Localism Bill

My Lords, I must intervene. Obviously the noble Lord has not developed his arguments at the same length as in Committee but I am afraid I am as unconvinced by them now as I was then. It is certainly a worthy thing to pay lip service to freedom of information but one has to think about the practical impact of what is proposed. Although the noble Lord says that in Amendment 199 he places a limit on the extent of the burden by specifying contracts for any sum over £1 million, this is vitiated by the fact that his amendment goes on to say: "““Where such a contract is to any extent performed by means of a sub-contract, that sub-contract shall be deemed to include a freedom of information provision””." And so on. It is like unwrapping a Russian doll. As we discussed in Committee, many of these large contracts may relate to construction, for example, where many small businesses will be involved. This may be onerous for small businesses and those businesses may well find themselves caught by the way that this amendment is drafted. The only people exempted are legal advisers to those bodies. Indeed, any other person acting on behalf of a sub-contractor, such as the bookkeeper of a small business, may be brought in to the scope of that amendment, as I read it. I should like the Minister to reflect carefully before going in that direction. I argued that the new clause proposed by Amendment 201 could be absurdly onerous on local authorities. The noble Lord’s amendment uses ““relevant authority””, which means that any parish council or community council in this country would have to publish annual reports on the Freedom of Information Act, environmental regulations and information on the number of requests that it had received. All the provisions here would apply to every authority in the country. My own council is very willing to comply with the Act—anybody can ask a question about it at council; we had a question on it answered two council meetings ago and this information was given—but the cost of doing so is already more than £100,000 a year. With the greatest respect, I do not think that extending this degree of reporting responsibility down the level of the merest parish council and community council in this country, let alone larger authorities, is appropriate or necessary. While respecting the enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Wills, I hope that my noble friend will resist his amendment for the reasons that I and others have given and that we can proceed with the rest of the Bill.