Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

This has been a very good debate and I agree with an awful lot of what has been said. My speaking note is rather long as I have to address the underlying principles. I shall also address the issues that have been raised. We agree that the aim is what works best for each community. There is real content with the notion of localism as people deal with petitions. I agree that local authorities are full of sensible people trying to do sensible and sometimes very difficult things, and I certainly agree that we are doing nothing new; petitioning has been around for a very long time. I accept the combined weight of experience in the parties opposite, and would not dream of comparing my own experience in local government. However, four years in this job have certainly taught me the about incredible diversity of local communities, the contemporary challenges that face local government and the great need to get the balance right between diversity and enabling local government to do what it has to do in order to meet those challenges without suffocating them. I am surprised by the weight of feeling against these clauses. To put it simply, all we are trying to do is make the petition system more visible, more credible and more effective. Those who learn over the years how to use petitions have no difficulty making the system work, but I genuinely believe that we have not invented a problem here; there are huge differences in the way in which local authorities convey information and respond effectively. We are not trying to do anything malign; we are trying to find a balance between ensuring rights, fairness of access and action for local people and providing protections for local government by not overburdening them. I am delighted that the Committee agrees that a duty will make for a more level playing field. There is a sense that a duty is not a bad thing in itself. Once you accept that, you have to look at how to contain the duty and make it effective. I will come to the noble Lord’s amendment in a moment. I understand what noble Lords are saying, and I am listening. The most important point is that there is nothing in the Bill to prevent a council from dealing additionally with petitions that fall outside the criteria that we have established. We make it clear that the sort of petitions that the noble Lord raised can still be dealt with. With the new duty we are creating clarity of process and a requirement to respond, but we are not circumscribing local authorities if they want to do things differently and go further. We have tried to establish four principles. First, people should be able to have their say about the services they pay for, be they meals on wheels, tree protection or whatever. Much of the time they do not have much of a say, and many resent it that they do not have more. I heard what Members said about the YouGov survey but we at CLG did our own research. Last April we looked at all English local authority websites and found that only one in five councils makes available the detail of how to submit a petition. The Committee may say, ““Well, everyone knows how to submit a petition””—but in fact they do not. Activists know how to organise a petition, but how many activists are there? That is one of the things we are trying to address in the Bill. Secondly, local authorities have a responsibility to listen and to give feedback on petitions. I take what Members have said about their own experiences with councils, but again we can use different evidence to support different theses. I will go through a few statistics, although in order to curtail the debate I promise not to use them again. Part of the alienation from local government and the general malaise and cynicism that we all deplore is that people do not think their councils listen. Opinion polling by YouGov last July found that while nine in 10 respondents agreed that their councils should take into account views and petitions, only two in 10 thought that they did. Only one-third of those who had been involved in petitioning the council were satisfied with the council’s process for submitting a petition. Some 84 per cent of those surveyed said they were more likely to sign a petition if a response were guaranteed and they knew about it, and over half said a guaranteed response would make them more likely to organise a petition themselves. The noble Lord may shake his head, but this is solid research. We need to think about the general culture in which local politicians are operating. Requiring councils to have in place a clear process for dealing with petitions and responding to them will help bring them all up to the standard of the best. The clauses are drafted on that basis, and they are pretty minimal. Clause 11 requires principal local authorities to make, publicise and comply with a scheme for handling paper and electronic petitions. By ““making a scheme”” we mean that principal authorities will be required to have agreed procedures for dealing with petitions, and that the scheme will be publicly available so that members of the public know how to submit a petition and what they can expect in response. Clause 12 has some simple requirements for a valid petition; Clause 13 for acknowledgment; Clauses 14, 15 and 16 for appropriate action, depending on how the local authorities set their thresholds; and Clause 17 for an appeal process. That illustrates the third principle, which is generally to make this as easy as possible for local authorities. There is nothing in it for the Government to overcomplicate things and thus overburden local authorities; we have to deal with them all the time. Our aim is to balance the need so that everyone can expect a minimum standard of service, but with a great deal of flexibility for local authorities to respond to the particular circumstances in their areas. We have built all necessary protections into the Bill. For example, if councils are to be legally required to respond, we need to ensure that they consider only issues of genuine concern, not from people from outside the area or in another country. As I said, we do not want to make it any harder for people to petition their council. They can do so on anything they like—even about putting a man on the moon. All we are doing is creating a legal duty to respond to petitions and setting up some simple criteria to make it more effective. With reference to Clauses 12 and 14, for example, councils are not legally required to respond to petitions that do not meet the thresholds they have set, but they can if they choose to do so. They can respond to petitions that may be totally irrelevant; they are free to do so and they are not required to respond. There are safeguards. Clause 14 provides that principal authorities do not need to take steps in regard to vexatious, abusive or inappropriate petitions. Clause 14(1)(c) protects councils from becoming bogged down in replying to petitions that raise the same issue over and over again. We are not creating a scheme to curtail what local authorities presently do; the notion of a valid petition is not about creating the notion of an invalid petition. It is just about making a necessary distinction between petitions and other bits of correspondence. We just had a splendid example from my noble friend, who pointed out that what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, talked about was probably a letter. It might have been a housing benefit claim form. This definition also makes a necessary distinction between these petitions and other petitions that exist for statutory purposes. It sets out some very basic rules that allow local authorities to respond. We are not putting a straitjacket around local authorities; we are simply trying to create some clarity. The chapter has been drafted to provide what we think is essential to enable access and consistency. I take the point about the LGA; of course it wanted this to be light touch, and we will do our best to work with it. We do not think that the chapter is unnecessarily detailed. It is about trying to find the right balance. The clause gives councils a lot of flexibility and autonomy to respond within the framework of what they think is appropriate and how they acknowledge and respond. Principal authorities will decide for themselves how many signatures are needed to trigger a response in the first place and then to trigger the different sorts of responses as set out in Clause 14. One factor could be how large the local population is, or how major the issue is and how many people it affects. They can set thresholds for different aspects of policy. No one is going to stop that. A council with a high numerical threshold may wish to set a higher threshold than a rural district council. They will be able to decide how quickly they acknowledge petitions, how they respond, how they publicise their scheme, how they deal with petitions that are not valid and what system they use for their e-petitions. The fourth principle of building on best practice is held very seriously by the Committee. Many authorities have effective systems for dealing with petitions, and we want to learn from them. Others do not. I took the point when the noble Lord rehearsed a whole range of different petitions. In our search of local authorities, we looked at Pendle. We found that there was a petition scheme last April. When we searched in January 2009, we were unable to locate any information on how petitions were dealt with by the local authority. We can all quote examples, which is the problem with selective analysis. Guidance will help to identify good practice and support local authorities, and there could be some value in a model scheme, for example, to use as a basis. In any such guidance, we want to work closely with the LGA. On thresholds, there are a very few issues on which we feel there is a need for central Government to set some standards so that we can ensure that these proposals are local in nature. The community empowerment White Paper made clear that we intend to exercise the power in Clause 19 to set a maximum threshold for triggering a full council debate. That is a serious undertaking. We believe that this threshold should not be more than 5 per cent of local residents. That is an accessible, achievable proposition. This is a high threshold which, for instance, in Bristol would amount to approximately 21,000 signatures. That is an important distinction. For the rest, councils can set thresholds for all other points of action and can set the same or different thresholds for different policies, depending on the nature of the response. How do we deal with the proposition that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, put to us? It has the enormous virtue of being short. I am deeply envious of its brevity. Unfortunately, it leaves out any reference to e-petitions or to the definition of a principal local authority, any reference to the Welsh Assembly and any definition of members of the public, which means that the London borough of Richmond would be breaking the law if it did not reply to a petition signed by the residents of Richmond, Virginia. We might use the term ““work, live or study”” to define the constituency that we mean. Nor is there any reference to whom petitions should be sent or to how quickly petitioners could expect a response, there is no guarantee of a response—indeed, no conditions whatever are attached—and there are no protections for local authorities. This illustrates our problem and what we have tried to address in this part of the Bill. I do not want to go on. I will think seriously about what noble Lords have said. Initially, we had hoped to have only one or two clauses on petitions, but we have to do this properly if we are going to have it in legislation. Sadly, Amendment 79B fails on those points. We are not taking an over-regulatory approach; we are taking a necessary and balanced approach. Amendment 80 would insert a provision that authorities may revise their schemes at any time. I agree, but this is in effect achieved in Clause 11(5) and (6), which clarify what procedural arrangements should apply if any amendment to the scheme is made. That is helpful to authorities and to people who intend to submit petitions. The amendment would simplify things, but at the expense of clarity. Amendment 83 would remove all the provisions on petition schemes: namely, that they should be approved by the full council and published on the website and so on, that they can be revised and that the authorities must comply with them. The noble Lord explained that this is about simplification, but I refer him to my previous argument. I hope that we will be able to agree about the clauses. We certainly want local authorities across the country to make their petition schemes more accessible, more credible, more usable and more used. I think that we have got the balance right, and I do not think that the argument is served by exaggeration. The detail that we have is necessary. We could have put in a lot more detail. We chose not to because we wanted to go for the minimum, for obvious reasons.