Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

This is a long group—I shall speak also to Amendments 82, 85, 86, 91, 105, 116 and 137—but they are all about the same thing. Many of them simply delete the word ““valid”” and insert the word ““statutory””; then there are some consequential amendments—Amendments 82, 85 and 86. I have a great dilemma in moving the amendments on petitions from here onwards, as, I think do my noble friends, because we are accepting the Government's proposed scheme as it stands, although we would like to do away with it and replace it with something much shorter. Our fallback position is that if we are to end up with the complex, tightly regulated scheme that the Government propose, it must work. Many of our other amendments are proposed because that we do not think that the present scheme will work in all sorts of details. That is partly because some of the details will not work and partly because, once you start including a lot of detail, you have to put some more in, otherwise you do not cater for circumstances that are likely to arise, and people therefore lose out. The amendments from now on, including this one, are detailed amendments to the Government's scheme. I had a long tussle with my conscience as to whether I should be helping the Government to improve their scheme when I think that it should just be swept away but, in the nature of things, I ended up trying to make the Government's scheme better for them. The amendment is all about the word ““valid””, which seems to us to be a very grave mistake. No matter how you dress it up and no matter how much you say to people that we can have systems to deal with petitions that do not classify as valid, inevitably people will think that they are not valid or invalid. Those councils who are reluctant to deal with petitions in an open-handed and generous way will have the excuse they want. They can say, ““It is not valid. The Government have laid down the rules. Therefore, we will not take it seriously””. Most of the informal, spontaneous petitions that I have here from my area are typical of petitions. They are grassroots petitions. The petition gets written out and sent or handed in before people begin to discover the rules. Putting all the rules on all the websites in the world will make no difference to that. The word ““valid”” is a bad word. I am not sure that ““statutory”” is a tremendous word; it is not a word that most people use as part of their daily lives. If the Government have a better word, I would be delighted to hear it, but ““valid”” is a bad word because it implies that everything else is invalid. The Government can do nothing within their scheme to prevent that. I beg to move.