Lord Markham (Con)

I thank the Minister and all noble Lords for their comments. It has become clear in this heavily truncated debate, but taking on the major points that we spoke about in Committee, that all noble Lords care passionately about what we are trying to do here, and that between us we are all trying to find what we think will be the best solution for football overall. My concern and the concern of my noble friends and many others is that if you damage the competitiveness of a lot of those Premier League games, it will result in less money being paid in media rights to the Premier League, which will mean less money to all the clubs in the pyramid. That is the real danger that we are talking about here. To directly address the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, around the closed-shop nature of the Premier League, only five clubs have been in the Premier League for the whole of its existence, so that is not a closed shop, and 55% of all the clubs have been in the Premier League at some point. Although the Minister’s comments were not unexpected, I believe that the previous version of the Bill that was presented by the then Conservative Government was better than the one before us today, and one of the major reasons for that is the changes around parachute payments. I regret that, although the Minister understands the importance of all the amendments, she is not minded to accept our Amendment 70 as a genuine attempt to reach compromise and consensus on this issue. That means that the regulator can still, if it considers it correct, abolish those parachute payments in their entirety, which I truly believe would have a significant impact on the game and damage all 92 clubs. As a result, I am afraid that I am not satisfied by Minister’s response and, as I indicated earlier, I would like to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 57.