Lord Markham (Con)

I appreciate the noble Lord’s efforts to do that. It was not specific to this group. There have been a number of examples which have been unwieldy, to say the least. I turn to Amendments 260, 269 and 293 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. They alter the backstop method to enable the regulator to trigger the resolution process. The current drafting permits only the competition organisers to trigger it. That is quite a profound change, if you think about it. To date, we have been saying that the regulator should step in only as a last resort if the competitions cannot reach an agreement among themselves. What we are saying here is that the regulator can step in—I guess, in theory even if the competition organisers have agreed—if it feels for some reason it is not quite happy with the agreement. That seems quite a shift away from the principles we were talking about earlier. Our concern would be that we are suddenly setting up a role for a quite muscular regulator which can interfere maybe not at breakfast, lunch and tea but quite a bit of the time, to say the least. Amendment 276 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, states that the leagues can trigger the resolution process if there has been a change to revenue received by other leagues, as mentioned. Again, I think we could get into situations where a five-year deal has been put in place and a league is suddenly trying to reopen the deal. I am delighted that the Championship has a good Sky deal. Do we think that gives cause to reopen the deal? That would be a concern there. I am always a great believer that a deal is a deal is a deal. You live by that deal for that time and when it comes up again, that is the time to negotiate. Amendment 264 from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, again makes provision for multiple competition organisers to trigger the backstop and mediation process. In all of these, there is a general concern that instead of the backstop being the backstop, as it is called, it becomes almost the first stop and the first resort. It goes to the concern that noble Lords have mentioned many times that while we start with the principle of a light-touch regulator, very quickly we get into a scenario of a pretty heavy-touch, muscular regulator. That would be our concern. Amendment 261 provides that competition organisers must obtain the regulator’s consent before entering into a distribution agreement. Again, this adds another level of complexity. If the competitions have agreed between them, why do they need to get the consent of the regulator? It goes far beyond the original intentions of the backstop per the Dame Tracey Crouch report, in which she referred to it as the nuclear option, and how that would be the only case it would come up in. Instead, through these amendments, we would be setting up a lot of situations in which it would be the first resort. While I understand that the intentions of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, are noble—as ever—I feel that this is another circumstance of mission creep and unintended consequences, where we would end up with a very muscular regulator. Those are our concerns.