Lincoln Jopp
MP for Spelthorne · Conservative · United Kingdom
“All my residents in Spelthorne and I are desperate to get Spelthorne’s five stations into the travelcard zone. The Secretary of State has looked at this in the past, but will she look again, with South Western Railway, at the financial modelling being used to say that it is not possible?”
“My residents in Spelthorne love their racecourse and have no desire to see it flattened and turned into housing so, as any Member would, I started a petition. It has received over 3,500 signatures so far. I also organised a public meeting in the Magpie pub in Lower Sunbury last week, attended by about 70 people.”
“Barratt Redrow told me on 20 March that it was going to put in a planning application by the end of this year. After I started campaigning vociferously for Kempton Park, it elicited a media statement from the company on Friday that it had no plans to put in a planning application during this calendar year.”
“In the centre, Jukebox Man; on the far side, Gaelic Warrior; and on the near side, Banbridge, in a classic renewal of the Ladbrokes King George.” The reason I focus on that is because I was there on Boxing day last year to watch the running of the King George.”
“The proposal had been seen off under previous planning rules. However, hon. Members will be aware that, under the new national planning policy framework, there is an assumed yes for planning purposes if a proposed development is within 800 metres of a train station with two departures an hour in the same direction.”
“Member for Liverpool Walton (Dan Carden), that it is “an internationally recognised venue and a major economic asset that, once lost, can never be replaced. Locally, it supports jobs and generates substantial spending for hospitality, retail, transport and many other businesses, while providing valuable green space.”
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“I wish to build on my hon. Friend’s themes. Football has the unfortunate concept of the friendly; frequently, they are not very friendly at all. When I read the Bill, it was clear to me that the drafters had in mind the prevention of another flyaway European super league, which we have debated. I would like the Minister to look at look at the example of a one-off friendly match. Many of our teams tour in the far east and in America, in their off-season, to generate additional revenues and expand their fan base and brand. Let us envisage a set of circumstances in which a North Korean has somehow managed to purchase an English football team, and they have the bright idea that they would like to play a “friendly” match in North Korea.”
“The hon. Member makes a pertinent point. As I said, the word “competition” seems to refer to the sort of flyaway league we have discussed; are one-off friendlies competitions under the terms of the Bill?”
“I appreciate the desire to legislate for bad owners, but is the hon. Gentleman not concerned about good owners who might find money very tight? They have assets beyond the home ground and team itself that they might have to consider selling, including a training ground, to remain financially viable and therefore be on the right side of the regulator in their business plan. Is he not concerned that, by extending even further the regulator’s purview into all properties, he might overly constrain good owners from doing what they want to save their clubs?”
“The Minister knows—I have approached her about this—that a club in my constituency of Spelthorne has gone into administration. It has no home ground, but it does have a training ground, which is a community asset. I am intrigued to know whether, in the potential conflict between the purview of the regulator and the enactment of companies law in dealing with the administration of the company, the provisions in the clause give the regulator power to influence the administrator on the manner of the administration and whether clubs’ training grounds can be bought or sold. What is the hierarchy of legislative authority between companies law and the clause?”
“The penalties for failing to act responsibly and in accordance with the Insolvency Act 1986 in such circumstances can include being barred as a director of any company by the Secretary of State for a number of years, whereas the jeopardy in this Bill is possibly losing the ability to own a football club or to be an officer thereof. On the basis that we can all become millionaires or start-up billionaires and buy a football club, it is very concerning that we are putting in law the ability to override the directors of said companies’ obligations under the Insolvency Act. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us whether the Government have taken any legal advice on the specific question about the potential conflict between obligations on directors under the Insolvency Act and obligations on owners and officers under the Bill.”
“It continues to be a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I do not know whether the Minister has ever run a company that was approaching either administration or insolvency, but had she, she would know that a number of incredibly onerous and important duties are placed on the directors of such companies, which are literally minute by minute, in terms of them being shown to be acting responsibly. That can include, potentially, having multiple board meetings during a day, which are minuted, in order to revisit the “going concern” statement that the company does indeed have sufficient resources to meet its obligations as they fall due.”
“The shadow Minister is making a completely reasonable amendment. We have the emblem, colours and name. Does he agree that it would be helpful if the Minister explained why the name has been taken out for different treatment from the emblem and the colours?”
“I welcome the fact that the Minister is saying, “Let’s trust existing organisations to do it”, rather than bringing it within the purview of a higher regulator. On the basis that the FA has exercised such responsibilities when it comes to names, why cannot it be trusted to have the same consideration for emblems and colours?”
“I am intrigued to know whether, with all his experience, his chairmanship of the football all-party parliamentary group and his background with the Bill, the hon. Gentleman thinks he has yet received an adequate explanation from the Minister on why emblems and colours are treated differently from the names of clubs.”
“Again, I am concerned about the clash of duties. The Minister has already told us that her team and the insolvency team have met and considered this issue. In a period of liquidation, not putting additional debt into a company, or indeed spending cash, is one of the directors’ responsibilities, but this will undoubtedly cost the club. Has the Minister sought and received reassurances that this approach is consistent with the Insolvency Act?”
“I want to clarify whether the Minister is entirely comfortable that the Government are in no way able to control the amount of money spent by the regulator. If, in fulfilling its duties, the regulator decided it was important to fly business class to meet UEFA and FIFA once a month—if I were the regulator, I could probably make the case that I was fulfilling my duties by doing that—it would create a huge cost and involve hiring additional staff. Are the Government really prepared to give the regulator a blank cheque?”
“I agree with the Minister—my understanding of what she just said is the same—but that leaves a tiny bit of clarity still to be given. Will all the normal running costs of the regulator be met by the levy, and none by the taxpayer?”
“Let me provide some context. I will not name the team, but there is a team in the National League whose cash at hand in 2020 was £25,000, and by 2022 that had reduced to £9,802. We are talking about clubs with an incredibly tight financial structure. I completely agree with my hon. Friend the shadow Minister that changes may be minor to the regulator, but they will not be minor to such teams.”
“Lky7 Sports is a small cycle and nutrition business in Ashford in my constituency. It has been hammered by the loss of small business rate relief, and wrote to me yesterday saying: “The Government say that they are helping small business, but this is a joke when our business rates have gone from nothing to £1,800. We are seriously considering closing the shop down.” What advice does the Minister have for that boss?”
“I thank the Chancellor for her statement, but I fear that she may have misunderstood the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) asked about the River Thames scheme. He asked whether the scheme is included in the £4.2 billion TDEL—total departmental expenditure limit—over three years referenced in paragraph 5.121 of the review. The Chancellor replied that my hon. Friend wants to put up expenditure and will not say where it is coming from, but both he and I are asking this: is the Environment Agency’s half of the River Thames scheme—Surrey county council pays the other half—funded from the £4.2 billion TDEL that she has announced today?”
“The Minister mentioned the two criteria of the business plan and the personnel statement. I thought from our discussions last week that giving the regulator any form of information that the regulator so requested was an additional condition.”
“I am sure that the Minister realises that one of the variants in a club’s business plan is whether its matches are selected for being televised. It is an incredibly haphazard process and difficult to predict, because they are decided within season. What guidance will the Minister give, as the appointer of the regulator, as to reasonable assumptions in the business plan regarding expected television revenue in season?”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that his amendment is very much in the spirit of football? We have seen many injury time winners, when all the odds are stacked against a club, but in the dying moments they manage to rescue an almost impossible situation. So it is not only in the spirit of fairness, but in the spirit of football.”
“Has the hon. Gentleman considered that, essentially, we are talking about the state seizing someone’s assets and giving them to someone else? If a club falls into administration, the administrator is governed by a very strict set of laws in terms of treating all creditors fairly. Is he not concerned that this power could fly in the face of existing powers for the administration of companies?”
“I appreciate that the Minister did not get a chance to spend long on the Back Benches—such has been his accelerated rise up the ministerial pole—but would he like to spare a thought for his former Back-Bench colleagues and join me in thanking and congratulating the small band of Labour Back Benchers who went public, broke cover and opposed this dreadful policy?”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. The shadow Minister is making a pertinent and important point. If the independent football regulator were inadvertently to cross lines into the jurisdictions of UEFA or FIFA, it could be catastrophic for English football. Clearly, that is not the purpose of the regulator. Given the success of many English teams in Europe, that would have serious ramifications. I genuinely think that the shadow Minister’s amendment is meant to be helpful and is incredibly important.”
“I suspect that Government Members will oppose the amendment. Given that, does my hon. Friend think that it would be reasonable of me to ask the Minister the extent to which UEFA has seen the Bill and signed it off as something that does not constitute political interference either way?”
“Mr Turner, you will have seen the declaration of interests that I made on Tuesday. I seek the Committee’s indulgence; this is the only gratuitous intervention that I will make. Can the shadow Minister remind the Committee of the identity of the only team who have won every major European trophy, having recently won the UEFA Conference League?”
“I ask the Minister to respond to this simple question: has the Bill as drafted been shared with UEFA? Is UEFA satisfied that it does not represent political control?”
“Equally, it would create a relationship between the fan and the regulator that might not otherwise be there, so I support the amendment.”
“I rise as someone who currently has an invitation in my inbox to renew my season ticket for an eye-watering £950. I would love to know where all that money goes, as the shadow spokesman said, and why the price has gone in the direction it has. The amendment should not be seen as counter to the regulator. There was significant pushback from the Government Benches when we tried to amend the regulator in terms of size and pay, and we also discussed the budget. If, in a regulated environment, the ticket price went up from £950 to, say, £980, then this amendment would ensure that fans were made aware that that 30 quid had gone on being part of a regulated industry. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for us to want to communicate with the viewing public.”
“The Liberal Democrat spokesman talks about dodgy owners. My season ticket is for a Premier League club; a season ticket for, say, Ashford Town (Middlesex) FC for the forthcoming season is £130. I think part of the function of this amendment is to make the regulator aware of the costs that it puts on well-run but smaller clubs. Simply making decisions and acting under this legislation without any sense of the financial impact and imposition that it is making on those clubs would be a very worrying way to do business, but the amendment would slightly redress the balance between club and regulator.”
“I struggle to understand what might be contained in the Government policy statements. The Minister is steeped in this legislation, so must have discussed this in the past. Can she give the Committee an indication of what sort of thing might be covered?”
“It is important for the House to understand that once an organisation is in the hands of the regulator, it has no choice. I was a director of a company that was applying for an operating licence from a national regulator. It cost millions of pounds, and we never achieved it—we tried three times, and never got there. As long as the regulator is doing its regulatory work, that is okay as far as it is concerned. There can be circumstances in which regulators, as long as things are being done by the rulebook, do not care about the growth of their industry. The amendment is a reasonable counterbalance to that, and would ensure that the regulator understands the financial burden it is putting on teams.”
“It is completely reasonable, at this stage of the regulator’s development, to seek limits so that it can take some very well-defined steps in regulating football, prior to giving it the carte blanche that subsection (3)(c) represents. As the shadow Minister said, I fear that the unintended consequences of subsection (3)(c) will be considerable.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Butler. Subsection (3)(c) of clause 16 is an absolute Trojan horse; it gives carte blanche to the regulator to demand whatever it wants, regardless of whether a club produces such documents or information on a routine basis. Anyone who has worked with a regulator will know that means that clubs will have to employ lawyers, because they would never submit anything to their regulator unless it had been through lawyers first. The shadow Minister used the phrase “blank cheque”, but it is almost a blank invoice to the poor clubs that will simply have to comply. When a regulator says, “Jump”, they do not say, “Why?”; they say, “How high?” However high the bar is set, they have to get over it.”
“Regulation does indeed evolve, but giving this football regulator carte blanche to evolve it without any recourse to Parliament is a key weakness of the Bill’s current drafting, which is why I support amendment 99.”
“My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East and I were not here in the last Parliament, so what went on and the provenance of the Bill are not really our concern. We are being asked to contribute to the discussion and the debate on the Bill that has been placed before us. Neither of us saw the last one, so these are genuine points.”
“The Minister just said something that I am not quite clear about; perhaps, given my hon. Friend’s experience, he could explain it to me. If a club gets promoted to the English Football League—the happiest day of the club’s history—it then has to apply to become regulated, but if it does not have that licence by the beginning of the next season, the Minister just said that it can play. Where should I look in the Bill to understand the latitude that clubs have to play in the English Football League without regulation?”
“The Minister said that clubs would still be allowed to play in the absence of a provisional operating licence. How long would they be allowed to play for before being granted such a licence?”
“Mr Speaker, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP”— so said the controversial Ulster rap band who remain on the bill at Glastonbury. Given that is the case, can the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster reassure the House that no Cabinet Office Ministers will be attending Glastonbury this year?”
“I did serve in Afghanistan, including with the young major who is now the general that my right hon. and gallant Friend is referring to. He is an outstanding officer with unimpeachable credentials. My right hon. and gallant Friend is making a compelling moral case. I have seen at first hand the risks that those Afghans who supported us on operations faced alongside us, which only increased exponentially when the Taliban took over. We have a very moral case for doing whatever we have to do to fulfil our obligation, and if that means tearing up someone’s bureaucratic rulebook, so be it.”
“The Minister’s civil servants will be proud of him. I think the point my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) was making was that when the computer says no and the Minister knows that the computer is wrong, does he not have an obligation simply to go away and change the system?”
“Q8. The Prime Minister told us during the general election that he is a socialist. What has been more surprising is to find out in the last couple of weeks that the leader of the Reform party might be one too. As the Chancellor locks down the spending review, will the Prime Minister please remind her of Mrs Thatcher’s all-too-pertinent observation that the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money?”
“I regret that I have not spent as long as the Minister has in considering this issue. Could she point me to the clauses that make it absolutely clear that the English national team could not be taken within the scope of the regulator and that “a club” could not apply to the Football Association?”
“I thank the shadow Minister for giving way. In essence, with this amendment, we are trying to set the regulator up for success. Presumably the question mark about whether someone appointed was the best person for the job—as opposed to any extraneous influence that donations might have had—should be the primary consideration.”
“Another counterpoint to the whataboutery argument is that this proposal will cut through massively with the British public and the football-supporting public. We had the appointment of the director general of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, who was a Labour donor, and the director of investment at the Treasury, who was a Labour donor. Those things matter to us here, but they do not cut through to the public in the same way that the football regulator will. It has to be cleaner than clean to instil the confidence of the footballing public.”
“It is dangerous to indulge in hypotheticals, but if an applicant for the football regulator chair role had been integral to the negotiation of broadcasting rights for the Premier League, would they not be conflicted in their duties under the Bill? They would have done something in their former life that could disadvantage certain leagues and certain divisions of the league, and they would be seeking to protect that legacy.”
“Does my hon. Friend remember the case of a referee whose footballing allegiance became public a couple of seasons ago? It caused a huge ruckus because it generated a suspicion that he had been, in some way, partial in the way he had conducted his independent role as a referee, which is not unlike that of the regulator. For football affiliation, read political affiliation. There will be semi-political decisions. Does that not also make the point that the regulator should not be politically aligned?”
“Let us suggest that, in carrying out its normal duties, the football regulator questioned, delayed and, finally, denied that change of ownership. If the football regulator was a paid-up member of another political party and a donor to that other party, does the Committee not understand that the perception would be that part of the reason the regulator had come to the conclusions that it had was political? That is what we are trying to avoid with the amendments. I ask Committee members to reconsider, in order to give the regulator the best possible chance of success.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I wish the Committee to entertain a semi-hypothetical set of circumstances. I have spent many minutes googling in order to find the only club in the Football League represented by a Conservative Member of Parliament—the mighty Bromley, as I am reminded constantly by my good and hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune). I think he said in the Chamber that visiting supporters have started chanting, “You’ve got the only Tory.” This is a very particular set of circumstances—there is only one. Bromley has done jolly well this season. Let us just hypothetically suggest that they caught the eye of a very wealthy potential new owner, which would bring riches beyond belief. That would come under the strictures of this Bill in terms of change of ownership.”
“If people appointed to regulators and quangos have fully declared what they have done, ab initio, that does a lot to dampen down concern about partiality. It would be nice to see the Government select someone for one of these appointments who was not a donor at the last election.”
“The Committee looks forward to working with him constructively and holding him to account.” Imagine how much simpler life would be if someone who did not have that perceived conflict of interest—”
“I completely take the Minister’s point about the unanimity of the Select Committee. In that same spirit, it is worth quoting the Chair of that Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), who said: “While Mr Kogan’s background and experience make him well-suited for the role, his past donations to the Labour Party will inevitably leave him open to charges of political bias in a job where independence is paramount. We want to see the new Independent Football Regulator succeed, so it’s crucial that nothing undermines the regulator as it gets up and running. Mr Kogan must give 110% when it comes to reassuring everyone in the game that he is his own man.”
“The hon. Member says that both his club and the fans support the football regulator, but they do not know how much it is going to cost or how big it is going to be. They like the purpose of the regulator, but they do not yet know the cost. Is it unfair to set a boundary on some of those aspects in the Bill, so that it does not grow arms and legs and put regulatory burdens on his club outwith their ability to meet them?”