Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. I certainly did not mind his intervention the other day, and his contribution today was extremely interesting and puts our deliberations into proper perspective. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, that he must not worry about the Bill, because it is excellent. I am sure that we shall all do our best by it. I hope that I can reassure the City of London by saying that nothing in the Bill will stop the Remembrancer continuing his functions as he has done for at least 400 years—I confess that I would quite like to know who the drunken poet was; there is quite a long list to choose from. We are trying to make sure that we have in statute a scheme that will make it easier for all our citizens to know that the council has a way of dealing with petitions which guarantees a response. A set of very reasonable, simple criteria will need to be fulfilled. However, if additional petitions, practices and routes exist, there is nothing to stop local authorities dealing with them as they wish. I cannot add anything to what I said on Monday, when we had a long debate. We want to ensure that everybody in a community—not just those who are active in it and are well used to organising and signing petitions—has a clear notion of how they might bring something to the attention of the council. I think that that response deals with Amendments 89 and 127. Amendment 127 would remove a helpful pointer on what a council might want to include in its scheme; for example, it may help people to understand something related to the functions of a different and connected authority. Amendments 96 and 98B relate in broad terms to the Government’s commitment, set out in the community empowerment White Paper, that petitions on a few issues such as planning and licensing will be dealt with differently in order to reflect, as the noble Lord said, existing statutory processes. Our stated intention is to use the order-making power in Clause 14(4), which will exclude those matters from the scope of the duty to respond to petitions, as it is simply common sense to do so. We want to avoid setting up parallel routes for considering local people’s concerns in those areas; the processes that exist are extensive and well known. Petitions on those subjects do not need to go through that separate system. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, spoke about the need for flexibility, which raised some interesting questions, particularly around consultation. We should reflect on that in the context of using secondary legislation, which would allow us to seek the views of the sector before putting legislation before Parliament. The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, capture the broad intention, although I suspect that the drafting would be more complex. I hope that he can withdraw them so that we can reflect on the issues in more detail. I would be happy to discuss them with him before Report.