Lord Markham (Con)

My Lords, I must admit that this group of amendments feels a bit “after the Lord Mayor’s Show”. I rise to move Amendment 60 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. This amendment reintroduces the ability of a competition organiser to contract out of the backstop. This was in the previous version of the Bill, introduced by the last Government. It permitted the leagues the opportunity to come to a mutual agreement to opt out of the backstop mechanism for a longer period of time. To me, this seems entirely sensible, because of course the whole point of a backstop agreement is for it to be a backstop. Clearly, if the leagues have already reached an agreement—and clearly both want to opt out of it all—by definition you do not need a backstop, because an agreement has been reached. So my question is: why should the leagues not be allowed to do that? Our Amendments 60 and 61 would also remove the short-termism introduced in this version of the Bill, allowing for a flexibly and mutually agreed opt-out mechanism that would be longer term—beyond the five years, if need be—to create the stability required for long-term partnerships. Again, it is commonly known that clubs, leagues and commercial organisations can often decide and come to better deals over a longer- term period, because often the people paying the money are prepared to pay more to get the certainty that a longer period of time gives. So allowing a period such as 10 years instead of five can often lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. Again, I do not know why we would want to be prescriptive in all this and not allow competition organisers—in this case the Premier League and the EFL—to have the flexibility to come mutually to those agreements. Clearly, they will do so only if they think it is in the interests of both parties, so I do not know why we would wish to deny them the opportunity to reach such a long-term partnership agreement. To me, that is what we should all be about: trying to encourage co-operation between the leagues, instead of being prescriptive, setting out things they cannot do and saying, “No, we’re not going to let you reach an agreement between yourselves”. For those reasons, we propose our amendments, which hopefully are very sensible. I will listen with interest to the Minister’s response.