Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay:

Moved by Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay

19: Clause 2, page 2, line 31, leave out subsection (3) and insert— “(3) For the purposes of this Act a “specified competition” includes—(a) the Premier League,(b) the English Football League, and(c) the National League.(3A) The Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument amend the competitions specified in section (3).”

My Lords, I rise in that spirit to move Amendment 19. In doing so, I thank the Committee for indulging my request not to take it at the end of business late in the evening on the previous day in Committee but to start with it today.

We began a very important debate on this matter on Monday evening, but it came well past 10 pm and got rather confused, so I thought it would be helpful if we return to this amendment to look at the issue again with cooler heads, particularly in the light of the letter which the Minister undertook to write and which she has very helpfully circulated to those of us who were in Committee on Monday. I thank her very much for doing that and for turning it around since the previous day of our debate.

I will not repeat the arguments that I made about the issue at hand in my Amendment 19, which is about including specific competitions in the Bill, but I will briefly remind the Committee—particularly for the benefit of those who were not here on Monday evening—that I was sceptical of the Government’s arguments for why the leagues in scope should not be put in primary legislation. The arguments that the Minister advanced on Monday, and in her letter this morning, related to the need for legislative agility and the requirement for the Government to retain the ability quickly to alter the relevant competitions should they change, or should the names of the leagues change slightly, as she set out on Monday.

As I said then, and as the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of your Lordships’ House has said in its report on this Bill, codifying the leagues in scope in the Bill does not preclude the possibility of making future alterations. The second part of my Amendment 19 would allow the Secretary of State to alter by statutory instrument the leagues in question, if they should change in future. That is the same method of alteration as currently set out in the Bill, so the pace at which those changes could be made, should the Government require them, is unchanged. What would be different is the starting point. My amendment would give competition organisers and football clubs the certainty they need, and surely deserve, to start planning their financial matters and regulatory compliance, since they would know from the outset whether they would be included in the scope of the Bill.

The other reason for returning to this matter today is so that we can talk properly about hybridity. This is fundamental to the Bill; it came very late in our debate on Monday, and the questions that it throws up require some answers. I do not think that the Committee was particularly satisfied with where we got to on Monday, so I hope we can make more progress today.

I have been advised by the Clerk of Legislation that my Amendment 19 could make this Bill hybrid. I believe the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, have been similarly advised about their Amendment 21. However, this Bill is, to all intents and purposes, already doing hybrid things; it is just not doing them explicitly.

The Government are clear about who they want to target with this Bill, and have said so in their Explanatory Notes and in comments outside this Committee. However, they do not want to say so in the Bill because that would afford those clubs and leagues the opportunity to petition Parliament directly about this new law which directly affects their organisations. If putting the leagues that the Government have publicly stated that they wish to see regulated into the text of this Bill makes it hybrid, should we not confront that question and refer it to the Examiners?

As I have mentioned before, the Government did not previously use the possibility of hybridity as an argument against placing the leagues in scope in the Bill. That might have been because they were not aware that doing so would make the Bill hybrid. I was certainly not aware of that until I was alerted to it by the clerks after I tabled this amendment. I think that was also the case for the Minister, who said on Monday,

“in the explanation of this group of amendments that I received from officials earlier today, they made it clear that following the tabling of Amendments 19 and 21, issues have been raised about hybridity. That was the point at which hybridity was raised with me

The Minister made it clear on Monday that that was the first time she was aware of the issue. I do not doubt her sincerity, but I was a little surprised when she said it, because the email I received from the Clerk of Legislation alerting me to it was copied to her noble friend the Government Chief Whip. He was certainly aware on 26 November—that is, last Tuesday—that this raised questions of hybridity. I do not know what discussions they had in the light of the email that he received, but it would be helpful to know.

That is rather incidental. The fact is that we are all now apprised of this issue and understand that the Bill is seeking, by not putting the leagues on the face of the Bill, to deny private businesses and much-loved organisations the right to petition Parliament about the impact this Bill has on their affairs—as is their right when a Bill is designed in a way that would affect certain groups more than others.

On Monday, I drew the Committee’s attention to Clause 91(5), which establishes that secondary legislation made under the Bill once it becomes an Act of Parliament to allow the Secretary of State to specify the leagues in scope is to be treated as if it is not hybrid. It is important to draw noble Lords’ attention to that again. It says:

“If a draft of an instrument containing regulations under this Act would … be treated for the purposes of the Standing Orders of either House of Parliament as a hybrid instrument, it is to proceed in that House as if it were not a hybrid instrument”.

That appears to demonstrate that the Government were aware, in at least some regard, that there are hybrid implications to this Bill.

We have special provisions relating to hybrid legislation for a reason. They are intended to protect private interests from being unjustly affected by the laws that we pass here. It is disagreeable to skirt around these rules by pushing potentially hybrid provisions into secondary legislation, and to tuck away at the end of a Bill measures to do the same in relation to secondary legislation brought by it. On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, and others reminded us of the report of your Lordships’ Delegated Powers Committee entitled Democracy Denied? I raised concerns on Monday that this would be another instance of the democratic rights of those organisations being restricted, if we were to proceed in this way.

I was keen that we return to this matter at the start of today, our third day in Committee, because I want us to ensure that, when the Bill becomes law—as all parties want—it has been scrutinised as thoroughly as it should be. I am conscious that we can do our duty here as legislators to examine the consequences for football. But, with some honourable exceptions—such as my noble friend Lady Brady and the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, on the Benches opposite, to give just two examples from across the Committee—not many of us in your Lordships’ House know as much about the implications of the Bill for football as football organisations themselves would be able to say if they could petition Parliament.

I am grateful for the opportunity to return to this question of hybridity. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her letter to us. I hope that she will respond to the concerns raised both today and on Monday, and I look forward to her response. I beg to move.

My Lords, I take the opportunity to rise early on this group to establish the Government’s position on an issue the Committee clearly cares about. The Committee debated Amendment 19 at length on Monday evening and asked me to write on the points raised. I was not confused, and I do not feel that the Committee was sitting unusually late for discussions on important legislation. I also do not think that the leagues are confused about which leagues this legislation will apply to. I have since written to the noble Lords, and a copy of that letter has been placed in the House Library.

I also want to put this rationale on record and reassure noble Lords that this power is both reasonable and the result of extensive evidence-based consultation with all key stakeholders in the industry. This power ensures that the competitions in scope can be amended in a timely manner, and it ensures that the scope of the regime remains relevant. It future-proofs for future innovations and protects against circumvention.

On the noble Lord’s point, I note that the previous Government included an equivalent provision in the Media Act 2024—the noble Lord himself brought that provision before your Lordships’ House. I hope this provides the explanation that he was after. We have now debated the amendment at length, and I have clearly outlined the Government’s rationale for the power. I hope the noble Lord opposite is now able to withdraw the amendment so that we can continue progress on the Bill past Clause 2, and I look forward to continuing discussions on this matter ahead of Report.

My Lords, I refer the Committee to my interests, which are declared in the register. I defer to other noble Lords who have experience of the technicalities of hybridity and parliamentary procedure, but I hope it is helpful and illuminating in this context to raise the issue of consultation with clubs. We are creating legislation that will profoundly affect 116 unique institutions, from Premier League clubs through to the National League community clubs. But it is important for everyone to understand that the consultation with these affected businesses by the current Government has been remarkably limited—almost unbelievably so.

Just seven Premier League clubs—mine was one of them—were granted a brief half-hour meeting with the Secretary of State over the summer. Following this cursory engagement, significant decisions were made that could fundamentally affect the future of English football, most notably with the inclusion of parachute payments within the backstop mechanism. I say again: seven clubs out of 20 have been seen for just half an hour since the Government took office and before they made that seismic decision.

This is particularly concerning given that fundamental issues still remained unresolved. We still lack any clarity on UEFA’s position regarding state interference, for example. This clearly creates profound uncertainty for clubs competing in, or aspiring to, European competition, as well as our national teams. We do not know what the ownership test will look like. This causes significant uncertainty for potential investors as to whether they are able to own a club.

I have listened with real interest to this debate on hybridity. Can the Minister help my understanding here? Can she confirm that, if my noble friends are correct and hybridity is a live question for the Bill, this would give clubs at all levels a real opportunity to present their specific circumstances to Parliament? For example, would it mean that National League clubs could explain their concerns about the regulatory burden and the concerns of the many that they say “would not survive” this regulation? Would it mean that Premier League clubs could have more than half an hour to detail the very serious implications for them, and the risk that we may harm the competitive balance of the Premier League, which we have all agreed that none of us wants to do?

That would be especially important, given that the impact on Premier League clubs is very different from that on other stakeholders in the Bill, as the Premier League is the only party that provides funding to any other part of the football pyramid. The backstop is clearly designed as a mechanism to gain direct access to, and apportion, Premier League revenue and no one else’s. It would allow the IFR to do this even if it was against the Premier League clubs’ will, or even without the clubs’ agreement, even if it was to have a detrimental effect on the clubs and the overall competition that it removes revenue from.

I have spoken to many of my colleagues across the whole football pyramid. We are all alarmed about, and puzzled by, the lack of discussion on the Bill with Ministers. Does the Minister agree that we all want to get the detail of the Bill right, and can she see any downsides to providing meaningful opportunities to hear from all clubs across the football pyramid affected by the legislation?

I must admit that, probably like other noble Lords, I am scratching my head over this. As the Minister said earlier, it is very clear that the leagues know who we are talking about here and that a large section of the Bill is talking about the whole arrangement, and in Clause 6 about the distribution agreement, the pyramid, the parachute payments and all that. There are only two instances where that counts, in the payments from the Premier League to the other leagues, so it is very clear that we are referring to Premier League and English Football League clubs. I do not think there is any doubt about that at all. As I was taught as a kid, if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.

I am pretty sure that this is a hybrid Bill already. I am not an expert, but I cannot see why it is not a hybrid Bill because, as the Minister just said, it is very clear to everyone which leagues we are referring to. The argument that somehow we could not change things if things changed, or if league structures changed, just does not stand up. Just as we are going to nominate which competitions we are talking about under secondary legislation, we could do exactly the same if there was any change in the format of the leagues. The Minister wrote in her letter about trying to stop people gaming the system, but we have a very easy way to stop them gaming the system. It is set up there already—you can change it in secondary legislation, just as the Government intend to do in defining the competitions involved in the first place.

I cannot see any reason why we would not call it as it is. It is as if we were somehow trying to stop the clubs having the proper amount of consultation. As my noble friend Lady Brady just said, it is clear that there has been very little consultation to date. The clubs themselves have said that there was very little consultation. The people here who are members of those clubs probably know more than anyone else about this.

I believe that we are all united in this Committee in wanting the best for football. That comes through very clearly in every conversation we have had. I know that colleagues from right across the spectrum want what is right for football, and I know that the Minister wants what is right for football—so why not give clubs the opportunity to be properly consulted and have proper input on something that is going to profoundly affect the whole game?

My Lords, I will very briefly support my noble friend Lord Parkinson’s Amendment 19. I do so as chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, although the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, chaired the relevant meeting in my absence. My noble friend’s amendment addresses a serious issue. I would have thought that, given the committee’s report on this, the Government would have at least considered the arguments and sought to alter them.

As noble Lords have noted, our committee’s eighth report highlighted that this Bill, as drafted, does not make the fundamental definition of English football clear. The committee was concerned because this Bill leaves us wanting. It leaves us with no definition in primary legislation of what it seeks to address; it is a Football Governance Bill that does not define what part of football it will govern and leaves such a key part of the definition of the Bill to come later in secondary legislation. As my noble friend has pointed out, certain parts of it say that the secondary legislation, if it were to be hybrid, should be ignored as hybrid. That gives a very wide-ranging power which we should be cautious about.

The memorandum explains that

“the rationale for regulatory intervention is based on market failures in the professional men’s game, and problems or harm that most typically and markedly arise in clubs of a certain size and type (typically professional clubs)”.

It then gives four different reasons why the Bill does not explicitly state that it intends to regulate the top five tiers of the professional men’s game. These reasons have been covered by other Members, so I will not go over them.

The Government argue that they need to define the scope in secondary legislation to allow them to change it in future. However, should they need to amend which leagues are in scope, they could still amend primary legislation to alter those leagues by statutory instrument. There is no change to that in my noble friend’s amendment. We have seen hybrid Bills before. I took one through the other place as Secretary of State for Transport, dealing with a rail link from the West Midlands to London. They are more complicated, but people know how to do them and know what regulations need to be abided by.

This amendment is not asking us to decide whether the Bill is hybrid; the Government are being asked to accept that there is inherently a form of hybridity in this Bill regardless, and that they must therefore allow it to go before the Examiners to see what they find. The Government should give very careful consideration to what the amendment says.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord McLoughlin has made an incredibly important point. While I do not think that this is the moment for us to test it, we should give due consideration to whether this ought to go before the Examiners after Committee and before Report, particularly because the Minister has today said that the leagues are not confused about which leagues this legislation applies to.

We are grateful to the Minister for writing to us today. She stated in her letter that:

“The initial intended scope of the top five tiers of Men’s English football is built on a strong evidence base and extensive consultation with all key stakeholders”.

Nothing could be clearer about exactly who this Bill is meant to refer to. Yet, in this whole long Bill, there is no reference to the five tiers of men’s English football and we have no idea whether the Secretary of State will ultimately keep to that or not. We are going through legislation about which we have no clarity to whom it refers. That is, if not unprecedented, extremely rare. It is important that we heard from my noble friend Lord McLoughlin, not least because, to repeat what his committee said in its report:

“The argument that something should not be fixed in primary legislation because it might need changing in future would be an argument against having any primary legislation”.

I urge the Minister to listen carefully to my noble friends and to make sure that the Government at least place what we are talking about in the Bill, so that we know which clubs it refers to and where the onerous powers contained in it for the potential state-appointed regulator will fall. Without that, we are talking in a vacuum.

My Lords, one of the amendments in question is in my name and that of my noble friend. I am surprised that Members opposite think that the previous Conservative Government would have introduced a hybrid Bill. I remind the House that this Bill is almost identical to the one they introduced and I am surprised that they thought that that might be hybrid. That Bill was discussed in another place at quite some length, but this question was not raised. As I understand it, the Bill would not have received a Second Reading had it been deemed to be hybrid at that time, so I do not think there is any question that this Bill is hybrid now. It can be made hybrid only if one House or the other passes an amendment that makes it so.

The amendment we put down was just to probe what the intention might be in future—it was a mechanism for debate, not to make this Bill hybrid. I am not sure of the intentions of those opposite, but certainly we were not intending to make it hybrid. It is not hybrid now and I do not think we should look to make it so in future. I suspect that any suggestion about referring this elsewhere is part of the delaying tactics that we have seen so much of these last few days.

To follow that point directly, I raised the original question of hybridity following an intervention by my noble friend Lord Markham, at which the Minister nodded. The Minister has since written to us, and I am grateful for her letter setting the situation out. I want to respond to what has been said in the following way. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, who is in his place, has at various times produced a copy of the Bill as it was under the last Conservative Government and pointed out, as the noble Baroness just said, that the two Bills are, in certain respects, almost identical.

The Bills are 95% identical. That is why we are somewhat surprised that noble Lords opposite are so opposed to its content. There is only one fundamental policy difference in it.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for intervening, because it buttresses the point I want to make. The Minister made it very clear on Monday that she was not aware of the hybridity issue that would arise were the leagues to be named in the Bill until that afternoon. It is evident, therefore, that someone in the department, as my noble friend said from the Front Bench, was aware of the hybridity issue under the last Government and under this one. I raise this as a member of the Delegated Powers Committee; when we received the view of the Government about why the leagues were not named in the Bill, the hybridity issue was not mentioned. It seems to me intuitively quite wrong that so important and real an issue should not have been named when the communication was made between the Government and the committee.

I am told that, procedurally, the people who speak on the Government’s behalf to those who brief us on the committee about the Bill are not obliged to tell the committee about the hybridity issue. If there is something as important as the hybridity issue, should the committee not be made aware of it somehow? I am grateful to the noble Lords opposite for raising the point about the Bill being much the same under the two Governments, as it is germane to the point I want to make.

My Lords, in one of the quaint ways that the Commons has of occasionally putting people, for whatever reason, on obscure committees, I found myself for 15 years on the hybrid Bill committee —one of the more obscure joys of life. I should just say that it was not the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, who put me on it.

You should not offend the Whips.

There are vast numbers of Bills that could in theory be called hybrid Bills but are not, such as the Great British Railways Bill. It is a nonsense argument, and there are millions of football fans waiting to see some change made.

The thing that triggered the origins of the Bill, with Boris Johnson and others, was a European super league. If Parliament ever attempted to say that the clubs that tried to form a breakaway European super league have a specific hybridity status—in relation to the people, having voted for manifestos that wish to stop this, being able to do so—the whole concept of how we make rules of law would come into question. This Bill is not hybrid and could not be hybrid, in exactly the same way that vast numbers of other Bills which have an impact on various private businesses are not hybrid. I think many noble Members realise that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has hit the nail on the head. We did a bit of research as well; the question of whether this is a hybrid Bill was asked in the other place, and it confirmed that it is not, so it comes to us with that confirmation. The letter from the Minister is really helpful, in that it clarifies that position for these Benches, and we will be happy if the mover withdraws the amendment.

The best thing would be to retire this amendment gracefully today, bring it back on Report and if need be, force a vote on it and let people decide. This is endless. The Chief Whip said, “Let’s be brief”. We are now 30 minutes in, rehearsing the rehearsal of last week’s four hour debate.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brady, said that seven Premier League clubs met the Minister. I presume that the Minister invited all the Premier League clubs to that meeting; they would not have been selected. If only seven bothered to turn up, again, that gives you a clear—

I can confirm to the noble Lord that only seven were invited. They were selected.

To be helpful to the Committee, could the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, give us the names of the seven clubs? That might shed some light on what is going on here. There seems to be an illusion that the Premier League was suddenly born out of the ether, and then provides for all. Players such as Ryan Giggs, Phil Foden and Alan Shearer do not just suddenly materialise; they come up from the other divisions. I get what the noble Baroness is trying to do, and I respect her position, but you have to look at this in a holistic way. This is about a regulator regulating for the five divisions, and if it is not blindingly obvious to anybody what those five divisions are, they may be sat in the wrong place.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been worth while having it again, painful and irritating though it may be. I am sorry if that upset the Minister—it certainly was not my intention to do so. I did it because this issue matters.

By the Minister’s own admission on Monday, she did not know about the issue of hybridity until it was raised with her on Monday. Does she think that a few hours’ consideration, along with all the other matters we gave attention to in Committee on Monday, and a few minutes’ debate in Committee late on Monday evening, is sufficient to dispose of an issue as fundamental as this?

As I said in my opening remarks, the Government Chief Whip knew about this issue at the same time I was alerted by the clerks, on 26 November, almost a week earlier. I am grateful that he stayed to listen to our debate on this group. Maybe he, if not the noble Baroness, can tell us what discussions he had in light of that issue being raised with the usual channels on 26 November. This is about engagement with the people, organisations and businesses that this new law will profoundly affect. I was shocked to hear what my noble friend Lady Brady said about only seven hand-picked clubs being given just half an hour of—

As requested, I will clarify who the seven invited clubs were: West Ham, Crystal Palace, Brighton, Liverpool, Spurs, Everton and Brentford.

I am grateful to my noble friend for providing that information to the Committee. As I am not the world’s greatest aficionado of football, I will leave it to others judge whether that is a representative spread of the beautiful game, but I am interested to hear from the Minister the rationale by which those clubs were selected. I would like to know whether she was present at the half-hour meeting with those clubs and, if she was not, how much time she has given to engaging with clubs before bringing this legislation before your Lordships’ House and asking us to pass it.

As my noble friend Lord Markham set out, the changes the Government have made to the Bill since the last Parliament—on backstops and parachute payments—make this a substantively different Bill. I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton: this is not a virtually identical Bill; there are some substantial differences in policy terms, to do with parachute payments and so on. I think she would agree that those affect certain leagues and clubs more than others, and engage the question of hybridity and to what extent this Bill is targeting certain groups differently from others.

As with the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and the noble Baroness, my Amendment 19 was a probing one to see whether we could provide clarity in the Bill for those whom it will regulate, so they know from the outset what they must do and that they must comply with it. Like the noble Baroness, the first I knew was when we received the advice from the Clerk of Legislation explaining that this would make the Bill a hybrid one.

It is worth saying that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, that the previous Bill, when it was in Committee in another place, was not a hybrid Bill and it was right to conclude that. The question is, if we give that explicit information to the English Football League, the Premier League and the National League, so they know that they are going to be covered by this law—which the Government, in their Explanatory Notes, say they will: something they are happy to say outside the House but are not happy to say in the Bill, because that would afford them the right to come and speak directly to Parliament—then it is a question well worth pausing on, and I make no apology for returning to it today.

I am proud of the way your Lordships’ House scrutinises legislation; we go through things sometimes slowly, more slowly than Governments would wish— I have stood on the other side of these Dispatch Boxes and share the pain the Government Chief Whip and the noble Baroness are feeling today. This is a shining example of the importance of your Lordships’ House and the excellent advice we receive from its clerks. Thanks to that advice, two successive Lords’ Ministers for this Bill have been alerted to the fact that it could become a hybrid Bill if it is said in it what it is trying to do. That is an important point to have returned to in Committee, and I would like to understand from the Minister why, when we pass this law, we should not tell the people it is going to affect that it is going to affect them.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to the debate. I have already outlined the Government’s position on an issue that the Committee clearly cares about. I can confirm to the noble Lord opposite that I am clear that this position is correct and, if the noble Lord is concerned that I am upset, then I am slightly surprised. I am more concerned that the noble Lord thinks we should still be confused about matters on which I have written an extensive letter to noble Lords earlier today. The House debated Amendment 19 at length on Monday evening and asked me to write on the points raised. I have done so, and a copy of the letter has been placed in the House Library. I do not really want to repeat my explanation of when a Minister might have to nod; however, I will do so if that is raised again.

I hope we can work through any residual concerns swiftly so that your Lordships’ House might be able to lend its scrutiny, which I agree is important, to the other very important parts of the Bill. I understand the noble Lord’s desire to have in the Bill upfront clarity as to which competitions will initially be in scope of the regulator’s regime. However, as I explained on Monday night, and in my letter, there is a sound policy rationale for the approach taken in Clause 2.

As my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton stated, this is the same position that the previous Government took. It will ensure that these competitions can be amended in a timely manner in the future, to ensure that the scope of the regime remains relevant if there is a change in the structure of the football pyramid. This will also ensure that regulation cannot be circumvented. For example, clubs and competition organisers cannot simply reconstitute, rename or establish new domestic competitions to avoid the regulator’s regime. In such a scenario, failing to amend the scope quickly enough could result in the legislation failing to deliver the effect intended by Parliament.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brady, referred to what she called a lack of consultation. I am thoroughly surprised by and do not recognise this. The intended scope of the Bill is built on one of the most sound evidence bases and most extensive consultations possible. Over the past three years, there have been countless opportunities for all affected and interested parties to make representations. These include the fan-led review, the Government’s response to the fan-led review, and the White Paper. No club that has asked this Government for a meeting has not had one. Some Premier League clubs have indeed turned down invitations to meet. I met the noble Baroness myself and I attended the meeting in the summer that was referred to.

A number of other noble Lords raised whether the scope should appear clearly in the Bill. We understand the importance of clarity and certainty for the industry. The football industry is unique in that the definition of the market in scope of regulation is not straightforward. This is why the regulated population must be defined by reference to the leagues in scope, which are subject to change. If there is a change in the market, as there was in 1992 when the First Division became the Premier League, the regime needs to be able to adjust so that its scope remains relevant. In such a scenario, failing to amend the scope in a timely fashion could result in the legislation becoming ineffectual and the regulator being undermined.

Does the Minister recognise that my Amendment 19 seeks to allow that to happen? In its second part, it keeps the provision for the Secretary of State to make, by regulation, amendments if the name changes. I take on board the point she made on Monday and that she repeated in her letter about the policy intent here, but my amendment, if she accepted it, would allow that to continue to happen. It would also give the clarity from the outset to the leagues that are going to be regulated.

As I previously explained, I do not think that the leagues that are likely to be regulated by this legislation in the first instance are in any doubt, but I will answer the noble Lord’s point about why we are not going to put the top five leagues in the Bill and take a power to amend it. I believe I have set out very clear reasons for the approach taken on defining the scope of the regime. The Bill delivers the effect intended, closing any loopholes that would allow avoidance of the regime, while allowing for agility in responding to any potential changes in the structure of the football pyramid. This is a clear, simple procedure that can be consistently applied to the competitions initially designated as being in scope, as it can to any future competitions.

We have heard from numerous noble Lords opposite about their concerns over the number of delegated powers in the Bill, and I hear those. I have set out why specifying the leagues in scope in the Bill is a potentially flawed approach and open to avoidance. At best, this approach leads to superfluous or unnecessary provisions in drafting. At worst, it could undermine the entire regulatory regime. That is why the approach in the Bill that the Government have taken, and that the previous Government took, is the right one. For that reason, I am unable to accept the noble Lord’s amendment and hope he withdraws it.

I am sorry to hear that from the Minister; it does not give us much more than we had in the debate on Monday. I thank her for restating it, but I do not think it has engaged with the point that my amendment seeks to provide, which is allowing that flexibility to answer all the policy questions that she has set out, but also giving the clarity in law to the leagues that will be regulated by the Bill. As far I can see, the only material difference between accepting my Amendment 19 and proceeding in the way she wants to is that it would allow those leagues to petition Parliament and make their voices heard more clearly. That would be a good way of hearing from those who will be affected by this law.

I was struck by the sage advice from the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, who is acting as referee on this matter. This is something we will have to return to, and I am grateful to the clerks who alerted me to it. We will have to think about the question of hybridity and the right of football clubs and leagues to make their views known on this legislation, as the Minister and I have both just come to understand. The Committee has, through the course of this and Monday night’s debate, been able to begin considering it, and we should continue to consider it between—

If the noble Lord insisted on this being included in the Bill, what would his response then be to further proceedings on the Bill?

I am interested in making sure that the Bill passes. I have been very clear from Second Reading onwards that we want to see it pass, that we want a regulator to be set up and that we want football to be protected and well governed. However, we want it to be done in a way that is not unduly burdensome, is proportionate and genuinely protects what is a hugely enjoyed pastime, a vital export and a group of hugely successful businesses for this country.

Thanks to the noble Lord’s Amendment 21 and my Amendment 19, we are given the opportunity to pause and consider whether we can have deeper and more fruitful conversations with those leagues and clubs to make sure that we get this legislation right. That is a question worth pondering with greater patience than I think we have seen from the Government Benches so far. I will certainly continue to consider it, and I hope that other noble Lords will do so too. For today, and in the interest of making further progress with our Committee deliberations, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 19 withdrawn.