Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Brady, who speaks with passion and deep expertise. I support this amendment. I suspect I am not the only football supporter sitting in your Lordships’ House who had never heard of parachute payments until I started to get my head around the Bill. It took me a little time to get my head around the concept. I have listened very carefully to, and interrogated, the arguments for it, and understand them. The essence seems to me that it is simply a fact—an irrefutable fact and not readily to be changed—that there is a huge gulf in the financial rewards that come to a club in the Premier League compared with one that is in the Championship. One might regret that, but the only way you could possibly change it would be, as my noble friend said, by levelling down and reducing the competitive tension that there is in the Premier League. The arguments that my noble friends Lord Markham and Lady Brady made about how parachute payments can narrow the gulf between Premier League and Championship are powerful and compelling. But the truth is that, without the ability for clubs that have been promoted to invest to become competitive, you would not have the competitive tension within the Premier League that is part of what makes it so successful. We have said repeatedly, but it bears repeating, that the Premier League is the goose that lays the golden eggs that reward the rest of the pyramid. If we damage that, we inflict damage not just on the Premier League but on the whole of English football, and that is what we have to be incredibly careful of. There is a high degree of mobility within the Premier League. I say this with regret as a supporter of a club that is always regarded as in the top six but is languishing —temporarily, I hasten to say—in 10th. It is, as we know, the hope that kills you, not the despair. Nottingham Forest were promoted two or three seasons ago and are now fourth in the Premier League, in a Champions League spot—there is strong mobility. Could they have done that without the confidence to be able to invest and to grow the team and the players? This is part of the magic of it, and to suggest that this is somehow a game and a racket and that it should be put in jeopardy is not to understand the magic of a degree of competitiveness that exists in English football all the way through the pyramid. This is something that the clubs and leagues have themselves come up with, and it is something that works. The idea—frankly, this thought applies to quite a lot of what the Bill is about—that what has worked and been proven to work will somehow suddenly be improved by the introduction of a state regulator might turn out to be true, but all the evidence of history suggests that it will not.