Lord Addington (LD)

My Lords, I am beginning to wish I had jumped up before the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, because I have come to a similar conclusion. For every success story in football, if you look you will find a failure. It is often the case when people come forward and buy themselves the dream team, then something goes wrong. You will find that especially in the lower levels. There are stories of those clubs, with Bury et cetera copping out, that have more expenditure going out on wages than they have coming in from revenue. If the regulator does not have the power to stop that speculative spending in certain circumstances, it is being denied a basic power over one of the biggest problems that has led to instability, particularly in the lower parts of the game. After some of the discussions we had on this, I really cannot see how we can support the lead amendment here and still have the central thrust of the Bill. How will the regulator assess the slightly strange finances of investing in people who are always one trip away from being worth nothing? One accident on a training field and your principal asset is worth nothing. How is that taken into account and balanced, which would require a level of expertise? Does the Minister have examples of where information will be gathered to make a sensible assessment on this? On speculative purchases, we have heard about deals with agents, et cetera, on other parts of this Bill; it is important to bear in mind how these are done. If the Minister has information on how that information will be gathered and those assessments made, I would be very interested to hear it.