Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I was going to come on to that point next. We are going to discuss the difference between valid petitions—and whether they should be called ““valid”” petitions at all—and other petitions in one or two later amendments, so I do not want to go into too much detail now. However, having two separate schemes side by side, the statutory government scheme and the locally determined scheme, is completely bonkers. That would cause massive confusion and, in some areas, chaos. The council would have to have a monitoring officer to determine whether a petition was under one scheme or the other. Or would the petitioners get the choice about which scheme their petition qualified for? The Minister is a sensible person; I ask her to think about the chaos and the nonsense that that would cause. A lot of people say, ““Oh, anyone will sign a petition; petitions are no use””. I am a great believer in petitions. They are not worthless, as some people think. I do not believe in government and decision-making by petition, however, and when the Minister says that quite a high proportion of people do not believe that their petition was dealt with properly, they mean that it did not get the result they wanted. We get this all the time: people who present petitions, or come to meetings and present their cases, and do not get what they want are dissatisfied. They say, ““The system’s rubbish””, but what they mean is that it has not delivered what they want. That is inevitable. If you have a democratic system and petitioning is part and parcel of it, there are going to be a lot of people who sign petitions who then, for whatever reason, do not get what they want out of it. It may be that their authority is useless and it should be doing this work, carrying out this project or stopping this scheme, and it is not doing so. However, it may be that there is just a difference of opinion or a question of priorities, or it may be that what people want is not actually possible, whether for legal, administrative or financial reasons. When I first got on the former Colne borough council before reorganisation back in 1971—the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, will be horrified by this—I read the council’s standing orders, which I do not think anybody had done for a long time, and discovered that there was a right to present petitions at the full council meeting. Nobody had done it in historic memory, but I made sure that a few people came along and did it. It was thought to be revolutionary at the time. When I was working for the organisation that my noble friend Lady Maddock talked about, which was then the Association of Liberal Councillors, we encouraged people all over the country to look at what their constitutions said—we discovered that a lot of them contained the right to present petitions—and persuaded them to present petitions under that right. The rest is history, I suppose. I accept that the noble Baroness could not find the proper petition system on Pendle’s website. In other places I spend a great deal of time complaining about Pendle Council’s website, which is adequate but not wonderful. It was probably state-of-the-art about eight years ago. That is the case with a lot of councils. With regard to the Government basing any research on what they find on council websites, they may find that faults arise not from councils and their systems but from their websites, as I think my noble friend Lord Tope said. That is a very valid argument. We think that a lot of the details are wrong and have sought to address them in later amendments. My amendment does not seek to leave out e-petitions. We are not trying to get rid of Clause 10. I said that we were in favour of it when we discussed it. Therefore, my amendment does not seek to leave those petitions out. The Minister said that we have to do this properly. I do not agree with that at all. We argue that each council has to do it properly. That is very different and goes back to my original point that if each council does it properly, there will be more diversity and variety than is allowed for under the Government’s system. We agree with the concept of best practice but it is for the LGA and other organisations, political parties and everybody else, to share their experience on that. The noble Baroness mentioned Pendle. I have one or two petitions with me. I shall not read them all out and I shall certainly not read out the names. These are recent petitions to Pendle Council. I asked the officer who deals with petitions to give me a few examples. We had one recently from the market traders in the market hall in Nelson. It had no addresses and many of the relevant people do not live in Pendle. It concerned their market rents. That was a perfectly reasonable thing on which to petition. People know who those traders are because they have market stalls, but it would not have been a valid petition under the Government’s scheme. A petition to stop speeding traffic on Chapelhouse Road in Nelson was presented to Pendle Council. It would not have been a valid petition because the Highways Authority is the county council. Therefore, Pendle Council sent it to the Highways Authority with a recommendation. At the previous Colne and district area committee we had a petition from a group of old people near the town centre who presented it on condition that their names and addresses were kept secret because they were frightened of the reaction of certain people associated with the town centre. I do not want to say any more than that. That would not have been a valid petition under the scheme we are discussing, but we dealt with it sensibly, as we do. I have a petition which just says: "““We as residents of Mansfield Crescent want a one-way system””." It is a perfectly good petition but has no date. I have another petition with a date organised by a local school. People were asked to fill in everything from e-mails to dates and to sign it. The petition asked for a pedestrian crossing. But again it was not a valid petition to Pendle Council because it was a highways matter that had to be referred to the highways committee. Here is a typical petition, which is actually a letter. It starts: ““Dear Sir/Madam””. It is signed by someone but, as an afterthought, they had gone round to get everyone else in the street to sign it. That happens quite a lot. It would never meet the Government’s criteria for a valid petition. Then it turns into a survey, because it asks everyone who signed it whether they were for or against. A whole series of such petitions are perfectly reasonable, perfectly valid. Here is a petition that is all nicely laid out and printed. It states: "““We call on Lancashire County Council to sort out the shambles of winter gritting and salt our roads and pavements properly””." That did not have the date on, but if the proposed system had existed it would have done, because it was organised by a political party that knew the system and put in a valid petition. It was the Liberal Democrats, actually, but it might not have been. We will do that, and the Labour and Conservative parties will get them right. It is the ordinary people submitting informal petitions who will not begin to meet the Government's criteria here and will be excluded from the system. That is the real problem: it is exclusive. I hope that we can come to agreement, but it will take a lot of work and we may need to include more in the Bill than either my noble friend's amendment or mine to reach a sensible compromise. If the Government want us to agree, they must move some way towards us. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 79B withdrawn. Clause 11 : Petition schemes Clause 11 : Petition schemes Amendment 80 not moved.