Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I welcome government Amendment 24, which reduces the minimum frequency of the revised football governance statements from every three years to every five years. That is a positive direction of travel, reining in a disproportionately burdensome bureaucracy. I was fearful that clubs might be in a perpetual state of having to fulfil the paperwork rather than improve governance, let alone improve football. I am glad to see that amendment. Another worry that some of us have raised is the need to rein in politicised mission creep, so I oppose Amendments 12 and 13. Amendment 13 seems to be the focus, linking this Bill to the Climate Change Act and linking environmental sustainability to economic sustainability and making climate and environmental impact reduction part of the IFR’s objectives. I think this is incredibly unwise for a number of reasons. It goes against the Government’s Amendment 14, debated earlier, which all sides of the House lauded and I agree with, which is a commitment to avoid any adverse effects on the financial growth of English football. Let us be honest: outside of football, even the Government are now acknowledging that net-zero targets and environmental regulations are often expensive and burdensome barriers to economic growth. They do not allow the Government and whole swathes of the corporate world to pursue, for example, infrastructure projects such as building houses. I do not think that it is uncontentious to say that, because “environmental sustainability” and “economic sustainability” will appear in the same provision, there is no tension between them; I think there is. I also think that this would really be an example of scope creep, which the Minister has assured us will not happen; UEFA and FIFA have been promised that it will not happen, as we were told earlier. In Committee, I spoke against adding football clubs into this ever-greater, non-football-related political territory, setting essentially politically driven environmental hoops to jump through. In Committee, the Minister assured us that the Government had no intention of accepting these Green demands into the legislation, and I was reassured. But I want the Minister to promise, if she can, that the independent regulator will not—once this Bill is passed, which undoubtedly it will be—simply slip them into the governance remit. I am worried because the green lobby is very active, persistent and wealthy and, to be honest, has an interest in pursuing this after this Bill is long gone. Larger clubs with lots of money might well be able to go along with a lot of these things that this Bill demands. We know that there are all sorts of Premier League football clubs at the moment that are more than happy to have sponsorship by green energy companies and so on. We have seen a lot of that happen. I think this could amount to eco-virtue signalling that ticks the social responsibility boxes of the big clubs and a sort of greenwashing that we know the corporate social responsibility industry does so well. But I fear that it will distract smaller clubs from their core role of thinking about financial stability and improving their governance so that we have better football clubs, and it will drag them into this extraneous environmental sustainability world.