Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

We are on to Chapter 2. Clause 10 is the first clause about petitions, which may detain us for an hour or two. There are a number of general points that I want to make about petitions to avoid having to make them all individually on every amendment, but I will wait until the next group, which is very substantive, to make them. Clause 10 is specifically about electronic petitions, so it seems sensible to talk about them at this point. I congratulate the Government on putting forward in Clause 10 a concise proposal, which effectively takes up only four lines, for a system that is a model of what the rest of Part 1 of the Bill could do. There is very little detail and little top-down prescription. The Bill simply says: "““A principal local authority must provide a facility for making petitions in electronic form to the authority””," and that it, "““must give reasons for not granting a request to use the facility provided by it under this section””." That is it. The rest of the clause just defines which local authorities it applies to and what a ““petition facility”” means. That is what the rest of the Bill ought to be like—certainly Part 1. It could even be put forward as guidance for the Government on how to do these things. Still, local authorities are able to do what is in Clause 10 already so it is arguable that even these four lines are not necessary. The Minister will chide me for trying to put another five lines into the Bill, but Amendment 78 probes on what basis petitions made by means of the e-petition facility should not be accepted. I suggest, first, that the petition would not be a valid petition as defined in the rest of this part and, secondly, that the wording was offensive, was against the law or called for something that would be against the law. There a number of instances throughout the petition parts of the Bill where we can debate reasons for refusing to accept a petition, but this is a good summary of what they should be. Amendment 79 is another probing amendment. It states: "““Nothing in this section prevents a principal local authority from … allowing the use of its internet facilities for petitions other than those made under””," their e-petition scheme, or from, "““using its internet facilities for the purposes of consultation with local people””." It seems to be common sense that that would be the case and that writing this down should not be necessary, but one of the fears about this legislation is that authorities that are not really interested and do not want to do this—that is, the authorities that the Government tell us this legislation is aimed at, rather than those that are doing good things already, but we will come on to that—will treat the Government’s schemes as not the minimum necessary but the maximum and will not do anything else. They will use them as an excuse not to accept other things. This amendment would provide that, if the council wanted to use its internet facilities for petitions that would not qualify as valid petitions under its petition scheme, it would not be restricted from being able to do so. Indeed, in all the copious guidance the size of a telephone directory that they are going to give authorities, the Government will tell them that these provisions should not be used as a means to restrict what happens and to prevent other things from happening, or merely to do what has to be done as a minimum. That is a fairly important subtext that runs through many of the amendments to this part of the Bill. The final amendment in the group, Amendment 101, simply probes the question of methods of authentication of signatures on a petition, particularly why they need to be different from those used on ordinary petitions. People sign an ordinary petition and there is a signature, which is not the case for an e-petition. The amendment seeks to confirm that the Government do not intend authentication to be particularly restrictive or onerous, or to require great technical ability. People should simply be able to give their name and address and leave it at that. I beg to move.