Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)

I just want to make a point that has emerged in this short debate—or has become obvious to me in it. The first thing is to say to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, that I take issue with his characterisation that England is “littered” with clubs from Wales. There are only four. There is another one at level 6, Merthyr, but that is not the point I want to make. I am concerned, looking at Clause 2, that subsection (3) refers to “teams that are members of … or … participate in” competitions being “exclusively or predominantly English teams”. However, Clause 2(4) says a team “is an ‘English team’ if the ground at which the team customarily plays its home matches is in England”. These are contradictory because, as we have heard, there are two Welsh clubs in the Championship, one in League One and one in League Two. So I think perhaps on Report there will have to be an amendment, which I am happy to bring forward if it is helpful to the Minister. I also take the point that the noble Lord, Lord Beith, makes about Berwick Rangers, who made a contribution to Scottish football over many years. I was sorry to see them drop out of the Scottish League and I hope that they will soon be back. But they do play in Scottish football still at a lower level. It is unusual; UEFA, the governing body for European football, is very strict on clubs not playing their matches in another country. The practice of Welsh clubs playing in the Welsh FA Cup and representing their teams and cities in Europe was stopped by UEFA. Now it is only the much smaller Welsh clubs that are able to do that, because UEFA said that clubs had to choose which jurisdiction they were playing under. The only other example I can think of within the UK is Derry City. For reasons that might be quite obvious, since Derry is right on the border of the Republic of Ireland, they play in the League of Ireland, not the NI Football League.