Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 42 and to speak to Amendments 45, 47 and 49, which are grouped with it. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Markham who has put his name to them. These amendments seek to provide greater guidance on the operation of the expert panel that will be established under the Bill to ensure that those who are involved in the panel and its work are limited in number, do not have any broadcast interests, are limited in pay and must exercise their functions transparently. These amendments reflect our commitment to ensuring robust, transparent and impartial governance for football to safeguard the integrity of the game. I will speak now to Amendments 42 and 45 and say a bit more about Amendments 47 and 49 in my winding speech. Amendment 42 would limit the number of members on the expert panel to no more than 20. The Bill already specifies no fewer than six, but the amendment would insert the words “or more than twenty”. It is in our view a sensible and pragmatic measure. Governance structures function best when they strike a balance between having diversity of experience and opinion and having operational agility and efficiency. By setting this range between six and 20, we think we can help to ensure that the panel is large enough to encompass a breadth of expertise while avoiding the pitfalls of having an unwieldy and bureaucratic decision-making body. We have heard about a lot of the similarities between this Bill and its predecessor that was looked at in another place in the previous Parliament, but this is another instance where the Government have decided to make some changes to the Bill. When I was going through it comparing the previous version to this one, this change perplexed me more than others. When the Bill before the previous Parliament was introduced by the Conservative Government, we capped the membership of the expert panel at 20. Will the Minister explain the policy rationale behind making this change to the Bill and removing the cap? In football governance, clarity and focus are surely paramount, so this amendment that in effect takes us back to the previous Bill is, as noble Lords might expect, in keeping with Conservative values of efficient, streamlined and effective governance and will ensure that the expert panel is equipped to make sound decisions without succumbing to the inefficiencies of an excessively large committee. I hope these arguments will resonate with noble Lords whatever their political allegiances. Amendment 45 echoes the debate we had previously on conflicts of interest relating to the chairman of the panel and would prohibit individuals with current media interests relating to football serving on the expert panel much in the same way as my Amendment 36, which we looked at earlier. I do not think we need to rehash the philosophical arguments behind that. I hope that the Minister will dwell a little on the need to make sure that we ensure impartiality for members of the expert panel just as much as we would for the chairman. Football is a sport that attracts passionate commentary and debate, particularly across the media. While, as we heard previously, live perspectives are invaluable in their own right, the work of the expert panel must remain beyond reproach. Again, I worry slightly that people with active media roles could risk stumbling into conflicts of interest or, at the very least, the perception of them, which could undermine the important work of the panel and its credibility.