Clause
9Interpretation Question
proposed, That the clause stand part of the
Bill.
Mr.
Goodman: After all that, Mr. Amess, it would be
most irresponsible of us to let this clause stand, harmless though it
is on its
own. Question
put, That the clause stand part of the
Bill. The
Committee divided: Ayes 9, Noes
6.
Division
No.
9] Question
accordingly agreed to.
Clause 9
ordered to stand part of the
Bill. Clause
10 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clause
11Petition
schemes
Julia
Goldsworthy: I beg to move amendment 38, in
clause 11, page 7, line 26, after
‘with’, insert ‘the statutory provisions
of’.
The
Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss
amendment 39, in
clause 11, page 7, line 27, after
‘Chapter’,
insert— ‘(a) prevents a
principal local authority from relaxing the requirements of its
petition schemes so as to apply it more widely than is required by this
Chapter of the scheme, or (b)
’.
Julia
Goldsworthy: May I begin by seeking guidance on whether we
will be considering whether clause 11 stands part of the Bill at the
same time? I see you indicate, Mr. Amess, that that is so,
which will be
useful.
The
Chairman: Order. I have just been advised that, because
these are slightly unusual proceedings, we will be dealing with things
separately, so there will be a clause stand part
debate.
Julia
Goldsworthy: Thank you, Mr. Amess; that is
helpful. I
shall confine my remarks to the amendments tabled in my name and that
of my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall. They would ensure that
local authorities will not be penalised if they seek to go beyond the
base line of the scheme established under the Bill.
Amendment 38 would amend subsection 6 of the clause, so that
it
reads: “A
principal local authority must comply with the statutory provisions of
its petition
scheme.” Essentially,
therefore, if an authority wishes to go beyond the scope of the
statutory provisions and then fails to meet its ambitions, it will not
be penalised for having done so.
As with so
many other things, including planning guidance, the lowest common
denominator is established and local authorities are averse to the risk
of going beyond that, which means that people are not encouraged to go
further. I hope that the Government want councils to do whatever they
can to be as responsive as possible and that, rather than penalising
councils that are slightly over-ambitious and are unable to deliver on
those ambitions, they ensure that a minimum requirement is delivered.
Similarly, amendment 39 would ensure that, if the requirements are
applied more widely, there will be no impact on councils if they wish
to go
further. The
amendments are straightforward, and I hope that the Minister will take
them in the spirit in which they were tabled—they are all about
seeking reassurance that authorities that wish to go further and,
perhaps, push best practice even further will not be penalised for
doing
so.
Ms
Winterton: These amendments express, I think, the hon.
Lady’s concerns that the requirements in the Bill may open the
way for increased numbers of judicial reviews or complaints. I hope
that I can reassure her on that and persuade her to withdraw the
amendment. We do not believe that the petitions regime will be onerous
for local authorities. When a council gets a petition, it must
acknowledge it and take appropriate action in respect of it.
As the law
currently stands, if the council received a petition and responded in a
wholly unreasonable manner, it would be liable to challenge by judicial
review. Although what we seek to do will not look fantastically
different
from the current situation, the profile of petitions will be raised.
People will know more clearly where and how to submit petitions and,
crucially, they will know that there will be guaranteed a response.
That is what is so important about the changes. It is also
true to say that, if all councils have a clear procedure for dealing
with petitions, they will be protected from any accusation that they
have acted in an unreasonable manner. Again, that is not necessarily
very different from what councils do in relation to any other function
that they discharge. I hope that that reassures the hon.
Lady.
Amendment 39
proposes to insert that nothing in this
chapter “prevents
a principal local authority from relaxing the requirements of its
petition schemes so as to apply it more widely than is required by this
Chapter of the
scheme”. Again,
the hon. Lady’s concern is that, once a principal local
authority has a petition scheme, it would be considered unreasonable
and therefore a waste of resources for it to act in response to
petitions that fall outside that scheme. I can give her some
reassurance on that. I do not think that any aspect of the
Bill’s requirements could be interpreted as imposing any sort of
exclusive set of obligations for the handling of petitions. Therefore,
we would not get the kind of criticism that she fears.
What we have
tried to do in this chapter is make it very clear that the authorities
are given a very wide discretion about what to include in their schemes
and how to respond to petitions. Although local authorities must do at
least what their petition schemes say they will do, they will continue
to have discretion to go wider if they wish, and the provision will not
prevent them from responding to any petition that they receive. With
that reassurance, I hope that the hon. Lady will withdraw her
amendment.
Julia
Goldsworthy: I will not seek to push these
amendments to a vote, but I would like to respond and reflect on some
of the comments that the Minister has made. The Minister initially said
that these were not onerous requirements. If that is the case, I wonder
whether the Minister’s own Department will be taking on such a
policy in relation to petitions. I understand that it does not count
the number of petitions that it receives. If best practice is so
straightforward, I see no reason why the Department for Communities and
Local Government should not improve its efforts to ensure that it too
abides by similar best practice.
5.30
pm The
intention of the amendments was to raise questions about the sanctions
in the Bill imposed on those local authorities not complying with the
requirements on petitions. It seems that there will not be any.
However, as was the case with the duties in the previous chapter that
would promote democracy at a local level, I wonder whether it is
another example of compliance being monitored by yet another key
performance indicator. Once again, we are seeing mission creep: the
Government say that they are reducing the number of key performance
indicators but are increasing them through the back door.
I still have
serious concerns about why this more general point is included in the
Bill, but I shall not press the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave
to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Question
proposed, That the clause stand part of the
Bill.
Mr.
Jackson: As ever, Mr. Amess, it is a pleasure
to serve under your chairmanship.
Clause 11,
like the chapter, is similar to the previous one in its complete
vacuity. One has to ask the deep philosophical question, “If
this clause did not exist, would local government in Britain be
demonstrably the poorer for it?” I suspect that the answer is
no. It forcefully makes the case that the Government have run out of
ideas. After 12 years of Labour Governments, the clause is a triumph of
trivia. I am amazed that Ministers and Labour Members should be
surprised that councillors feel undervalued from time to time. With
such legislation, their decisions, their authority and their autonomy
are circumscribed.
The important
question is why it is necessary for such provisions to be made in
primary legislation, reaching as they do into the nooks and crannies,
and the minutiae of local government. Effectively, it is an
assertion writ large that local councillors cannot be trusted to
administer their areas properly—and, more
importantly, that local electors are frankly too stupid to realise that
their councils are either very good or very bad, and that
they have to be drawn to water like the proverbial horse.
The irony is
that things could have been different. When the White Paper
“Communities in Control” was published in July
2008—it followed the Green White Paper “The Governance of
Britain”, published by the Prime Minister in July
2007—there was a real opportunity to empower communities. To
give the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears) her due, the late
and not much lamented by the Labour party Secretary of State was
committed. Some people made hay in the other place about the lack of
petitions in Salford. I would not dare to make that point again, but
the fact is that it would be a wasted opportunity.
The real
problem is the accretion of power to unelected quangos and other
bodies. The Bill makes no mention of that. As we all
know—reference has been made to this before—people are
concerned about the Child Support Agency, the Border and Immigration
Agency, Jobcentre Plus and CAFCASS to name but a few, but where is the
opportunity to petition them for immediate action? It is much easier
for the Government to beat up on local government and make the
assertion that councillors are not fulfilling the functions for which
they were elected. That is wrong.
There is no
empirical or academic evidence to underpin the clause, but a rather
dodgy survey, the provenance and robustness of which we have never
established, was debated in the other place in January. A Local
Government Association survey apparently showed that 30 per cent. of
councils fail to deal properly with petitions. That is the only
evidence of the need for this intrusive, prescriptive and draconian
clause to force local councils to do what they are already
doing.
Mr.
Goodman: Does my hon. Friend believe that the force of the
Government’s argument is that there is a case for requiring
Departments to respond to petitions? To give the hon. Member for
Falmouth and Camborne her due, she pointed out on Second Reading that
the Department does not have a good record in responding to petitions,
and I am sure that she will make great play of that later. If the
Department cannot get it right, why are the Government putting these
cumbersome and burdensome duties on local
authorities?
Mr.
Jackson: My hon. Friend makes his point powerfully, and I
suspect that the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne is no longer on
the South West of England Development Agency’s Christmas card
list. Nevertheless, she made a strong
point. The
clause is a displacement activity to cover up what the Government
should have done, but have not done, to empower local people and to
give them real financial autonomy and democratic powers. My right hon.
Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden made the important point
that many of us have constituents who have issues with housing and
arm’s length management organisations, but instead of providing
them with the capacity to petition, we are concentrating on other
third-party bodies. Those responsibilities are falling to local
authorities
unfairly. Looking
back at House of Lords debates shows that there was significant
consensus about the possible efficacy of the clause. It is interesting
that many people with years of direct experience in local government
held forth ad infinitum on the matter, and made some powerful points.
Lord Greaves, the sage of Pendle said on
Report: “I
would much prefer that the entire chapter on petitions did not exist.
It is unnecessary.”— [Official Report, House of
Lords, 17 March 2009; Vol. 709, c.
179.]
Mr.
Goodman: Is my hon. Friend aware that the noble Lord is
not the only person who seems to be of that
view. “Part
1, chapter 2 deals with petitions, and probably the less said about
that the better. Petitions provide one mechanism for citizens to
highlight concerns, but one must question whether 11 clauses are
necessary. It looks to me suspiciously like
micro-management.”— [Official Report, 1 June 2009;
Vol. 493, c.
65.] Those
were the words of the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich on
Second Reading. Does my hon. Friend hope, as I do, that the right hon.
Gentleman will rise frequently to give us the benefit of his
views?
Mr.
Jackson: The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich
is being uncharacteristically taciturn. As an hon. and fair-minded
Member, he cannot reconcile the dichotomy between commitments in
various Green and White Papers and by Ministers for real localism and
the top-down centralism of the Bill.
My hon.
Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles), who
knows what he is talking about with his expertise, said in response to
the White Paper on 8 July
2008: “If
petitions are to play a more important role, does the Secretary of
State realise that listening to them will be all the more important?
The Government have ignored petitions on post office closures,
polyclinics, a referendum on the European treaty and the congestion
charge. What is the point in a council having a
duty to respond to petitions if it has been stripped of its powers to
make any difference?”—[ Official Report, 9 July
2008; Vol. 478, c.
1415.] That
is important. Furthermore, Ministers pray in aid the support that they
have received from the Local Government Association. The Minister will
know that the LGA believes that the clause, and its associated clauses,
is a turkey. It says
that “the
LGA does not accept evidence of widespread public dissatisfaction with
the way petitions are currently handled by local
authorities.” It
also says that it
foresees “problems
with the introduction of a prescriptive process for handling petitions,
leading to a greater bureaucracy for dealing with them...The LGA
does not therefore agree with the proposal to impose a duty to respond
to local petitions as outlined in the consultation
paper”. Furthermore,
as Ministers will know, the LGA offers an alternative which we would
have supported had Ministers themselves brought it forward as an
amendment. That is to
update “the
model constitution published by CLG following the Local Government Act
2000, along with updated guidance under S31 of that Act, setting out
best practice guidance on handling petitions and
deputations.” That
leads me to another important point. Given that these powers, duties
and responsibilities are new to local authorities, I fail to see how
any realistic impact assessment can be made of the cost of the
proposals. They are plucked out of the air. We have no idea. In this
age of difficult fiscal decisions and a lack money in terms of the
grants given to local authorities, we will be piling even more
responsibilities on them to deal, particularly, with
petitions.
The
clause—and others—is superfluous and unnecessary, as my
right hon. Friend said. It is at the end game of a drive to a unitary
state—not federalism, not localism, top-down Stalinist,
draconian proposals which force people to do the bidding of Government.
It stands as a disreputable rebuke to the best interests of local
people and to democracy in this country.
Ian
Stewart (Eccles) (Lab): How can a Front-Bench spokesman
from a party that imposed a poll tax on the people of Scotland talk
about a draconian exercise within this
country?
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