It is a great pleasure to follow Mr Betts, who has done much work on this issue, and to follow the wonderful speech earlier from my hon. Friend Dame Tracey Crouch, who has done such fantastic work on the important fan-led review. It builds on work done over many years by Members and Committees of this House.

When I was a new MP, I took part in the 2011 football governance review undertaken by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which was chaired by my right hon. Friend Sir John Whittingdale, and this issue has been a recurring theme of interest for the House. The reason is that when clubs get into distress, it becomes evident very quickly that the competition’s primary interest is protecting the competition, not individual clubs.

When a club goes into administration, it can be too late to solve the problems. The actions of the league are to protect the integrity of the competition and to complete the season, rather than to save the individual clubs. Because the leagues are effectively governed by the collective views of the chairs of those clubs, they are often not very sympathetic when one of their own gets into trouble, particularly if they think the clubs have got into financial trouble because they have been overspending or, as the leagues would see it, cheating in some way. As we saw with Bolton and Bury—Bury failed financially and were expelled from the league, and Bolton very nearly were—and as we have seen with clubs like Derby, had there been an intervention and had it been made clear that the clubs were already playing and trading in breach of league rules, as they stood, the situation could have been avoided. There could have been an earlier intervention, rather than waiting until the last minute when nothing more could be done.

It is in response to those concerns that the fan-led review was triggered and this Bill has come forward today. We have seen numerous cases of bad ownership. Massimo Cellino acquired Leeds United a few years ago, and the football league did not think he was a fit and proper person, which demonstrates that there was no fit and proper person test. If a person was qualified to be a company director in the UK, they had as much right to be a director of a football club as any other entity, and he defeated the football league in the courts. We desperately needed a test in which somebody could stand up and say, “We are not convinced by this person’s track record. They cannot own the club.”

Coventry City were owned by an investment fund at one point, and nobody knew who the investors were. Leeds United were owned by somebody we did not know, and Sheffield Wednesday were almost bought by somebody who did not exist. It was the wild west, and the Bill seeks to address this by having a regulator that is required to license clubs and has the power to say to a potential owner, as Ofcom does to broadcasters when it is not happy with how they execute their licence, “We are not convinced that you have met the tests, so you can’t be the owner of this club,” or, “You must demonstrate and prove who you are if you are investing in this club. And we must have a robust business plan that demonstrates that you can run the club sustainably, meeting its requirements for this season and future seasons.” That does not require the regulator to invent new rules for football. It simply requires an independent body to enforce the competition rules that already exist. If we had that transparency and that ability to tackle rogue owners, many of the game’s problems would be resolved.

I do not believe that this form of effective regulation will deter people from investing in English football. If anything, it will encourage them. If someone is looking to buy a club in the championship or league one, with the hope of investing in that club and getting it into the premier league, having proper governance and enforcement of the rules will attract better owners into English football, which will be good for everyone.

I seek the Minister’s advice on a few specific points. As I said to the Secretary of State, the Bill’s structure is very interesting. The primary purpose of the regulator is to ensure sustainability, alongside which it has three objectives to consider: soundness, resilience and heritage. In making a determination, the regulator should always act in a way that is sustainable and that supports at least one of the three objectives.

This raises a question where, say, a club does not own its own ground. The ground might be owned by a private third-party entity that is seeking to push up the rent by an extortionate amount that the club cannot afford to pay, so it has to move to a new ground. The fans might be against the move, and the heritage test might say that the club should not move, but the soundness and resilience tests would say that, no, the club should move. The Secretary of State said earlier that the regulator could set aside heritage concerns and make that decision.

The regulator needs to establish some guidelines and principles that it will follow in making such decisions, so that there is proper consideration and so that it does not always defer to the financial case but considers the other points in the round. It is important that the test for directors is subjective and that the regulator can say when it is not satisfied, rather than the test simply being a tick-box exercise in which people may own a club if they can demonstrate that they do not have live convictions for particular offences. The regulator should have a robust power to say no.

The licensing conditions say that a club has to produce a corporate governance report, and the Companies Act 2006 sets out the sort of criteria that a company has to include in its report. And the Bill’s explanatory notes say that a corporate governance report should cover

“the nature, constitution or function of different parts (‘organs’) of the club;
the manner in which those parts conduct themselves;
the requirements imposed upon them;
and the relationship between them.”

That would exclude the players and any relationship, responsibility or obligation that the club has to them. I agree with Ministers that the regulator should not be writing welfare standards and policies for football, but it could act as a guardian in making sure they are being properly enforced. It could use its investigatory powers, if it feels that there are grounds to investigate, to make sure that welfare standards are being properly maintained. This is important because where this idea has failed in football and other sports in the past, it has been because of the power structure within a sporting organisation, whereby the coach and team doctor often have huge influence over the athletes and it is difficult for people to know where they can safely blow the whistle. A backstop guardian, through the regulator, on welfare standards would be totally consistent with the requirement on the clubs to produce a corporate governance statement to the regulator every year. I urge the Minister to consider that.