Baroness Brady (Con)

My Lords, Amendments 280 and 281 in my name seek to reinsert the ability for the Premier League and the EFL to agree distribution arrangements for longer than five years without triggering the automatic availability of the backstop mechanism. These amendments are essential to restoring common sense, legal certainty, aligned incentives and, crucially, to restoring trust between football’s governing bodies. When I first read the revised Bill, I thought I must be mistaken. “Surely”, I thought, “no Government would propose that two consenting parties mutually agreeing a long-term financial arrangement should be actively disincentivised from doing so by the automatic availability of a dispute mechanism”—and yet, astonishingly, here we are. Removing the freedom of football stakeholders to agree arrangements for more than five years by mutual consent cannot possibly be about fairness, transparency or sustainability. This is purely a device enabled by an active decision of the Government to turn the backstop into a ratchet. It ensures that no long-term agreement between the Premier League and the EFL, no matter how mutually beneficial, can ever provide genuine stability or be truly relied upon.