Contribution
I only wish I could say to the noble Lord that that is what we have in front of us. Had we had the opportunity to sit with him and explore each and every clause as we have gone through this, we might have been able to say so, but that is not the case. This is not light-touch regulation. This is not even regulation that you find in the Companies Act.
Let me give the noble Lord a quick example; I risk admonition for repeating a point that I made earlier, but I will make it very quickly indeed. When you give powers to the regulator to explore not just the controlling influence of a football club but those who “significantly” influence a football club, those are very different roles. You have “controlling” in the Premier League; you have “significant influence” in the Bill. Significant influence can reach back as far as the Crown Prince, who has significant influence over the PIF, which owns Newcastle, whereas, by definition in this Bill, he does not control that club, nor would the Premier League investigate him on that basis.
So it is reasonable to accept the noble Lord’s premise—I wish it were true that this is light-touch regulation—but, in reality, this is incredibly intrusive, highly detailed regulation. It goes further than the regulation I put in place in 1990 when I was the Minister responsible for water privatisation and we were setting up Ofwat. That was light-touch regulation in comparison with this extraordinarily detailed Bill. That is the most important point driving my concern about unintended consequences—what some people call the “mission creep” of regulation.
I turn to the amendments. Given that we are going to have a Bill for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said—there is all-party support for having legislation of this kind—we may as well get it right. There is real merit in looking at the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—backed so eloquently, as ever, by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson—which would
“ensure regulated clubs have a clear, appropriate governance structure with a board consisting of executive and non-executive directors enabling decisions to be taken collectively”.
I hope that it would not be just regulated clubs. I hope that all clubs in all sports would do that, because the benefits of having both executive and non-executive directors is well known to those of us in sport—not least in the British Olympic Association, which I had the privilege of chairing.
The noble Lord, Lord Mann, has widespread support in this House for the work he has done on anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism training. I am glad that he tabled his amendment, because it gives us an opportunity to thank him on behalf of sport and on behalf of football. That work has been absolutely critical; I say this not just as a fellow Leeds fan but because, across sport as a whole, it is vital that we put equality, inclusion and diversity right at the top of what we do.
We are expected to do that outside football. I have an interest to declare as the chair of Amey, which has some 13,000 people. Almost the first thing that I did as chairman was set up an ESG committee immediately beneath the board and chair it so that I could ensure inclusion and diversity were right at the heart of our policy and were in the DNA of everybody who worked in that organisation. I do not believe that that is different from sport and I do not believe that that is different from football.
So, if we are to have legislation—which, as noble Lords know, I regret—let us get this right and listen carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said in the first 50% of his speech, and to the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Mann. There is real merit in the Minister taking this away and thinking about what we would expect to see from the regulator in this context.