Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

This is a good opportunity to have a substantive debate about quite a few things relating to petitions. I note that my noble friend Lady Hamwee has two amendments in this group. In moving Amendment 79B, I think that the implication is that, if the amendment were accepted, Clauses 12 to 22 inclusive would be left out of the Bill. At one stage, I was trying to group all the debates together but for various reasons—there may be some points in different clauses that need to be raised—they have been grouped separately. If the Government want quite dramatically to increase the ability of people to organise and present petitions to their local authorities, or if they want to ensure that it happens in those areas where it is not done at the moment, where it is not possible and where it is not dealt with sensibly if it happens, they have three choices. The first choice, which I, and I think Liberal Democrats generally, would prefer, is that the Government should not legislate but encourage what they might call best practice generally. I cannot remember a single occasion when the national Government have gone to local councils, either individually or as a whole, and said, ““Petitions are a good thing. You should have systems for dealing with them sensibly when you get them. You ought perhaps to encourage people to present them to you, and when they do so, you should look at them properly and deal with them properly. Perhaps you should also have systems under your own council’s standing orders, constitutions and conventions to enable this to happen””. The Government have never done that. Yet they are saying that, in order to ensure that all authorities do it, they must legislate and do so in a detailed, top-down way that will produce a lot of uniformity. Authorities do not need to do that. If there was a joint initiative between the Government, the Local Government Association and other interested bodies, we would get to the point at which pretty well all local authorities in the country operated a sensible system for receiving and dealing with petitions. If that were to happen, there would be one real difference compared with what will happen after this Bill passes, if it passes in its present form: there would be a huge amount of variety of practice in different places. That would be a good thing, because local people could work out what was best in their area and on their council and because a variety of practice is the only way to work out what is best practice. Unless you have such a variety, you know what the uniform, centrally imposed practice is, but you never know what the best practice is and what is not so good, which means that authorities are much less able to learn from one another. Variety would be our choice but, if the Government say no, local authorities really must have a duty placed on them. If you cannot trust local authorities to do something quite as simple as dealing sensibly with petitions from the public, it is a poor do—very disappointing and wrong. It is possible to have a genuinely light-touch approach that sets out the duty, lays down a few principles and then trusts councils to get on with it. If, having done that, and after two or three or four or five years’ experience, there are still problems, you can legislate as a backstop in the future. You have done it the right way around; you have trusted people and you have allowed them to do their own thing. If we are talking about local democracy, for heaven’s sake, surely that is how it should happen as a matter of principle. There is, as I said, another possible approach—the Government’s approach—which is detailed, top-down, prescriptive legislation: eight pages, with 3,000 words of primary legislation on how to present a petition to your local council and how the council should deal with it. In addition, we will get reams of guidance, compulsion and uniformity. I have to say that the Government are making themselves look ridiculous. The Government will say that all this has been worked out in co-operation with local government, but the councillors and council officers to whom I have spoken over the past few weeks have no idea that this legislation is coming. If the Local Government Association says that it agrees with this, which it does not, it has not been dealing with its members properly. But of course it does not say that, and I shall come on to that point shortly. The other problem with the Government’s approach is that once this incredibly detailed legislation is in place, it will be difficult to go back if the problems that we are forecasting arise. Once a heavy-handed, centralised, detailed, namby-pamby system of micromanagement is in place, it is difficult to unpick it. If there has to be legislation—and we accept the Government’s right to bring forward legislation as far as this place is concerned—we ought to exercise our right to scrutinise and revise it in order to bring it down to genuine framework legislation. My noble friend Lady Hamwee and I both have proposals for that and I am sure that, if the Government were willing to meet us on this, we could come up with a much more acceptable scheme than what is being proposed. I have been trying to think of how to describe what the Government are doing. This Bill is what might be called Gulliver legislation. As Gulliver lay on the beach after he was shipwrecked, he was caught unawares, tied up with a huge amount of red tape and held down. If he did not do exactly what he was told, the Lilliputians would fire off arrows at him. This legislation is a Gulliver approach and I am tempted to say that it is coming from a Lilliputian Government. I shall now go back to dissecting the legislation instead of making what I think are amusing political points, even if the Minister does not. However, when I refer to Gulliver legislation in the future, she will know what I am talking about. First, the problem is that, if the Government make all these detailed rules and regulations, inevitably there will be difficulties because they will not cover everything. The more details you include, the more detailed the legislation has to get as you discover anomalies where things are not covered and where those that are have been dealt with wrongly. As a matter of principle, there ought to be as few rules as possible. Secondly, the fact that these are top-down rules causes problems. They do not allow for local circumstances, they certainly do not address local wishes, and they may be dangerous in relation to schemes that are already in place. Thirdly, the schemes will cost more in money and resources to implement because not just those people already working in councils will need to do all this; the Government themselves will have to take people on for it. The whole Bill is a wonderful job creation scheme. It may be part of what the Government are after, because there is a recession and people are losing their jobs. More jobs can be created for civil servants to administer these detailed schemes, for writing, consulting and revising the regulations, and then for monitoring everyone’s websites to make sure that they are doing it right. That is what we were told would happen when we considered the previous group of amendments. Are we really going to employ civil servants to supervise and control democratically elected local authorities? It is crazy. The real danger is that, because the Bill imposes a straitjacket on authorities, informal and spontaneous activity will be restricted. Indeed, councils may have to dismantle their current systems, even if they are working effectively, in order to conform with the detail of these proposed schemes. I have a little information about some petition schemes and some of the ways in which councils deal with petitions at the moment. The noble Baroness said that the aim of a lot of the Bill is to challenge local authorities to do their business differently. Some of us are worried that this will force some local authorities that are at the moment carrying out good practice to do things differently when they do not want to. The system that we end up with may well be worse than what we have now. That is the inevitable consequence, when we have people out there doing good things, of imposing a detailed, uniform, centralised system on them. I have some information from Oldham, where my colleague Councillor Howard Sykes commented: ““The system is still as we changed it to when we last ran the council from 2000 to 2003, when I wrote it””—I thought that that was quite amusing—““nothing fancy, but common sense, and it means petitioners cannot be ignored and can get their five minutes in court with elected members and officers, which of course is what people really want””. On Luton Borough Council, I am told that, if a petition contains a planning application, it is dealt with as an objection representation on the application and the development control committee has to decide it. That is a sensible, common-sense way to deal with a petition, which no doubt pretty well every authority will adopt, rather than going through the Government’s convoluted scheme—by the time that is finished, a planning application may well already be decided. If the petition relates to a townwide issue, it goes first to the relevant scrutiny committee, which can refer it elsewhere if it thinks it appropriate. If it is a local issue, it goes first to the relevant area committee, which can refer it wherever it thinks appropriate. Those are sensible, common-sense local schemes. On St Albans District Council, I am told that petitions are guided to the meeting most likely to be dealing with the issue. Petitioners can speak to them and then they are dealt with. I have similar information from Guildford. Surrey County Council is rather more restrictive: you need 100 or more signatures in what is a fairly big county. Petitions can be presented to the executive or for scrutiny in other committees, but not the full council. That council is perhaps a bit more restrictive than I would want, but it has worked out its own rules, which work for that council. That is what local democracy is all about. In Mid-Bedfordshire, petitions are either presented to the full council by the member or are received by committee services. Either way, they are referred to the appropriate committee, where they are processed for formal recommendation to the executive. The organiser and/or the member are of course informed of progress and the result. In East Sussex, the chairman, where appropriate, will refer a petition to the cabinet, relevant cabinet member or relevant scrutiny committee and, where he or she does that, the person signing the covering letter accompanying the petition or, if there is no such letter, the first signatory or another person nominated by them, shall be invited to address the cabinet, relevant cabinet member or committee. So it goes on. I have a protocol for dealing with petitions from Bradford, which now calls itself the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. It is two pages long. It is short; it is sensible; it is flexible. It looks to me ideal as a way to deal with petitions handed in, but it will not in all details fit into the Government’s scheme. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is dealt with in the constitution and in the standing orders. The council has managed to define a petition, which the Government have not. It states that, "““a ‘petition’ means a written document requesting that the Council take the action referred to in the petition and signed primarily by persons resident or working in the city””." That is a sensible, working, common-sense definition that would not fit within the Government’s scheme. There are others. The one council for which we could not find a petition scheme was Salford, but we are still looking.