Mr Louie French

Here we are: the final opportunity for the Government and this House to trigger a VAR review before English football fans and the beautiful game are left in tears. We cannot support this expanded Bill as drafted, and we believe that passing it tonight risks harming the very game that it claims to protect. We all largely agree on the problems in football: we have a minority of greedy owners, with loyal fans left powerless when a proud club is torn apart for profit or by reckless management. No one in this House wants to see another Bury or Macclesfield, but let us be clear and honest with fans: this Bill will not stop a bad owner damaging a club, market failure will not be removed, and clubs will not be bailed out by this Government. The risk of a breakaway league will now grow, not shrink. This Bill risks replacing financial mismanagement with political interference, poor governance with endless red tape, and the soul of our game with a new quango that grows year by year, unchallenged by real scrutiny or accountability to Parliament or fans. If we vote this Bill through tonight, we will not remove unaccountable owners; we will only create more unaccountable bureaucrats. This amateur Government will strangle the growth of a great British success story, rather than enable it, while Reform still struggles to manage its five-a-side team after yet another scandal—sorry, four-a-side now. English football does not belong to politicians; it belongs to the fans in the stands, the volunteers in the clubhouse and the kids pulling on the shirt for the first time on a Sunday morning. Yet this Bill opens the door for mission creep on an extraordinary scale, with provisions that would let any future Minister expand the regulator’s powers and the leagues covered at will. As drafted, this Bill risks breaching FIFA and UEFA’s clear rules against Government overreach, putting our clubs and national sides in danger of sanctions that would shame the country on the world stage. It sets up a powerful new regulator with vast discretion, but precious little real democratic control, and it piles on costs that smaller clubs and fans simply cannot bear. If the Minister thinks that big clubs will pay for this quango alone, she needs to read her own impact report. Ultimately, the fans always pay—through higher ticket prices and higher merchandise prices—all to stand on the same terraces on which generations have previously stood. The test of a good law is whether it solves a problem proportionately and properly, not whether it lets Ministers feel that they have done something. This Bill fails that test, and fails it spectacularly. It treats our national game not as a living tradition rooted in local pride, but as an industry to be micromanaged by the state. This is not how English football was built, and it is not how it will be sustained. On behalf of His Majesty’s official Opposition, I say clearly tonight that football is at its best when the players entertain the crowd and the referee goes unnoticed, but this Bill risks creating more referees than players—referees who answer not to clubs or supporters, but to Labour Ministers and mandarins. If this Bill passes, and we expect it will tonight, I can confirm to the House and to fans at home that a future Conservative Government will trigger a review of Labour’s regulator as soon as possible, and if it is overreaching and strangling clubs—[Interruption.]