Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, in case everyone thought a bout of consensus had broken out, I beg to differ. I have some reservations about this group. I find myself at odds with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, which neither of us will be surprised by, but I also find myself at odds with the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, which is perhaps more surprising having been through Committee. Let me raise some of my reservations. We have been consistently told that this legislation is necessary to protect football clubs precisely because they are such intrinsic parts of our community and interwoven into our society. It is those authentic, organic relationships with local areas and generations of fans I am worried this Bill could undermine. I am not convinced that the clubs need a regulator to add something that could become a performative and unnecessary corporate governance duty. That is one of my reservations. I was also somewhat surprised to see the Government’s Amendment 32, making a club’s contribution to the economic and social well-being of its local community part of its corporate governance. That was somehow quite insulting, as though clubs need officialdom to tell them to be socially responsible. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, indicated, that is very much the ecosystem of connectedness that is in clubs’ DNA. There is a danger of overregulation here. In a later group on regulatory principles, the Government’s Amendment 18—which I do welcome—states as a regulatory principle that the independent football regulator should have regard to whether any requirement or restriction is necessary before it imposes it and asks the IFR to consider “whether a similar outcome could be achieved by less burdensome means”. Amendment 32 seems to fail that test. I am worried about putting in the Bill a regulation that could be interpreted as asking football to take on responsibilities far removed from football in a regulatory fashion that makes them behave somewhere between social engineering and social work. I would like some reassurance that this will not contradict or add a burden of regulation on clubs in what they already are doing. Why do we need to have it written down in the Bill?