My Lords, I rise to support the three amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Parkinson.

On Amendment 45, it is very important that we have Chinese walls around media interests and that we preclude, if possible, any potential conflict of interest. We are not talking about a corner shop; we are talking about very serious big business and huge amounts of money for broadcasting rights. The information that will be contained within this regulator and the expert panel is phenomenally important in terms of its commercial confidentiality. Therefore, it is appropriate to put in the Bill a protocol which precludes the possibility of any interference from those who have a vested interest in media, and particularly in the workings of the expert panel.

We can look at models across the world whereby you have to keep secret from many people confidential information that is market-sensitive and may affect stock and share prices. Some of the information in the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission would fall into that category. This is not quite as lucrative, but it is very big business. Therefore, we need to protect individual clubs that do not have economic heft, and bigger clubs that may be affected by a leak of information or inappropriate use of information from the expert panel.

Amendment 47 strikes a balance on the ability to pay an expert the appropriate amount of money. You want someone who has accumulated knowledge, skills and experience of football on the expert panel, but you do not want to pay them more than, for instance, the Prime Minister is paid. You want to have a set amount, and I think it is appropriate to put it in the Bill, in primary legislation. We know that £91,346 is pretty much two and a half times the average salary. It is a decent amount of money for the services that will be provided by the members of the expert panel.

The amendment I support most strongly is Amendment 49 because, as Judge Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court judge in 1913, said, daylight is the best disinfectant. That was not said by a British historian, as people think, but by a Supreme Court judge. He was absolutely right about this in all the ways government is conducted. This gets the balance right, because there will be Chinese walls between different functions within the independent football regulator. This is light-touch transparency. It would not divulge the intricate proceedings of the expert panel within the IFR, but it would allow people to make a value judgment on how key decisions had been reached and who had made them. There would be accountability and transparency, as you would know not only who was making a case but the reasons why they did not support a decision. It is right that we would not include detailed minutes of the deliberations of the expert panel, because that would not be in the interest of the game and good governance, but it would be important to understand how decisions were made.

If you put that together as a complementary mechanism, with parliamentary oversight and scrutiny of the independent football regulator as a whole, it is a very useful amendment for making sure there are key checks and balances. It would make sure that certain clubs are not dominating and certain other clubs are not being pushed out, and that everyone has an opportunity to have empirical evidence, data and proper facts put before the expert panel. Ultimately, the panel will be accountable, first, to the IFR, then to Parliament and then to the wider public, including the fans.

I am not saying that the IFR is exactly the same as the Securities and Exchange Commission, but, for those reasons, I think there is a framework here that can be used to make sure that we deliver a decent and effective IFR—but in a fair and equitable way that is open, transparent and, above all, accountable to the taxpayers and people of this country.