I am grateful to my hon. Friend. When I am on the opposite side of an argument from that of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, I wonder whether I am on the wrong side of the argument. Having the robust support of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) will reinforce my confidence that I am on the right side.
The desire of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch to use the amendment to force the privatisation of car parks may have merit. If he were back in charge of a local authority, he might decide that that was the best way to go. I am not convinced that other local authorities would take that view, so the provision would end up being an unnecessary burden on the taxpayer. The amendment is therefore not worthy of support, despite his best efforts to rescue support for what might otherwise be thought of as a poor amendment.
I turn back to amendment 24. In effect, preventing local authorities from allowing the private sector to run charging apparatuses on their behalf would be a retrograde step. If we are to embark on this project, the merits of the amendments are not necessarily relevant. We have to presume that we are going down this route. If we are, I would like the private sector to be involved; it would have an awful lot to offer and could probably show local authorities how to operate the points better, more efficiently and more cheaply. To prevent the private sector from being involved, as my hon. Friend envisages with amendment 24, is not sensible. I cannot support the amendment.
Amendment 25 is a consequential amendment to amendment 24 that also reinforces it, so if I cannot support amendment 24 I certainly cannot support amendment 25. On that basis—my hon. Friend will correct me if I am wrong—I do not think I can support amendment 26 either. I think that for the first time in my short time in the House I have found that I cannot support the first six amendments tabled by my hon. Friend. I hope that that will never be repeated in future.
On amendment 27, my hon. Friend is back on normal form again, because he is absolutely right about subsection (7). I am not a legal expert, as he is, but it seems to me that in the normal way of things people are responsible for their equipment. The subsection implies that everybody in the whole country, apart from London local authorities, is responsible for any accidents, damage or incidents that happen as a result of their equipment. I am sure that the Government’s view and Parliament’s view is that people should be responsible for their own stuff. It is utterly unacceptable to say that we are going to exempt London local authorities willy-nilly from the normal course of the law. Why on earth we should think that the state should be exempt from all the normal things that apply to everybody else is beyond me. I hope that the promoter of the Bill will reflect on this, because it drives a coach and horses through what we would expect in this country. I certainly encourage my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch to pursue amendment 27.
On amendment 28, my hon. Friend is again on to a very good point. In seeking to strike out subsection (8), he focuses on the part where it says that
“it shall be presumed that the person in charge of the relevant vehicle at the relevant time had responsibility for and control of the cable.”
The person in charge at the time may well have control of the cable—it is probably self-evident that if they are using it they have control of it—but to say that they have responsibility for that piece of equipment is a step too far. As my hon. Friend said, we would not expect somebody filling up at a petrol station to take full responsibility for the pumps they were filling up from. I cannot believe that anybody in this House would think that. If people should not take full responsibility for the pumps when they are filling up their car with petrol, why on earth should they take responsibility for the cables when they are charging their car? The same rules should apply. It might be a different form of fuel, but the same principles should apply across the board. Leaving aside control of the cable, it is unacceptable to impose responsibility for it. For that reason alone, I support my hon. Friend in wanting to strike out subsection (8). Of course, if it did not include the words “responsibility for”, I might take a different view, but as it stands it is unacceptable. Subsection (9) relates to the previous subsection, so we do not need to waste much time on that.
I was puzzled by the Bill’s sponsor, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, saying that he was willing to accept amendment 30, because it seems to fly in the face of what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch was trying to achieve with his previous amendments. I understand now, however, that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is throwing in the towel—I certainly hope he is—with regard to amendments 21, 22 and 23. Amendment 30 seems to pre-empt that throwing in of the towel, because it suggests a much more sensible state of affairs whereby my hon. Friend accepts that the private sector could be involved and that the wires it provides should also be covered. For that reason, amendment 30 is sensible and I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East accepts it.
We do not need to waste time on amendment 31. Amendment 32 takes us back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch about the
authorised person. As I said earlier, I am for having authorised people other than the local authority, so for that reason amendments 32, 33 and 34 should be discarded.