Lord O'Donnell (CB)

My Lords, I support this amendment. I should declare my interest: I am passionate about football. Wembley has been mentioned, and I remember my first trip there was in 1968 to see my team, Manchester United, win the European Cup—alas, that may not happen again for a while. Like the noble Lord, Lord Burns, my former boss, I was at Wembley in 1973 and 1974; unlike him, I was playing, but it was not quite the same crowd, because it was the Oxford v Cambridge match, but I was there. I will not repeat all the excellent arguments of the noble Lords, Lord Birt and Lord Burns, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, but I support them all. We are now observing the Government having issues with regulators, saying they are not taking due account of growth. I think this tells you, when setting up a new regulator, to think very carefully about what you want them to consider. These amendments go into detail about that; that is absolutely important, because the current process has this absurd system where there are two numbers and you have to choose one. When they are trying to work out the right balance, they need to take account of these factors, and these factors should be made clear. There are two aspects to this. The first is to make things clear. The second is: if you want fairness and competitiveness to be really important, you also need guidance about trade-offs. In my experience dealing with regulators, those are some of the most difficult issues—that is where politics gets involved—so we need to be clear what we are asking the regulators to do, what they should be doing and what they should be referring to others. We need clarity on the role of the regulator, guidance on inevitable trade-offs and, ultimately—I agree with many here—we need fairness. We must keep the Premier League at the pinnacle of the global game. If we succeed in that, then Premier League clubs will repeat Manchester United’s 1968 performance and win the European competitions.