Lord Addington (LD)

My Lords, as the noble Baroness just said, could we have the answer tonight as to what the state of play actually is? If we get some assurance that, “Providing we do not do X and Y, which we hope is not the intention of the Bill, we are fine”, then this will get put to bed. If the Minister can see some way of assuring us, even if it had to be on Chatham House terms or something, that would help, because we do not want there to be a problem. If we can get that assurance out there, this issue will go away. Let us face facts: it just would not exist. We want there to be a competition. Presumably, Europe wants the Premier League there. The reason why we have this Bill is about Europe. It was because of fans protesting that they were going to lose their competition and their traditions to Europe, and politicians saying, “We’ll intervene”, which most people agreed with. If we can get an assurance that there is something solid that means we would have to do something radically different to turn this bad scenario into a living nightmare, that is fine. We cannot guarantee the future; we can deal only with the Bill in front of us. If the Minister can give us those assurances she will have my full support.