Lord Markham (Con)

I thank the Minister for her response and thank noble Lords for all the contributions to the debate on this amendment. On Amendment 172 and the expenditure cap, the Minister referred to league rules on permitted losses, and that is exactly the point I am trying to make: permitted losses are different from expenditure. I completely get why you might have rules trying to prevent permitted losses, but with permitted expenditure you can spend a lot and still make a profit, and that is a good thing. Maybe we can explore further whether Clause 22(4) allows clubs, despite everything, to still spend money on players. As per the example I gave earlier, I am not quite sure that it does, but again, it would be good to consult or work on that later. On Amendment 173A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Moynihan, as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I do not think any of us could envisage the regulator not consulting the clubs and the competitions, so it seems sensible to have that in the Bill. Again, I hope the Minister will be able to look at that. On Amendment 173B and my noble friend Lord Hayward’s point about capital buffers, this really is an area of huge concern. The Minister said, “Well, if you’re reliant on an owner, maybe they need to provide more examples of how they could cater for that financial shock if they were to die”. The trouble is, as with so many clubs at that stage, that was exactly the Brighton and Brentford model—they were reliant at that stage on the owners bankrolling them behind what was a very sensible plan. But if, God forbid, something had happened to them during that stage, clearly, they would have gone, and if they had been asked to put aside some money as a buffer against that, that would have made their plan much harder to achieve. I know it is the view of both clubs that they may well never have embarked on those plans in the first place, because it was tough enough to begin with, and having to set some money aside makes the hurdle even higher. So again, I would appreciate it if we could return to that issue. The last point about this clause overall, which goes right to the point the noble Lord, Lord Addington, made, is that there is a fundamental difference here. He said that for every success there is a failure, and that we have to stop that speculative spending. With Brighton and Brentford, it absolutely was speculative spending. With any team that invests in players ahead of their revenue, that is speculative spending. That is the excitement of the league and of the game: there are no guarantees of success behind any of that. But if we seek to restrict that, we are seeking to restrict the whole competitive element of the game we love: football. The reality is that we cannot point to many failures; I think there have been two since the war. I do not want any failures, but are we really trying to prevent any club trying to embark on those success stories— I hope we are seeing it again now with Wrexham, who have come very far—because we want to protect against any failures whatsoever? That is the fundamental difference we are talking about here. We have seen examples of asset stripping, and I absolutely agree that we want to guard against it. But owners wanting to put in a lot of money in order to really get behind a club, invest in players and gain promotion—to me, that is the fundamental spirit of the game we all love. I therefore hope that we will be able to return to that issue, but at this stage I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.