Debate on the Address

My Lords, I warmly welcome the government programme outlined in the Queen’s Speech, but there are missed opportunities which might usefully fill the two weeks for which we are laid off yet again like seasonal workers—pear-pickers or pea-podders—and cannot do the proper job of scrutinising the Government. I will suggest some legislation on local authorities’ responsibilities on transport and the Fire Service, but I begin with regulating street trading in our city centres. Too often now, it is abused by those who take out pedlars’ licences. I make this point because I chaired the ninth local government private Bill which has tried to rectify matters. Would it not save an awful lot of time if the Government brought forward a Bill to help local authorities get into a regulated system to deny these pedlars who are abusing their licences? I move on to commercial advertising billboards, which so besmirch our motorway sides. They are unsightly, are undoubtedly breaking planning permission and are a danger to traffic. This was debated in June 2005; the then Minister, Yvette Cooper, asked local authorities to do something about it, and some have. I understand that a database of motorway ad prosecutions announced in 2007 is coming into effect soon, although it is only voluntary. Can the Minister tell us whether that database is up and running? Is it helpful and effective in coming down on those who transgress the law? Since that debate two years ago, research from Brunel University by Dr Young demonstrates the detrimental effect of billboards on the performance and attention of drivers on motorways, making it more likely that they will crash as they try to understand or write down a telephone number displayed on the side of the motorway. Will the Government accept an amendment to the Local Transport Bill, for instance, to increase local authorities’ powers to interview, prosecute or fine those who transgress? Or should it be—as I believe is a better way of dealing with this—a duty to be placed on the Highways Agency? Local authorities are overburdened as it is. The Fire Service must clean up the motorways when such accidents happen, and I want to talk about the recent tragic warehouse fire in Warwickshire, where four firefighters died. They were found by comrades from Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service, who had gone down to Warwickshire to help. Indeed, we in Cheshire have suffered from warehouses which do not have sprinklers attached to them to douse fires when they start. We should legislate for sprinklers being part of our public buildings and important warehouses, such as the one that went up in flames yesterday in London. When we are talking about the effect on the environment, I wonder in passing whether we could work harder at reducing the way in which we pollute the sky with the smoke from these incidents by introducing sprinklers more widely, thereby reducing the pollution and the environmental footprint that we currently leave. Next Wednesday, I shall ask a Question about the self-extinguishing fire-safe cigarette. We recently discovered through the EU consumer protection commissioner, Meglena Kuneva, that some 2,000 deaths a year in 14 of the 27 member states of European Union occur when people fall asleep smoking a cigarette or are too drunk to notice. Self-extinguishing cigarettes would save those deaths, the thousands more who are injured and the millions of euros and pounds that literally go up in smoke as a result of people starting fires in that way. Finally, I cannot resist the opportunity to say that the fire service in Cheshire, Warrington and Halton is run by one authority, and long may it remain so. Just look at the difficulties involved in the Secretary of State’s decision to split Cheshire into two separate unitary authorities. We are going in the reverse direction to bringing local authorities closer to the people when west Cheshire will be moved to become part of Merseyside and east Cheshire will become part of a large area called Manshire. Can we resist this? Can we come back to some common sense and keep Cheshire for the people of Cheshire?