information on a routine basis. Anyone who has worked with a regulator will know that means that clubs will have to employ lawyers, because they would never submit anything to their regulator unless it had been through lawyers first.

The shadow Minister used the phrase “blank cheque”, but it is almost a blank invoice to the poor clubs that will simply have to comply. When a regulator says, “Jump”, they do not say, “Why?”; they say, “How high?” However high the bar is set, they have to get over it. It is completely reasonable, at this stage of the regulator’s development, to seek limits so that it can take some very well-defined steps in regulating football, prior to giving it the carte blanche that subsection (3)(c) represents. As the shadow Minister said, I fear that the unintended consequences of subsection (3)(c) will be considerable.

[James Naish]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that regulation evolves anyway? My brother runs a property business, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that what he was first required to deliver to his regulator in 2012, when he set that business up, versus what he is required to deliver today has changed beyond imagination. Things move all the time, so it is appropriate for the regulator to be able to determine what it needs to perform the relevant functions.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Regulation does indeed evolve, but giving this football regulator carte blanche to evolve it without any recourse to Parliament is a key weakness of the Bill’s current drafting, which is why I support amendment 99.