Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

It is a great pleasure to continue this reunion event of the Public Bill Committee into a second day, and to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), particularly as I had the great pleasure of being able to read some of her words in the briefings that I, too, received. That helped me to follow some of the details. I do not wish to detain the House for long in speaking to the new clause. First, I should put it on record that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association, and in that capacity I am delighted to be able to welcome this change, for which the LGA has pressed for a very long time. Not for the first time, I extend my thanks to the Minister for taking this and many other issues seriously, and for the time that he has taken to have meetings outside the Bill Committee structure on a range of issues. It is right that the system should not impose a cost on councils. The fundamental problem with the current system is that it has been a huge drain on council resources at a time when councils have many other things to do and many other calls on the public purse. Rather unusually, I am not going to blame the previous Government and say that they got it wrong on purpose. I believe that the fees were simply wrongly set, and that the required updates have not been made. I do not think the intention was to make councils pay, but that was how it evolved. It is important that we move from the previous Government's approach of having things set centrally to a more localist agenda. Councils should be free and have more power. For example, it should be open to a council to set fees below the cost-recovery level if, for some reason, it felt that an important thing to do. I am not entirely sure why taxpayers might feel that that was the right thing to do, but then councils should be allowed to do things for which I do not understand the reasoning. Indeed, on many occasions they do so. I will not go through all the details of the new clause, as the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North mentioned them. However, I have one concern to put to the Minister. He talked about the Secretary of State's powers and used the word ““cap””. He will be aware that we had discussions yesterday on concerns about the Secretary of State's capping powers over the police precept. I understand where the Minister is heading and why he wants such a power in this case, but can he assure me that he wants the Secretary of State's capping power to be used rarely, and that, ideally, it should not be the driving force as it has been in other cases in local government, such as police precepts? I am delighted to see the new clause, and I thank the Minister again on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, and on behalf of the LGA as one of its vice-presidents.