EFL chair urges Badenoch to take ‘more balanced view’ on football regulator | Football League

Rick Parry, the chair of the English Football League, has expressed disappointment with Kemi Badenoch for not speaking to the league before coming out against an independent football regulator, and has asked the leader of the Conservative party to consider taking “a more balanced view”.

In February, Badenoch declared her personal opposition to a policy launched by the last Conservative government, calling the regulator a “waste of money” and claiming that “people in the industry don’t think it’s going to work”.

Before the return of the Football Governance Bill to the House of Lords this week, Parry, a leading advocate for a regulator, said he had written to Badenoch requesting a meeting on the topic. “We were surprised that she had come out against the bill having said she had spoken to people in football who had said it was a waste of time,” he said. “We did point out she hadn’t spoken to anybody at the EFL. So if she hadn’t taken our views on board, we’d like a meeting to explain our perspective so that she could take a more balanced view.

“We’ve written to the leader, and we are in touch with a few Tory MPs and quite a few former MPs who were backing the bill at the time. They are making the point that perhaps they’d like to be re-elected one day, that they actually understand why they were backing the bill in the first place and perhaps think it is something the Tories might want to revisit. I think the strength of Tory opposition in the House of Lords has been surprising, remembering it broadly was a Tory bill.”

The passage of the Football Governance Bill through the House of Lords has been characterised by interventions from Conservative peers seeking to challenge the regulator through amendments to the bill. In January the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, accused Tory frontbench peers of being “wreckers” who were “killing off the hopes and dreams and inheritance of supporters”.

In response to Parry’s remarks, a spokesperson for Badenoch said the Conservative leader had made a principled decision to oppose the bill. “Kemi ran for leader of the Conservative party on a platform of ‘governments should do fewer things but better’ and she is instinctively opposed to new regulation when she believes government should be deregulating more,” read a statement. “As such, her opposition to a new football regulator is based on principle.”