Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)

My Lords, I am happy to support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Jackson and the eloquent case that he made for it. I wholeheartedly endorse the remarks of my noble friend Lord Moynihan. As we go further into this Bill and debate it further, it becomes clearer that this was a Bill conceived in a fit of absence of mind; it has come about almost by accident. There were some concerns about Bury Football Club going into administration. There were concerns about the European Super League being proposed—an idea that was almost literally dead on arrival not because of a regulator or primarily because of political intervention but because of a fan revolt. The system as it was worked. It was the deep commitment of fans to the current arrangement, the current competitive leagues and all of that. Their anger and dismay at this were reflected in the British clubs which had committed to it, including my own. They abandoned it as if it was suddenly realised that this thing that they were holding was red hot and that the sooner they got rid of it the better. This was working. Yet there was a casual threat made by the then Prime Minister, reacting—as a populist will often do—to popular anger with a threat to introduce legislation. It is more and more evident as we go further that the Bill we are now considering at length, with its deficiencies and its threats, is the result of that. I want to consider, for a moment, the case that my noble friend Lord Jackson made about overregulation. I have been involved, at various stages of my long and chequered career, in trying to counter overregulation. The first time was nearly 40 years ago when I was Margaret Thatcher’s Minister for Deregulation. Later, I chaired a deregulation task force at the request of my noble friend Lord Heseltine, the then Deputy Prime Minister. I then chaired periodically the coalition Government’s better regulation Cabinet Committee, or whatever we called it. I have been involved in this a lot and spent a lot of time looking at the effects of overregulation, who the beneficiaries are and which organisations suffer because of it. One of the conclusions that I reached very early on was that it is not the big businesses that suffer most but the smaller ones. A bit of a theme in how we have been debating this Bill is the sense that “All of the resentment and all of the difficulty with this is coming from the Premier League”, and that somehow we are trying to defend it. I have to tell your Lordships that the clubs that will feel the least of the burden of overregulation, the compliance costs, are the big clubs, because they are big machines. They are serious businesses. They have the personnel and infrastructure and can draw on resources to deal with the unexpected effects of regulation. They will have a machine that will accommodate it. It will be uncomfortable and unnecessary and it will have costs, but they will not be threatened by it. The clubs that will really feel the burden are the small clubs. They do not have these big machines and are not equipped with armies of lawyers and accountants and the rest of the panoply of resource that is required to deal with this totally new form of regulation that is suddenly being thrust upon them. This is something we need to think about very carefully indeed. One might not want there to be bad effects, but so many of the debates we have had on this Bill have been about the threat of unintended consequences.