Contribution
My Lords, in moving the amendment, I shall speak also to my Amendment 9. Amendment 26 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, also touches on many of the issues that concern me and motivated me in bringing my amendments; I look forward to hearing him set out the case for it later in the debate.
My amendments in this group probe the Government’s definition of a football fan. In any other context, the exact definition would perhaps be academic, but fans have had an important role in the process that has led to this Bill. As the Minister and many others have said, the Bill seeks to put fans’ interests at the heart of this legislation. It was, after all, the fan-led review chaired—refereed, if you like—by my former honourable friend Dame Tracey Crouch which led to the Bill in its former iteration under the previous Government and which continues to inform the work that the new Government have taken forward in the Bill that they have brought before your Lordships. It was the fans’ voices in that process that were so important, and which began the path to where we now find ourselves.
We on these Benches agree with the Government that fans must be consulted and that they will have an important and ongoing role to play not just in the future of English football but in the operation of this new regulatory regime, but we cannot empower fans, or listen to their views, if we cannot say who they are. Through Amendment 8, I put it to the Government that both clubs and the new independent football regulator should seek to serve the interests of both “current and prospective” football fans. This expands the point that we have made about growth and making sure that the Bill is not simply seeking to preserve football in aspic.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, Edmund Burke wrote:
“Society is indeed a contract … it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.
That may be a high-falutin’ way of putting it, but it is the principle that underlies my Amendment 8. Football must not be governed as a game merely for the fans of today, nor should it simply seek to preserve the game in a form that fans of the past have enjoyed; it must also continue to be a game for the future. That is surely what the Government mean by the sustainability of football which, as the noble Baroness said in the debate on the previous group, is the key concern of this Bill.
We on these Benches feel that prospective fans—whether they be literally unborn, as Burke would point out, or those who are not yet alive to the joys of the game—should always have their interests served by clubs and the new regulator as well. Only if we are seeking to serve the interests of prospective fans as well as existing ones will we truly secure a sustainable future for English football.
My Amendment 9 similarly seeks to expand the definition of the communities whose interests are served by the Bill. The purpose clause in the Bill seeks to serve only “local communities” with which regulated clubs are associated. I was keen that the Committee should probe the inclusion of that word, “local”. We had the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester with us for earlier deliberations in this Committee. I am taken to understand that not everybody who is a fan of Manchester United or Manchester City lives in the city of Manchester. If a large group of people from London or another part of the country were to follow Manchester United or Manchester City during a period of success for one of those clubs, would it be right for those clubs or the new regulator merely to serve the interests of local communities in Manchester, or should they consider the interests of fans who follow those teams and who have a stake in them no matter where in the country they are based?