| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC75
Grand Committee
Wednesday, 28 January 2009.
Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]
Bill Main Page
Copy of the Bill
Explanatory Notes
Amendments
1st Report from DPC
Committee (4th Day)
3.45 pm
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Harris of Richmond): If there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
89: Clause 11, page 7, line 24, at end insert—
“( ) Nothing in this Chapter shall prevent a principal local authority from receiving, considering and taking any action on any petitions that are presented to it that are not valid petitions in accordance with its petition scheme.”
Lord Greaves:Just to give people a change, we can talk about petitions. The problem with irony is that it does not look very good in Hansard, because nobody can understand it.
Amendment 89 relates to petitions which are not valid or active under the Government’s scheme. The amendment states the position clearly. We had some discussion about this on Monday, and I think that the Government will say that nothing will prevent the local authority from doing as the amendment suggests. We have spoken about whether councils will nevertheless regard the Bill as the maximum rather than the minimum provision. We will continue with these discussions as we wrestle with this part of the Bill over the next few weeks.
I have had a specific request to raise the matter on behalf of the City of London Corporation. It is not a body I normally have a great deal to do with, but Mr Double, the Remembrancer of the corporation, has written to me. He says:
“It is part of the custom of London (what is now the City of London) that local communities, gathered in wardmotes, should be able to petition the Court of Common Council (the City’s administrative arm) to ensure that issues of local concern are addressed. By this method, individual voters can secure direct involvement with the decision making body. The Court of Common Council is required to respond to such petitions and usually does so by referring to the issues raised to a committee for detailed consideration and a report.
It cannot be the intention of the Bill that such examples of effective local democracy should be displaced by the new provisions. Amendment 89 provides an opportunity for the Minister to confirm that existing arrangements”—
that is, in the City of London—
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC76
I am very happy to ask that question on the corporation’s behalf.
Amendment 96 amends Clause 12(1)(e), which excepts a petition,
The amendment is tabled partly to probe what that means. Taken together with Amendment 98B, which would insert a new subsection, my amendment is intended to clarify the position. It sets out a number of instances where it seems to us that the council will find difficulty in applying the Government’s scheme to specific circumstances that apply. Yet if a petition appears to be valid, it will have to be dealt with according to the statutory scheme. In order to probe this issue, I shall set out examples of some of the difficulties that a prescriptive, top-down, nationally imposed scheme may have.
One difficulty relates to petitions made under and in accordance with any other enactment. An obvious example is a petition for a mayor, but there may well be others.
The second is a petition in connection with a planning application that is under consideration by the authority. The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, pointed out on Monday that petitions about a planning application will have to be dealt with there and then as part of the planning process and regarded as a representation in relation to that application. It would be ridiculous to deal with such a petition in any other way; therefore, it would have to be outside the scheme as laid down. Yet that does not appear to be the case in the Bill.
The third is a petition made in connection with a licensing application. Exactly the same situation applies as to planning applications. If someone is applying for a licence to run a taxi or to amend the opening hours of a local pub, for example, the council makes a decision in a quasi-judicial capacity under the legislation applying to that kind of licensing. Yet the petition itself could hardly be said to be made under, and in accordance with, an enactment. The enactments allow people to make representations but not necessarily a petition.
The fourth is a petition made in connection with the annual budget-making process of the authority. This is the most important example each year of an instance where the council is making decisions according to a set timetable—it has to. There is no point in a petition going through a convoluted system under the Government’s requirements if it comes in the day before the council’s budget-making meeting; it clearly has to be reported to that meeting and considered at it as part of the budget-making process. That is so obvious, and it is what a normal council will do as a matter of course in a common-sense, pragmatic way, which is our argument throughout.
There may be matters generally in connection with an item due to be discussed at an early meeting of the council, a committee, a sub-committee, the executive, any other body or at a public meeting of a cabinet member who has delegated power to make decisions—sometimes those decisions are made in public by a cabinet member sitting as a chairman but making decisions as a one-man committee, which is a strange way to make decisions but an open and public way for
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC77
Councils carry out all kinds of public consultation. More consultation takes place nowadays than ever before, by a factor of probably 10 or 20, perhaps more. A lot of people complain that there is too much consultation; they do not want to be consulted again and just want councils to get on with it. Nevertheless, consultation is built into all kinds of things the council does. The council sets out a consultation process. Sometimes it is a statutory or semi-statutory process, as under the local development framework. On this particular issue, the council just decided to carry out consultation and then set up the scheme. It is ludicrous for a petition on a matter regarding that consultation process to be considered in any way other than as part of that consultation process and for the council to have a petition scheme preventing that happening.
I am sure that noble Lords with experience in these matters can probably think of lots of other circumstances where the Government’s tightly organised scheme will not fit. Amendments 96 and 98B seek to set out some of the problems that the government scheme is likely to cause, to show the complexity of the issue and the need for flexibility.
Amendment 127 simply removes the Government’s rather feeble attempt to deal with this problem, compared with the much more positive and rigorous way of dealing with it as set out in these amendments. I beg to move.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for having given me the opportunity of speaking to Amendment 89, as it enables me to apologise to the Minister for the contumacious manner with which I treated her on Monday, and to say that I am delighted to be able to speak on an amendment that is without controversy.
As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will know, the letter from the Remembrancer, the Parliamentary Agent to the City, was copied to me by virtue of my previous membership of the House of Commons on behalf of the City. I do not propose to rehearse what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said because I think he admirably made the case the City asked him to. I join him in hoping that the Minister can meet his and the City’s request.
Perhaps I may reinforce the reference to the City’s ancient practices, which were involved in the passage the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, communicated. They go back a long way. The Remembrancer is the only local government officer in the land who is allowed to go anywhere within the Palace of Westminster without let or hindrance. I have known the last four Remembrancers; they have all been men of the highest
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC78
Since I am citing the City of London as one of the cradles of our democracy, I shall reinforce it with a case in the Westminster part of the constituency. Charles James Fox, whom I greatly respect, was the Member of Parliament for the City for 26 years, while I was the Member for only 24, so he gets the bronze medal for being the third longest serving Member for the City since 1283. He had the experience of fighting Midhurst, where there were only seven voters, and Malmesbury, where there were only 13, until he arrived in Westminster, where there were 6,000 electors, which was what I will describe as a serious election. So liberal was the franchise in Westminster, and thus nurturing and fostering democracy in this land, that when the Great Reform Bill came in, the franchise was tighter than the Westminster one and therefore, as a result of the Bill’s passage, the electorate at Westminster fell.
Lord Hanningfield: I support my noble friend’s comments. I apologise for the absence of my noble friend Lady Warsi this afternoon. She is not at all well. Whereas I was planning to participate much more in the later stages of the Bill, I am now going to have to cope with doing so for most of this afternoon.
I support the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, particularly in what he said about flexibility. It is all very well there being government guidance, but, as he said, there are many different types of consultation and some petitions are different from others. For example, if the closure of a school is proposed, thousands of people with children in that school at that time will submit a petition. You obviously have to consider that but it is rather different from getting a petition about some issue that the public are suddenly very concerned about. I would like the Minister to acknowledge that the provision is fully flexible.
4 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Andrews): I thank the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. I certainly did not mind his intervention the other day, and his contribution today was extremely interesting and puts our deliberations into proper perspective. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, that he must not worry about the Bill, because it is excellent. I am sure that we shall all do our best by it.
I hope that I can reassure the City of London by saying that nothing in the Bill will stop the Remembrancer continuing his functions as he has done for at least 400 years—I confess that I would quite like to know who the drunken poet was; there is quite a long list to choose from.
We are trying to make sure that we have in statute a scheme that will make it easier for all our citizens to know that the council has a way of dealing with petitions which guarantees a response. A set of very reasonable, simple criteria will need to be fulfilled. However, if additional petitions, practices and routes exist, there is nothing to stop local authorities dealing
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC79
Amendments 96 and 98B relate in broad terms to the Government’s commitment, set out in the community empowerment White Paper, that petitions on a few issues such as planning and licensing will be dealt with differently in order to reflect, as the noble Lord said, existing statutory processes. Our stated intention is to use the order-making power in Clause 14(4), which will exclude those matters from the scope of the duty to respond to petitions, as it is simply common sense to do so. We want to avoid setting up parallel routes for considering local people’s concerns in those areas; the processes that exist are extensive and well known. Petitions on those subjects do not need to go through that separate system.
The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, spoke about the need for flexibility, which raised some interesting questions, particularly around consultation. We should reflect on that in the context of using secondary legislation, which would allow us to seek the views of the sector before putting legislation before Parliament. The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, capture the broad intention, although I suspect that the drafting would be more complex. I hope that he can withdraw them so that we can reflect on the issues in more detail. I would be happy to discuss them with him before Report.
Lord Greaves: Amendment 127 relates to Clause 18, and we will come to that in a later group. There are very serious flaws in Clause 18 at the moment, and I think we will want to discuss them in detail later but not now.
The Minister said that a few issues will be excluded by the powers in subsection (4), which I shall come to in a moment. However, I do not think that a few issues will be excluded if the provision is sensibly worded. I think that a large number of issues will have to be excluded, partly because very often petitions appear not in a vacuum but in relation to something that the council is already doing. I mentioned, for example, the budget-making process. If what the council does in its budget-making process is controversial, a lot of petitions will come in directly in relation to that and indeed to lots of other decisions that are on the agenda or are about to get on to the agenda of a meeting. Therefore, the issues that are already going through the council system are very important, and I do not think that there will be only a few.
I have already said that, unless the wording in Clause 14(4) is changed quite substantially, when people look at this legislation, they will think it is crackers. Subsection (4)(a) states that,
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC80
that is, the Secretary of State in England—
- “may by order specify matters falling within subsection (2)(a) which are not to be regarded as relating to a function of the authority”.
Subsection (2)(b) refers to “relevant matters”. However, for the Secretary of State to issue a document that says that planning applications are not to be regarded as relating to a function of the authority is madness. This is not real-world wording; it is crazy. It may mean that to lawyers, who will understand it, as perhaps will some of the rest of us, but you cannot tell a council to exclude planning applications because they do not relate to its function when they are one of the most important things that a council does.
I get the impression that this legislation has been written by people who are on a different planet but I think that the Minister will already have gathered that from what I have said. In the mean time, although there are important issues here that still have to be discussed and resolved, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves: I shall speak also to Amendments 126 and 128 and the Question whether Clause 18 should stand part. This group concerns a smallish number of miscellaneous issues which, nevertheless, need to be put on the record and probed.
Amendment 91A brings us back to our old friend, the definition of a valid petition. Clause 12(1)(a) says that, for a petition to be valid, it must be “addressed to the authority”. I simply want to add the words “or presented” so that it reads that a valid petition has to be “addressed or presented to the authority”. I am not sure what the Government will say “addressed” means but, in my view, it means an address written down; in other words, at the minimum, it should say “to East Sussex County Council” or “to Cornwall County Council”, or whichever authority the petition is being presented to, yet a large number of informal petitions that come in and have to be treated properly are not. I read out two yesterday and shall repeat them:
“We as residents of Mansfield Crescent want a one-way system”.
That is not addressed to anyone. The second reads:
“We the undersigned want to stop the speeding traffic on Chapel House Road”.
That is not addressed to anyone. I think that they were presented separately to different committees of Pendle Borough Council. They might have been presented to the town councils in Brierfield or Nelson, or they might have been presented directly to the authority which has powers to do these things—that is, the county council. However, they were not addressed to
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC81
Amendment 126 relates to Clause 18. Some of the supplementary provisions in that clause are worthy of discussion. Under Clause 18(2)(a), the principal local authority’s petition scheme may include,
I do not understand the purpose of these eight pages if they can be ignored so that the petition scheme can apply to invalid petitions. If there is to be a detailed prescription of a valid petition, rather than telling local authorities that they may include petitions that do not fit the precise criteria laid down—for example, because every signature is not dated, which is one of the more ludicrous ideas—they ought to have a duty to consider them. Otherwise, there is a great risk that a lot of valid petitions—for example, for a one-way system in Mansfield Crescent or for traffic calming on Chapel House Road and hundreds of thousands of others all over the country—would be excluded because they do not fit. Therefore, I propose the insertion of “shall” instead of “may” in line 31.
Amendment 128 provides that a petition that clearly relates to a number of different authorities can be photocopied, either by the petitioners or by the council that first receives it, and that those photocopies should then be regarded as a true copy of the petition. The Newcastle scheme makes that provision so that people can hand in true copies of petitions rather than the original. On a matter such as winter gritting—to pick an issue at random—people might well want to present a petition to the town council, the district council and the county council, perhaps to the police and possibly even to the Lord Lieutenant, although I am not sure what he would do with it.
I shall speak to Clause 18 stand part. Clause 18(2)(c) relates to whether a petition handed to one authority can be dealt with and passed to another authority. This paragraph seems to allow it, but other clauses, which we will discuss later, appear not to. We need some clarity to avoid confusion.
Lord Hanningfield: I shall speak to Clause 18 stand part, but I support what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said on the other amendments in this group. Clause 18 adds confusion. It allows local authorities to have variations, and being a localist I agree with that, but it contradicts some of what we have been talking about. I hope that the Government will think again on this. The system needs to be fairly flexible. If the Government want to give guidance and include all these matters in the Bill, the system must be flexible.
As we have said, there are many different types of petitions. For example, some may be generated by people wanting to change the position of a level crossing, which may not necessarily coincide with the local authority’s point of view, but it is something on which it could take advice and operate. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves said, some may be generated by what the council is doing at that moment. The whole issue needs rethinking, and that is why we have tabled the Question whether Clause 18 should stand part of the Bill.
28 Jan 2009 : Column GC82
4.15 pm
Baroness Hamwee: On Clause 18 stand part, when I wrote to the Minister on 15 January—I was surprised but pleased to receive written answers to all the points I had raised when I was simply warning of what I might mention at this stage—I, too, used the term “confusing” about Clause 18. I said that allowing for non-statutory provisions but spelling out in primary legislation what they “may in particular include” was certainly confusing to me. I do not understand where in the hierarchy of legislative requirement—going down from primary legislation, through secondary legislation, statutory guidance, non-statutory guidance and so on—this might lie.
I understand the response that what is dealt with here is in addition to the statutory provisions and requirements that are in the earlier clauses—that is implicit, but you have to think about that. It must be the case but, as my noble friend said, a fairly technical approach is required to reach that conclusion.
I was concerned, too, about the words “may in particular”. It is terminology to which we have become accustomed in legislation—it normally means “shall”, but perhaps that is another spectrum. The answer to this was that they are practical points which might come to light when a scheme gets under way—indeed they are—and which are worth highlighting to local authorities for possible inclusion. Perhaps they are but, if so, their place is in guidance and not on the face of the Bill.
Lord Patel of Bradford: Noble Lords have raised some pragmatic and sensible issues on which I hope I can reassure them. Certainly this is an area we could discuss further.
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |