Commons Bill [HL]

I thought that was the answer I would receive. Can the Minister provide any number at all of such cases which have taken place? I am disappointed with the Minister’s reply because the argument that this would be a dreadful burden on local authorities does not stand up. As I have said before, one of the duties that local authorities have already is to deal with blockages to rights of way, many of which are serious. But many are minor and are dealt with fairly quickly, not by taking people to court but by merely dealing with the matter. The real danger is that if local authorities do not have a duty to do so, they will not try to deal with the problem, even in cases where simply getting involved could sort it out. I am aware of a number of cases, including one at Blackstone Edge in the Pennines, which I know very well, where simply the involvement of the local authority—which I believe to be Rochdale—solved the problem without having to go to court. It is a question of whether local authorities will take this issue seriously. However, nothing the Minister has said convinces me that they will now take the problem seriously when they have not done so in the past. Can the Minister explain what she means by ““minor encroachments””? Clearly some encroachments deserve the expenditure of a great deal of time and resources by a local authority, but others can probably be sorted out quite easily. What is a minor encroachment? Is it something which relates only to a small piece of land? Is it perhaps the erection of a wind turbine, to which a noble Lord referred earlier? Or is it something which has only a small visual impact? Can the Minister clarify what she said about local access forums? Did she say that the Government are consulting about whether to give local access forums powers to give advice to bodies other than the access authorities? Which other bodies might these be? Might they be Natural England or the appropriate national authority in relation to commons? Might they be the local authorities? Might they be the commons associations? What did the Minister mean by that—or are the Government consulting about what she means by it? The Minister said that the Government are consulting on whether the local access forums should be given a role in dealing with unlawful works on commons. Clearly some unlawful works on commons—perhaps a great many of them—involve access, but, equally, others would not per se impede access in any great way. I am not sure of the relationship between the access functions of the local access forums and the wider issue of unlawful works on commons. Can the noble Baroness help me with that?