Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

As usual, my noble friend makes a sensible and accurate point. There is a big difference between a club such as Arsenal, which has several hundred full-time employees, and a club such as Ebbsfleet, which I think has five. The problem is that one will have a gap between pulling down the Premier League clubs by damaging investment and pulling up other leagues, which are going to aspire to the best in terms of professional support but will not have the resources so to do. That is the difficulty that the Bill imposes on those clubs. It will be a big question as to whether the clubs in the smaller leagues will be able to afford the new compliance, risk and legal officers who will be, of necessity, required to comply with the responsibilities outlined in the Bill. The Minister has repeated time and again that the aim of the Bill is to improve the financial sustainability of football clubs. Yet, the Government’s solution is to slap these clubs with more costs. The shadow regulator should have been invited to the meeting because if the strategic objective of the Government is to drive growth, this is the wrong way of doing it. I am mindful of the time.