Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)

I support the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, in what she and the previous speaker have said and in all the work that she does. It is all there in the Deloitte report on the Premier League. The Premier League has missed a trick; the pages of the report show where the money goes and how it is spent, and it is all very laudable. Premier League football clubs, independent of the Premier League, do great schemes as well. Manchester City’s City in the Community started in 2003 with no funding from the football club, apart from one officer and that was Alex Williams, an England goalkeeper, who has just retired after doing 20 years at City in the Community. That is an example of the social responsibility of football clubs. The reasoning behind these amendments, even though they may be just probing amendments, is that those things that can be given can be taken away. If football clubs in the Premier League fall on hard times and things have to stop being done, they may stop doing the things they do not have to do, and that effect will invariably come down to the poorest parts of the pyramid. All we are trying to say with these amendments is: let us acknowledge the social responsibility that the Premier League has and the Premier League football clubs deliver but let us give the regulator the ability to ensure that that carries on. My noble friend is not being prescriptive and saying, “You should all pay that much”, but he wants to ensure that, to avoid unintended consequences, football clubs do not suffer in the event that some Premier League clubs or the Premier League itself cannot deliver those benefits in future years. I have no reason to think that will happen, because the Premier League is getting bigger and going global and more money is coming in, but that is the point of the fan-led review. How many football clubs did the review show were one match away from disaster? That why we are looking for a regulator. Sometimes the unintended consequences are too dire, especially for smaller clubs.