Local Government Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill

Yes, that is a chosen way to try to harden the conker, but I must bring the hon. Gentleman some bad news in that regard: I do not believe that vinegaring conkers does make them sturdy for the purposes of conker fighting. To be fair and balanced, I must add that there are genuine reasons why activities—conker fighting or otherwise—can and may be banned. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) rightly pointed out that there are significant health and safety concerns about deaths that happen in the workplace and she cited a figure of 20,000 deaths each year. One death is too many, so health and safety has an important role to play. However, this debate is about whether health and safety is used as an excuse to prevent perfectly legitimate activities taking place—my hon. Friend suggests that it is—and whether people are overcompensating for the possibility of danger in almost every activity. I am familiar with the stories we hear each year of local authorities choosing to be overly prescriptive and cautious whenever any festival is celebrated—one thinks of the royal wedding that is coming up next month. A woman was recently in the news as she had been told that she could not put bunting up outside her house because it attached to a lamp post across the way. She was told that even though she had been doing this for decades—suddenly this was deemed to be dangerous. I had heard the stories of the Christmas lights that are not put up. I had not heard about the Devon rock festival and the UFO spaceship prop, but those examples sounded bizarre. An issue has arisen through health and safety being used as a backdrop in order to ban things. Lord Young of Graffham published his report in October, rightly pointing out that more needs to be done to rein back the overzealous use of health and safety laws to ban things. This brings us to the nub of my hon. Friend's argument, which is that the local government ombudsman could be provided with powers, through this amendment to the way in which he operates, so that he could pare back the more extreme health and safety excesses. The Government are sympathetic to that idea, and I have indicated privately to my hon. Friend that we would like this to be done in time. However, I now have to inform my hon. Friend that we do not think the Bill goes far enough. Lord Young's recommendations were clear on this matter. He made a number of recommendations about the compensation culture; the low-hazard workplace; raising standards; insurance; education; health and safety legislation; and local authorities. In particular, he recommended that when local authorities ban or curtail events on health and safety grounds, the official banning the event should write about those reasons and allow them to be presented to the organiser of the proposed event. The hon. Lady rightly pointed out that hearing a decision only on the day may not provide sufficient notice if a meeting takes place in the evening. That well made point demonstrates at least one of the things that needs a little further thought and investigation. Lord Young says that his approach would allow citizens to have a route for redress when they want to challenge local officials' decisions. He said that local authorities should conduct an internal review of all refusals on the grounds of health and safety. In other words, he proposes that we go even further in order to provide redress, saying not only that councils should provide a written statement, which would not put the event back on and which would not make any difference at all, but that there should be some kind of process whereby citizens can see what has happened and why, and have the opportunity therefore to challenge it, perhaps through the local media. Lord Young also says that citizens should be able to refer unfair decisions to the ombudsman and have a fast-track process to ensure that decisions can be overturned within two weeks. Again, this all depends very much on timing. The hon. Lady made the important point that some events are set up months, if not years, in advance, so putting in place some kind of fast-track process, perhaps taking no more than a couple of weeks, to examine and potentially overturn a bad decision would be a very good idea. Again, it would need to be incorporated in this legislation.