Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

We are still on the question of valid petitions. This group of amendments questions a number of the requirements of validity set out in the Bill. In speaking to the amendment, I shall speak also to the other amendments in the group. I am grateful to the Conservative spokespeople for adding their name to the lead amendment. This all applies to restrictions on the question of validity as it applies to petitions. Amendments 93, 99 and 129 refer to the concept of a valid petition having to have at least a specified number on the petition before it can be regarded as valid. Amendment 100 refers to the provision that the petition must include a date on which each person has signed the petition, presumably next to their signature. Amendment 100 would remove that provision. Amendment 97 would remove the provision that, "““if the petition is in electronic form””," it must be, "““made using the authority’s e-petition facility””," which has been set up in Clause 10. Those are three specific restrictions that we would not like to see in the Bill. On the first of them, the question of a number, the problem is that circumstances differ according to different petitions. In a large unitary county such as Northumberland or Cornwall or a large shire county such as Lancashire or North Yorkshire where people are petitioning about a general policy—for no increase in the council tax precept from those authorities in the coming year, perhaps, or for an increase of a certain amount to do a certain thing, although that is fairly rare nowadays—it is reasonable for the authority to take account of the number of people signing the petition. If, in the whole of Northumberland, only five people consisting of my noble friend Lady Maddock and her neighbours sign it, the authority is perfectly entitled to regard it with that degree of seriousness. If, on the other hand, 100,000 people sign it, the authority will regard it with a different degree of seriousness. But that is all down to common sense being applied by the authority, and the Government do not seem to be prepared to accept that authorities are capable of that. In different circumstances, a petition signed by six people might be perfectly sensible. If the residents of the street in which I live, where there are about a dozen adults, send a petition to the local council with six signatures, and I have refused to sign it because I am a member of the local council and therefore it is coming to me, that is a majority—six out of 11. That petition therefore deserves to be treated with every possible seriousness by whichever body of the council is discussing it. The residents might want the street lighting to be improved, or something like that. These are matters that must be left to local circumstances and local flexibility. When talking about numbers, the Minister said that it was okay and that all that the regulations would say was that the council must set minimum numbers for petitions and can set different minimum numbers for different purposes. We are back to the council employing people to work out those schemes and systems and having reams of detailed requirements. Then the barrack-room lawyers in the council, who may be council solicitors or councillors, will say that it does not fit and is not valid. That sort of silly argument goes on—and the more detailed prescription there is, the more that silly argument goes on. It is a fact of life. Whereas if people are left to take decisions in a sensible, common-sense, flexible way, without being tied down and hidebound by these Gulliver rules, they will get on a lot better. So we want to take out the numbers. The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, said that in his view a petition signed by two people from different households was a letter, not a petition. That is fair enough. Letters have to be taken seriously as well, which is where the flexibility comes in. If some councils do not respond seriously to what residents say, that is fair enough. In informal conversation with the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, the number ““two”” came up. I asked her, ““What happens if there is a petition from a little settlement with only three or four houses?””. She said that two people might count as a petition, and I agree with her. That sort of flexibility needs to be in the provisions. Therefore, we do not need national rules, regulations, guidance and everything else; we just need to be allowed to get on it. The requirement that people should put on the document the date they sign it is ludicrous. Most informal petitions will be declared invalid because they will not have dates on them. It is as simple as that. Official petitions or petitions organised by political parties or pressure groups will have the date on because officials will know about the rules and regulations. However, such requirements will exclude the very people the Government say they want to bring into local democracy—people who are perhaps more excluded from the system and do not feel at home with bureaucracies, official systems, councils and so on. Such a requirement will exclude people and large numbers of petitions. People wanting to draw up a petition about something happening in their area do not run off to the council or anywhere else to find out what the rules are. They do not even look on the internet. They go out and collect signatures and then they hand it in. You cannot turn around afterwards and say to them, ““Sorry, your petition is invalid because you have not obeyed all our bureaucratic, narrow instructions””. Electronic petitioning is a very important matter. The Bill requires local authorities to set up an e-petition facility. We support that; we think it is a very good idea for them to have that on their websites. What we do not say is that that automatically excludes any other petitions gathered by any other people or any other organisations on their own websites. That seems to be totally restrictive. If the local Women’s Institute wants to gather a petition by electronic means, why should it not be allowed to do so? It can then present that petition to the council, either by printing it off and handing it in, which will get a press story, or by sending it by e-mail, which might get a press story, but it will not get a nice picture so they will probably print it off. What are the Government going to do? What do they think that councils should do if people organise petitions in this way? Are they going to reject them just because they have been gathered by electronic means? It is a ridiculous bit of the Bill, and should be removed. Amendment 103 is probing. It simply suggests that petitions should not be declared invalid because some of the people who have contributed to the petition and signed it have not obeyed the rules, or are not valid persons to sign it. Therefore, if a council receives a petition signed by 200 people and it turns out that 25 of them do not live, work or study in the council’s area, and if the council has wasted a lot of staff time and money working this out, it cannot reject the petition because there are still 175 who do. Equally, if the petition includes more information than is required, such as e-mail addresses, which nowadays it might well do, or telephone numbers, that does not make it invalid. I think I will get a sensible answer on that, but it is something that has to be probed. Amendment 121 refers to the six-month rule the Government wish to introduce. It refers to Clause 14, a part of the Bill we have not yet reached, on how a valid petition can become an active petition. This is another piece of extraordinary voodoo or local bureaucracy, where a petition first has to become a valid petition and then has to become an active petition. Only civil servants can dream up this kind of thing. The amendment refers to that part of the Bill. Nevertheless, it is a restriction and states that if a petition of the same or similar nature has been submitted within the previous six months, it will not be an active petition. It may well be that a council wants to act sensibly. If a council receives a petition, goes through its decision-making processes and makes a decision and then an identical petition is received three weeks later, the council will simply write back saying that it has just made that decision. On the other hand, there may well be circumstances in which a council wishes to reconsider a decision within six months when it receives a petition disagreeing with the decision. For example, a highways authority comes up with a programme of new puffin crossings, and a particular puffin crossing is not in the programme, so people petition and ask why the crossing that local councillors had promised is not in the scheme. That petition goes through the system and is rejected because there are no more resources for the crossing. Then, miraculously, three or four months later, for whatever reason, the council discovers that it has more resources to put into puffin crossings. It makes an announcement that it has the money for three more crossings and asks where they should be, and the same people then put in a similar petition asking for one of the extra three crossings. Are the Government saying that the council should reject that petition and say that it is not an active petition because it has already been discussed in the previous six months? That is nonsense. The Government are proposing to lay down detailed, rigid rules when what is required is sensible local flexibility. This argument is made all the time by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, and by the Liberal Democrats. The rule is unnecessary. If the Government want rules, it may be that the council should have the power to reject a petition, but for legislation to lay down that a petition is not an active petition in those circumstances is absolute nonsense.