Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I underline what my noble friend Lord Tope has just said. There is nothing between us in the wish to see more visible and effective petitioning of local authorities and many other bodies. The argument lies in the means, not the ends. Again, I thank the noble Baroness for her frank response and for setting out the areas where there is broad agreement and those where there is not. If we are going to reach agreement before the Bill is sent to the Commons, a lot more debate and discussion, both in Committee and outside, will be needed to see whether we can reach a compromise. This is an important issue. The problem that some of us have is that, although the Minister said earlier that the Government are not in the business of making things more difficult, we believe from our experience that quite a lot of the material in these eight pages in the Bill will indeed make things more difficult. I certainly was not criticising Salford, merely making the ironic point that we could not find the petition scheme. I am making inquiries with contacts there, though, and if I discover that Salford deals with these things wonderfully, I shall come back and report that that is the case. The suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, that the comprehensive area assessment might be a means of monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of petitioning in different councils should be thought about a lot more. We will think about that. The noble Baroness said that she wanted, in her words, what works best for each community. It is our submission that the amount of prescriptive detail in the Bill will prevent that happening. It will also mean that many councils that have perfectly adequate schemes and practices will have to dismantle those, and that will be wrong—it will do damage before it starts to do good again.