Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall explain again why we have gone down the route of defining petitions as ““valid””. It is part of my general argument that since we are creating a duty to respond, as we think our evidence suggests we should, we are obliged to offer a definition in the Bill that will make clear what a petition is. We have debated whether a letter is a petition, and so on; there are many different signed communications. We struggled with a term and came up with ““valid”” because we thought that was the best. We need to distinguish these particular petitions from the existing petitions that serve specific statutory purposes. Given the logic of the argument I set out at some length with regard to the previous amendment, we need to set out some minimum legal requirements to ensure that there is a known process for responding. The basics are that they are petitions that are addressed to the authority, which call for action, which identify a person who is the petition organiser to whom responses can be sent, and which are signed by the minimum number of petitioners as agreed by the local authority. We will come on to talk about thresholds and so on, but that is a basic legal framework. I reiterate that we do not want to disqualify people who, maybe on a technicality or through ignorance, do not fulfil these criteria; it may take a little time before the petition scheme becomes known. As I have said, there is nothing to stop the council, if it wants, responding in other ways to other petitions, such as those that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, read out—it can do so if it wishes. It has been suggested in the debate, however, that there should be no need for a person to be identified as the petition organiser and that the first signatory to a petition should himself or herself be deemed to be the organiser. I see a lot of sense in local authorities adopting that approach if it is unclear in any case who the organiser is, but the point we need to cover in legislation is that in order to be effective and fulfil expectations there needs to be an individual with whom the local authority can deal, someone who receives the acknowledgement and who decides whether the council has dealt with the petition sufficiently or whether they want to appeal to the overview and scrutiny committee about the manner in which it has been treated. Clause 12(1) provides that the petition must be signed by a number of people who live, work or study in the area, and that the local authority will choose that number. Clause 13 requires principal local authorities to acknowledge valid paper petitions in writing and to say what they intend to do. I make it clear that, as confirmed by Clause 11(7), there is no prohibition on local authorities responding to petitions that do not meet the criteria for technical reasons. No local authority would want to rule out on technical grounds something that was intended to be a petition—it would surely end up being resubmitted—but the concept of the ““valid”” petition is concerned with the identification of the source of things that need to be treated as a petition, not with ruling out things that are intended to be petitions but which fall short. The problem with the term ““statutory”” is that it gets confused immediately with statutory petitions. I turn to electronic petitions. We have discussed how these must be made using e-petition facilities. That clarifies that principal councils are not required to respond to petitions hosted on websites that are hosted by local newspapers, for example, or by other organisations. That is an important control against inappropriate or abusive e-petitions, but they do not need to be categorised as ““valid”” as it will generally be pretty apparent, when a person requests the hosting of a petition, whether it is intended to be a petition and fulfils the key criteria. However, if by some mischance an individual sought to post something on an e-petition page that was not really a petition, all the authority would have to do would be to explain that and an alternative approach could be found. As I said, in Amendments 81, 91, 105, 116 and 137 the noble Lord advocates the use of the term ““statutory””, but that confuses the issue. Statutory provisions have different eligibility criteria, for example. I am not persuaded that Amendments 82, 85 and 86 bring additional clarity. It is already sufficiently clear that the schemes referred to in Clause 11 are schemes for dealing with petitions made under this chapter. Amendment 85 would replace the general duty on authorities to comply with their petitions scheme with the duty to comply only when they receive a petition. The language is there for a purpose. It is already clear that a principal local authority’s duty to comply with its petition scheme encompasses the situation when it receives a petition, because the scheme itself is, "““for the handling of valid petitions””." Principal authorities have certain duties that anticipate receiving a petition—for example, the duty to publicise how to make a petition in the first place. Amendment 85 would remove that duty, which is not a sensible outcome. Amendment 86 would delete ““its petition”” from subsection (6), and replace it with ““the””. This amendment would be a linguistic consequence of the other amendments, and I hope, my not having accepted the earlier amendments, that the noble Lord will understand that the amendment is not necessary in the context of my argument.