Buckinghamshire County Council (Filming on Highways) Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Chope
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her short intervention, but in a sense I am even more disappointed. Why did the Minister not refer to such a private Member’s Bill? It might well deal with the issue by giving all local authorities a power to introduce such provisions without the need to use the private legislation route.
Sir Greg Knight
Does my hon. Friend not agree that if we had a Bill covering the whole country that perhaps gave councils the power to preserve outdoor film sets by banning unsightly wind farms, the House might pass it with acclamation?
Mr Chope
I look forward to supporting my right hon. Friend’s Bill on that topic. I think that there may be a chance to present such a Bill even on Friday if he gives notice of it tomorrow.
To return to the point about the private Member’s Bill, the Minister did not say whether the Government will support it, which is rather a missed opportunity, if I may put it like that. Whether in relation to pedlars—we know all about such iterative Bills—or filming on highways, it is much better to try to have general legislation to which local authorities can opt in if they wish, without the need to engage in the expensive and often protracted process of private legislation.
Having said that, because there are no petitions against the Bill, it will go to an unopposed Bill Committee and will not even come back on Report unless the Committee finds some reason to amend it, and it will then go straight through on Third Reading.
However, that is an expensive process. I hope that by the time the Bill returns for Third Reading we will have more news about the private Member’s Bill to which my right hon. Friend referred. [Interruption.] I see the Minister nodding in agreement. Private Members’ Bills are often rather extensive in ambit, and therefore controversial and difficult to get through, but it sounds as though that Bill will have a narrow ambit. If it is supported by the Government and the Opposition, it could have a fair wind and result in our spending less time looking at private legislation.
Sir Greg Knight
If this Bill goes ahead, is there not a case for giving the council more powers? Clause 6(2) allows it to impose a charge for placing objects on the highway, but only to cover its reasonable expenses. Taking into account my hon. Friend’s earlier point about local community groups, perhaps the council should be given the power to levy a fee that includes a donation to the local community.
Mr Chope
I am against that, because I do not see why we should burden the blossoming British film industry with additional stealth taxes. However, I support film companies working closely with residents and residents associations and, where appropriate—I think that this is best practice in the industry—making ex gratia payments to compensate them for the inconvenience.
That happened recently in a street that I am familiar with where a company is shooting a film about the Krays—“Legend” is the working title—which I think will be very popular. The buildings in the ganglands where the Krays operated have long since been demolished, so the company had to find some lookalikes. They came along to the street in question and painted all the houses grey in order to make them look as dingy as they must have done in the 1950s. This is not an advertisement for “Legend”, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I wanted to explain that the film company, in order to ensure that local residents did not feel that they had been taken advantage of, made a donation to the local residents association as well as to individual residents who were particularly inconvenienced. If you would like to speak with me afterwards, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will give you the details of the residents association and the fantastic Christmas parties it can throw as a result of the donations it has received, and not only from that film company, but from many others.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I can see that you feel that there comes a time when all the points that need to be made have been made. I made many of the points that I would like to have made on this Bill when I spoke to the Hertfordshire County Council (Filming on Highways) Bill. In conclusion, I hope that this is the last time we have to deal with the Second Reading of an individual local authority Bill for filming on the highways and that in future they can all be dealt with under delegated legislation.
Wales Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Chope. If the four people who voted in favour of new clause 4 want to express an opinion on one side of the argument or the other later this evening, is there not a case that you should weigh the voices?
The Temporary Chair
That could be considered. I have always been keen that we should allow the minority to express their opinion in the Chamber without having it suppressed.
Hertfordshire County Council (Filming on Highways) Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
May I say at the outset that it is not my desire to divide the House on Second Reading? However, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) and the promoter of the Bill will take on board the concerns Government Members have expressed in interventions.
Essentially, the issue is: what is proportionate and reasonable? At the moment, national legislation enables activities to take place on the highway for a maximum of three days and ensures that no piece of road may be affected more often than once a year. As I made clear in an intervention, the Bill would make it possible for an individual piece of highway to be closed for as long as 42 days a year, without any compensation for businesses or residents who were inconvenienced or suffered a loss as a result. The question is whether this House needs to give such wide powers to a local authority through private legislation.
One can envisage what would happen if Westminster bridge was closed for 42 days a year for filming. One could make any number of arguments as to why it would be a wonderful location for filming. If it was closed for 42 days a year, one can imagine what the consequences would be for local residents and other users of that highway. I venture to suggest that the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 was drafted in the way it was to maintain a balance between the interests and needs of local residents and the wider interests that might be served by closing a road for a particular purpose on a particular occasion.
A lot of films are made in Hertfordshire, so the county council feels it needs to increase the powers that are available to it or, as my hon. Friend said, clarify those powers. However, the Bill goes far beyond clarifying the wording of the 1984 Act. A clarification could be made by adding one or two words to that Act and without changing the amount of time for which a road may be blocked. It is a misrepresentation to suggest that the Bill merely seeks to clarify an ambiguity in the existing legislation. It goes far beyond that and I hope that in Committee it will be given a degree of scrutiny commensurate with those extra powers.
I have been approached by Buckinghamshire county council. I do not know why it thought it necessary to write to me for advice on introducing a private Bill, but it had the courtesy of so doing. I wrote back to the council leader and said that the Bill that he was seeking to bring forward was very similar, if not identical, to this one. If it is presented tomorrow, as we heard it might be, we will see. I suggested that rather than his county council bringing forward a separate Bill, it might get together with Hertfordshire and any other county council that is interested, speak to the Minister and see whether it could bring in more general legislation.
If the Minister wishes to intervene, I shall be happy to hear his answer. Perhaps we will hear in due course whether he thinks it would be appropriate for the national framework legislation to be changed so that instead of having the rather unhealthy competition between rival councils that are vying to present neighbouring towns as the most friendly to film-makers, which ultimately comes at the expense of the convenience of local people, there would be a more objective way of assessing what is reasonable and what is not.
There is another point that concerns me about the Bill. When I am not in my constituency, I live in a part of London that has a network of streets that were constructed largely in the late-Georgian period. The streets have retained their character and are often used for film sets. To compensate residents for the inconvenience associated with the use of local roads for film sets, which involves not being allowed to park and sometimes having access impeded by film crews, film companies pay a significant sum to the local residents association. It means that the association can function and hold Christmas parties and such things that it might not otherwise be able to afford. In a sense, there is a quid pro quo. Film companies are not acting for charity but to make money for themselves, so why should there not be a system for compensating those who are inconvenienced as a result of those activities? I would be interested if at some stage the promoters of the Bill considered whether some provision could be included to ensure that residents and businesses that are unduly inconvenienced, or perhaps inconvenienced on more than one occasion each year, are entitled to some compensation or recognition in monetary terms that they are making a contribution that should be recognised by the film company.
Like a lot of other Bills, this Bill merits considerable scrutiny. I am also puzzled by the explanatory memorandum that states that clause 3
“enables closures for the purpose of enabling members of the public to watch the making of a film.”
If we start closing roads to enable spectators to watch the making of a film, it seems to me that we are getting a long way from the Bill’s core purpose alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere, which is to enable people to make films. If we start saying that additional roads must be closed, or additional time taken up because we must provide for people who want to watch the making of films, that is going further than might have been intended by the architects of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. I hope that in due course that issue can also be addressed.
Sir Greg Knight
My hon. Friend made an interesting point about compensation. Does he know whether under existing legislation a local authority could charge a whopping licence fee to the film makers, thereby making money out of the process?
London Local Authorities and Transport for London (No. 2) Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Mr Chope
As always, you anticipate my remarks, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The whole process of private legislation should perhaps by revisited by the Procedure Committee, because this Bill shows that too often Bills are brought to this House and presented without being sufficiently thought through in advance. Great chunks of the Bill have been removed as a result of the scrutiny that this House has given to it. I know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that on Third Reading we do not talk about what is not in a Bill but only what is left in it. However, it is important to put it on record that all the provisions relating to pedicabs, for example, which were very controversial, have been completely removed. As I indicated in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), a Bill that originally had 39 clauses now has only 20, so it is much tighter.
There have also been a significant number of amendments. I commend my hon. Friend for the constructive way in which he has dealt with the points that have been raised. Obviously he and I have not agreed about everything, but where we have been able to agree we have amended the Bill accordingly.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Has my hon. Friend not rather destroyed his own argument? If the Bill has been improved in the process of scrutiny that already exists, surely there is no need for the Procedure Committee to look at our procedures.
Mr Chope
As my right hon. Friend is a former distinguished Chairman of the Procedure Committee, his intervention will probably carry considerable weight. I can understand why the Committee might not want to get involved in looking at private legislation. However, quite a lot of right hon. and hon. Members’ time has been taken up with this legislation, and the implication of my remarks was that some of that time could have been spared if the contents of the Bill had been thought through more carefully in advance before it was presented. I have noticed a distinct drying up of the number of private Bills being brought before the House. I hope that the thorough scrutiny to which they have been subject has become part of a deterrent process whereby people realise that one cannot just dream up some idea, put it in the form of legislation, present it, and hope that it will go through the House without anybody taking too much notice of it. If the Procedure Committee wants to look at the issue, then obviously it will do so.
The next Bill we are debating deals with filming on the highways in one particular locality. It is often asked why we need Bills dealing with a particular locality that could have a more general application through an enabling Bill passed by the Government that would enable local authorities, if they so wished, to opt into certain legislation. However, that is a debate for another day.
Having had such constructive engagement with my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, it would not be appropriate to seek to divide the House on Third Reading. As I have I said all along, there are parts of this Bill that I support. I merely wanted to ensure that it was a better Bill when it left this House than when it arrived. I think that anybody looking at this objectively will agree with me and with you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it is a better Bill that is worthy of a Third Reading.
London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I was in mid-sentence, I think, when we finished last time at 10 minutes past 10. On that occasion, as we know, we had in the Chamber the sponsor of the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer). Since then, he has been unwell but he is back today and we are delighted to see him in his place.
The Bill was first introduced in November 2007 and has since progressed through Parliament, although no one would suggest that that progress has been rapid. If and when it gets its Third Reading it will go to the other place so that the many amendments that have been introduced, largely as a result of the broad-mindedness and good sense of my hon. Friend, can be considered. He is to be congratulated on having put pressure on the Bill’s promoters—the local authorities behind it—to compromise on many of the issues on which they did not, at one stage, appear to be willing to compromise. The Bill is now in a significantly better state than when it first reached this House, because it has been amended in Committee and during the three-hour sittings on Report, but it is still an unsatisfactory Bill for a number of reasons.
I articulated in some detail my concerns about the Bill during the nine hours of debate on a series of amendments on Report, and I do not think I can add much to the arguments I deployed in those debates. We are now left with what the Bill looks like after many of those amendments were rejected but others were accepted. All I shall say tonight is that I am glad we have been able to have a full debate on this issue. I am disappointed that there has not been wider participation among Members who represent London constituencies and that we are introducing legislation that will affect one part of the country while ignoring other parts. There is an issue of principle there that the Government need to address. Having said all that, I think the Bill is in a better state than it was.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
We have all enjoyed my hon. Friend’s circumlocution on this matter, but can he distil his arguments into a couple of sentences? Is he saying that he now regards the Bill as reasonably acceptable, broadly acceptable or still unacceptable?
Mr Chope
It depends. It is unacceptable to me but it is probably acceptable to the majority of Members of the House if one has regard to the debates and votes that have taken place. As with much legislation, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. When people in London find that they cannot go to the public toilet they used to go to without going through a turnstile they might ask, “Where’s that come from? What happened to the private Member’s legislation that outlawed turnstiles in public lavatories right across the country? Why do we now have a separate regime being introduced in London?” I wonder what will happen when they are accused of trying to sell their car on the internet and are deemed to be engaging in street trading by reason of a substantial extension of the definition of street trading. In fact, we have been able to restrict that, through an amendment, so that it will not affect ordinary individual householders as it would have originally affected such individuals in Westminster. People who try to sell their cars on the internet will be adversely affected by this legislation and perhaps when they suffer significant penalties they will contact their local MP.
I still have significant concerns about the Bill, but there have been many Bills before the House that I have had concerns about, not all of which one has been able to amend. If one is fair-minded, one must accept that progress has been made and that there has been a willingness on the part of the promoters and particularly on the part of my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green, who has taken the matter forward on their behalf, to listen. That is an important lesson for people who want to bring forward private Bills. There is a lot to be said for a bit of jaw-jaw and discussion and for trying to reach a reasonable compromise. That is probably quite a long answer to the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight), but I feel that after this length of time not much more can be said either in summary or in detail. That is why I am going to resume my place.
First, though, let me say that I am very grateful to all those colleagues who have participated in these debates, not least my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who has made quite a name for himself. In one debate he broke through the one-hour barrier. That is not a novelty for my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who I think will catch your eye shortly, Mr Deputy Speaker, but for those of our colleagues who have not yet broken the one-hour barrier, this type of legislation is fertile ground for doing so. I commend that process to my hon. Friends.
Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Chope
The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) has again done the House a service in raising this issue. He has spoken of the need for proportionality. I disagree with the way he has worded his amendment, however, as it is rather hard in law to place a duty on an insurer to “show regard” to a principle. Given all the other qualifications in the amendment, it would, in practice, by unenforceable.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Is the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) not making rather heavy weather of this matter? Will not the market take care of it? If one insurer on its own presented reams and reams of questions, and the others did not, surely the potential customer would simply go elsewhere.
London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Chope
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that that would be the consequence and that it indicates the shoddy drafting. One has to ask why the provision is so broad brush. That is why I tabled amendment 5. It is only a small amendment; it does not address all that I think is wrong with clause 3, but it would at least remove part of the wide ambit and prevent people who have not been the subject of penalty charges from being served with penalty charge notices. One might ask whether it really matters if penalty notices are served on people who should not be served with them. It does if we also look at clause 4. If the person being served with a penalty charge notice to which he should not be subject, as he has been wrongly accused of having liability for it, is asked to give his name and address and refuses to do so, he then becomes under clause 4 a criminal and is liable to a summary fine on strict liability of up to £1,000.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me for saying this, but could it not be argued that his amendment, too, is guilty of sloppy drafting? What would happen if his amendment were accepted and the responsibility belonged to a body corporate? Surely it would mean that the person serving the notice could not hand it to a director, but would have to post it or deliver it to the company’s registered office. That is what would happen if my hon. Friend’s amendment were accepted.
Mr Chope
If a body corporate were liable for the penalty charge, it could be served on its director. My right hon. Friend, who will have looked assiduously at the Bill, will know that there are references in clause 20 to the liability of directors for offences committed by a body corporate. I am not sure, therefore, that my amendment would be out of order in that sense. I think it would improve the Bill, given that the issue of corporate liability is covered by clause 20. Although I say it myself, I believe that amendment 5 will bring about a modest improvement in the drafting.
Amendment 6 is the second in the group; it would leave out subsection (2) of clause 3. That subsection talks about giving these powers, to which I have already referred, not just to the police or police community support officers, but to an “accredited person”. It proposes to make these significant powers available to anybody who is an accredited person. My amendment would leave out the provision to enable those accredited people to have the powers given to PCSOs.
Amendment 7 would likewise leave out subsection (3), which is consequential, as it states:
“An accreditation may only specify that subsection (2) applies to an accredited person”
and so forth. That will be taken out, so that clause 3 would not apply to accredited persons.
Mr Chope
That is a very good question, but it is probable that only the promoters of the Bill can answer it definitively. It seems to be a rather murky area. I do not think that we should build up a bureaucracy in this country in which a lot of officials are going around with powers to ask people for their names and addresses and to ensure, if they refuse to give them, that they are subject to criminal penalties including fines of up to £1,000, when it is not known who those officials are. There will be plenty of opportunities for bluff and bluster. Who will do the accrediting, how will those who do the accrediting be made accountable, and who will know who they are? I trust that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), will be able to respond to those and other questions, because I understand that there is a fair amount of support among the Bill’s supporters for an extension of the powers to accredited people.
I think that the answer to my hon. Friend’s specific question can be found in the schedule to the Police Reform Act 2002 that contains definitions relating to accredited persons. However, I must admit that the interaction between those definitions and what is in the Bill is not exactly as plain as a pikestaff to me.
Mr Knight
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way to me again. He is being very generous.
We all know that a police officer who is involved in the issuing of a fixed penalty ticket will have been trained in the rules of evidence, and will know that the starting point should be a presumption of innocence. What assurances does the Bill give us that an accredited person will have been given similar training in our law? Does it contain any provision to prevent a local authority from putting an accredited person on a pay scale enabling that person to receive a bonus based on the number of tickets that he or she issues? In other words, might the accredited person have a vested interest in giving out tickets willy-nilly, even when no offence has been committed?
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend has made a powerful point. There is evidence that local authorities have given just such financial incentives to their officials, based on the number of people to whom they can issue tickets for offences, or alleged offences. The Bill would give those same officials an additional power to issue penalty notices.
One of the weakest parts of the “accredited person” concept, which does not apply under the present law, is that someone who declined to give his name and address to an accredited person would be guilty prima facie of an offence, but the accredited person himself would have no power of arrest. What would he do then? Would he just wait there? If he were a police community support officer, he would be able to ask the person to wait for up to half an hour for a police officer to arrive, and the police officer could exercise his own power to arrest the person concerned for not having given his name and address. However, no such power extends to accredited persons. This provision would not work in practice, and I do not think that it has been thought through by the promoters.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend is on to a really important point: if we are to change the balance between officialdom and civil liberties, it should be done nationally rather than on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, which could lead to laws in London being different from those in Shipley—different, indeed, from those anywhere else outside London.
It should be for Home Office Ministers to come forward with these proposals, if they think it reasonable to extend such powers to councils in the way suggested in the Bill, but they manifestly have not done so; there have been extensions, but nothing in this area, despite the fact that the Bill was printed back in 2007. The Government have not chosen to extend these powers to police community support officer and others, or to extend officials’ ability to require names and addresses nationally. Implicit in that is that the Government would not support such an extension of restrictions on civil liberties. If they do not support such restrictions on civil liberties nationally, why should they support them in London?
Mr Knight
Is the following statement an accurate précis of the situation: my hon. Friend’s amendments are an attempt to thwart the promoters of the Bill who are seeking to decriminalise a number of offences and to replace them with a far more draconian council-operated system?
Mr Chope
Yes. Over time, offences have been decriminalised, and when I was a Transport Minister I supported the decriminalising of offences, but I never had in mind that that would be coupled with extending the powers of the police to deal with people such as those who do not give their name and address, and there are not as strong safeguards in respect of officials as there are for police officers.
The income or yield from decriminalised offences goes straight into the coffers of the local authorities, and local authorities cannot expect to have it both ways. They cannot expect both to receive all that money and to have the powers of the police given to their officials. My right hon. Friend therefore highlights a key issue.
We must remember that over time the Cities of London and Westminster and the London local authorities have salami-sliced the powers and rights of individual citizens in favour of bureaucratic local government. If this Bill is passed unamended, it will be argued that that trend should be extended, yet this Bill will not have been subjected to the same degree of parliamentary scrutiny as a public Bill.
Mr Knight
Is there any popular support for this measure? A number of colleagues representing London constituencies are present, but not a single Opposition Back Bencher is in the Chamber. It does not seem to me that there is popular demand for this measure. I can understand why money-grubbing council officers might want this matter to proceed, but do the public?
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend makes a good point. It certainly appears that the public’s representatives are not keen on this matter. Although I have not checked the No. 10 website to see whether there is an online petition with hundreds or thousands of signatures in support of this Bill, I suspect not, and I think we would have been told about it if there was. The Bill’s passage through this House has not yet concluded, however, so it is still open to somebody to start an online petition in support of it, and against today’s amendments.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend is doing a great job in defending his local authorities, and I hope that as a result he will in due course be granted the freedom of his boroughs, if that has not already happened. I accept what he says about localism and about London, especially parts of central London, being different in character from other parts of the country, but I do not believe that we should have one regime of civil liberties in London and another elsewhere. If that were the case, we could, for instance, introduce much more draconian laws for people causing trouble or holding demonstrations in London. Nobody has yet suggested we should have a different criminal law according to where an offence takes place, yet that is what we are building up to under this decriminalised regime of law. It will result in alternative sets of laws applying to London as opposed to the rest of the country.
I argued that point when we were discussing various Bills concerning pedlars. Pedlars travelling across the country want the certainty of knowing what the law is; they do not want different laws in different parts of the country. That argument applies even more strongly in the context of whether someone has the right to ask for our name and address and whether we will be subject to a criminal penalty if we refuse to give that information.
Clauses 3 and 4 address important matters of principle, and amendment 10 seeks to alter clause 4 as follows:
“leave out ‘a community support officer or an accredited person’ and insert ‘or a community support officer’.”
Amendments 11, 12 and 13 address the same theme, and seek to remove from clause 4 powers relating to accredited persons and to confine them to police community support officers. The reasoning behind that is the same as the reasoning I articulated in respect of the amendments to clause 3.
Mr Chope
I do not want to advertise, but I agree that readers of tourist guides such as those produced by Lonely Planet and Rough Guides might find it useful to know about such penalty regimes. I am sure that if this legislation is put on to the statute book in its current form the editors of those books will want to ensure they are up to date in respect of the fact that there are fewer civil liberties in London than in other parts of the country, as visitors may wish to steer clear of London in order to enjoy the full range of English freedoms outside London. Those are important points.
Regulatory Authorities (Level of Charges) Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Chope
That is a rather general example, if I may say so. Perhaps when my hon. Friend comes to respond to the debate he will address a specific profession, such as dentistry. Dentists are already regulated by their professional body. They are also regulated under health and safety legislation and so forth, but the CQC is now insisting that it too should regulate them. It is going to cost dentists a minimum of £800 a year, I think, to register with the CQC. I hope that the Minister will in due course explain what added value will come from that, as there is an enormous amount of scepticism about whether it will lead to any improvement in the quality of dentistry in this country. When one looks at the CQC report, one finds that the income from the regulatory fees for dentists will far exceed the amount that will be spent on regulating dentists. That is a good example of what I am describing as a “stealth tax” or an “additional regulatory burden”.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
May I gently chide my hon. Friend? It is open to someone who has a Bill before this House to provide explanatory notes to assist the House in considering the Bill. I understand from the Vote Office that he has not done so and perhaps he could tell the House why. It would have been helpful had he gone to the extra effort of providing those notes. Because he has not done so and because he has gone on about the Care Quality Commission, may I ask whether he intends the definition of “regulatory authority” in his Bill to encompass local authorities?
Mr Chope
The short answer is that I do not intend that definition to cover local authorities. On the lack of explanatory notes, my right hon. Friend is a lawyer of considerable repute and he is capable of reading a two-clause Bill just as well as anybody else. This is not a complicated 100-page, six or 10 schedule Bill. We know that you, Mr Speaker, are saying that we must ensure we get good value for money, and we want to reduce our costs, so I thought it would be an unnecessary burden and an additional cost to have explanatory notes for something that is self-explanatory. I hope, in due course, to take my right hon. Friend through the terms of this short Bill, so that if he has any doubts, he can ask questions in interventions and so on. Perhaps I shall do so now, as I am being prompted.
Clause 1 refers to:
“No regulatory authority carrying out functions in England”,
so the Bill extends only to England. Although we have to say that it applies to England and Wales, it will apply only to England.
Mr Knight
Clause 1(1) begins:
“No regulatory authority carrying out functions in England on behalf of a Minister of the Crown”.
My hon. Friend says that that is what the Bill is to cover and that he does not intend it to cover local authorities, yet I understand that the analysis of whether a property which is not connected to the water mains is receiving water of an adequate quality is carried out by the local authority, which is undertaking that duty on behalf of a Minister of the Crown, so surely his definition might include local authorities in some circumstances.
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend may well be right. It may well be that there are certain circumstances in which local authorities are undertaking a responsibility given to them by the Crown and so this Bill would apply to them, but it is not intended to cut across the discretion of local authorities to set their own fees and charges for the services they provide. That would be contrary to the principles of localism, which are supported so widely across the House now.
Clause 1 states:
“No regulatory authority carrying out functions in England on behalf of a Minister of the Crown may increase, over any given period of time, the fees charged in respect of any of its services by more than the rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, over that given period of time.”
Recently, these charges have been increasing very much above the rate of inflation, and I shall give the House some examples.
Anyone who wishes to travel abroad must have a passport, so one can hardly describe this as an optional extra for most citizens. In 1997, a 10-year renewal for an adult passport cost £17.50 but in 2009 the cost had increased to £77.50, which is almost a fourfold increase in real terms in 12 years. Why? Is such an increase not rather unfair, given that everybody needs a passport and especially given that children now have to have their own passports and cannot travel on their parents’ passports? How can such an increase be justified? Clause 1 would make it impossible for the Passport and Records Agency to increase its fees above the rate of inflation over a given period of time without getting specific authority so to do.
Mr Chope
We now know where my hon. Friend the Minister gets all these references from, but that is another story.
Let me give an example of a good regulator. Some of us had the privilege of listening to Colette Bowe from Ofcom earlier in the week. She said that Ofcom had been asked by the Government to reduce its costs by some 25%. It has already reduced its costs by more than 20% and it has not increased the costs of regulation but reduced the size of the organisation so that it acts more proportionately. There is a message there for many other regulators whose minds are not concentrated sufficiently because they have the option of always being able to increase their charges. That is why I have these provisions in the Bill.
The Bill does not say that regulators can never increase their charges, but clause 1(2) states:
“No regulatory authority shall introduce a charge in respect of a service currently provided free of charge in England unless a report has been laid before Parliament setting out the reasons for the introduction of the charge and that report has been approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Other colleagues will have different examples, but at the moment the Department for Transport is actively considering charging owners of vehicles a registration fee just for having a vehicle in their ownership. The statutory off road notification, which is a means whereby an owner can keep a car off the main road without incurring a fee, will be changed and the owner will have to pay the fee that is being introduced, even if they are keeping the car off the main road and not using it on the highway. That would be an additional new charge. Would it be reasonable? I do not think it would, but if it were introduced under the Bill, it would be necessary for a report to be laid before Parliament setting out the reasons and justification for it. If that were to happen, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire would no doubt ask questions about the impact on those who have older cars that they do not use very often.
Mr Knight
Does my hon. Friend agree that the introduction of such a charge would be outrageous? In effect, it would be a tax on ownership, which would be unique in this country. Does he share my shock about the reading matter on the Minister’s bedside table? Would the Minister not be better advised to have a copy of the Jensen Interceptor Mark III workshop manual by his bed?
Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(13 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Chope
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He is obviously demonstrating that he has an open mind on this subject, which is more than I can say for the Government in relation to another Bill that I have on the Order Paper, the Minimum Wage (Amendment) Bill. Yesterday, before he had even had a chance to the listen to the arguments for that Bill, the Leader of the House said that the Government would be against it. I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend has an open mind on this issue.
I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that there is a lot of confusion at the moment, among universities in particular and other institutions of higher education, because the Government seem to be at sixes and sevens in developing their policy in this area. Originally, the Government said that they would publish guidance to the Office for Fair Access by the end of January to enable it to give guidance to universities by the middle of February on their admissions policies for the academic year starting in 2012. Despite full guidance having been issued in the middle of February, with the Minister for Universities and Science saying in a press statement at the time that OFFA would be able to advise universities by the end of February, as of now, in the first week of March, there is still no information from OFFA on the principles that universities should apply for next year’s admissions.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
On the subject of guidance, may I ask why my hon. Friend has, unusually, not published explanatory notes and guidance to his Bill?
Mr Chope
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that question. The reason is that I thought that my Bill was exemplary in putting forward an argument in simple language that everyone should be able to understand, and that it did not need any guidance. I will come to the detail of the Bill shortly. I hope that, having read the Bill, he accepts that it is plain about what it seeks to achieve.
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend has just succeeded in getting his Bill through its Second Reading, Committee stage and Third Reading very fast. I hope that my Bill will make similarly rapid progress. That is why I look forward eagerly to hearing what the Government’s attitude to it will be. As a general rule, I am not sure that the length of the explanatory notes, or the fact that there are explanatory notes, is a good guide to whether a Bill will make progress. If I recall correctly, the Wreck Removal Convention Bill, which was brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) and which we will discuss in a fortnight, has quite extensive explanatory notes. I am not sure that that is necessarily an indication of how much time will be spent discussing it.
I return now to one of the principal reasons for my concern about the guidance. The full guidance that was issued by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Minister for Universities and Science to the director of fair access in February was based on the draft guidance that was issued on 7 December 2010. Paragraph 6.1 of the draft guidance was very clear:
“There have been no changes in the legal constraints on your powers as Director of Fair Access. You are not empowered to interfere in institutions’ decisions about the admissions of students and you may only set conditions that clearly relate to promoting participation and access.”
When the final guidance was issued last month, that paragraph was omitted. I tabled a parliamentary question to the Minister for Universities and Science, asking why it had been omitted. Unfortunately, the fact that I received a holding reply rather than an immediate substantive reply makes it obvious that he had to think about why it had been omitted. Eventually, he came back with an answer pursuant to the holding answer of 16 February:
“Paragraph 6.1 was unnecessary as it provided no new information.”—[Official Report, 17 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 981W.]
I am not convinced by that and remain very suspicious. Indeed, the full guidance is more extensive than the draft guidance. The full guidance is some seven and a half pages long, whereas the draft was only five and a half pages long. That clearly expressed paragraph is omitted from the final guidance.
I share the concern of many people in universities that the Government are trying to increase regulation and interference to tick boxes on social engineering and social mobility, and that that is ill conceived.
Mr Chope
Certainly, Mr Deputy Speaker. It would ill-behove either you or me to bask in any glory as a result of that by-election result. It is a pity, however, that there is no Liberal Democrat representative in today’s debate to discuss these very important issues.
I turn to the measures being taken already to improve access. There is going to be a measurement system under the proposals for assessing the ability or willingness of OFFA to allow universities to charge higher fees. The system for measuring the success in improving access needs to include—it does not at the moment—access to other institutions as a result of the work carried out by a particular university. The Russell group welcomed
“the Government’s guidance that institutions should set their own targets and measures of progress”,
but was concerned that
“existing…widening participation benchmarks are unsuitable as targets against which institutions’ progress can be meaningfully measured.”
It quotes Lord Browne—the guru on this issue, who produced his report last year—who found that
“the benchmarks do not provide a sophisticated enough picture of the student population actually qualified to meet the entry requirements of many courses. For example, they take no account of the fact that someone with 4 A*s at A-level might have a high tariff score but would not have a strong chance of being accepted on a Medicine course if these A-levels are in the wrong subjects…Moreover, financial penalties for not meeting these targets would be unfair and unhelpful to our aim of investing in ways to help poorer students win a place at our universities.”
Mr Knight
We are having a very interesting debate, but underlying it is the question of whether we should support the Bill. I have to say to my hon. Friend, however, that the more I look at his Bill, the less I think of it. I do not see how it can achieve anything, because clause 3 on exemptions blows a hole in clause 1, under which a decision has to be made on the basis of merit alone. Clause 3 states that a course can be advertised where there are
“criteria additional to or in substitution for the criterion of merit”.
To use an extreme example, if this Bill was the only arbiter that universities have to follow, they could advertise a course for aspiring gentlefolk where the only requirement is that someone can pay the high fees.
Mr Chope
Exactly, but my right hon. Friend fails to appreciate the transparency of the measure. If an institution of higher or further education is going to give places on a particular course on criteria other than merit, it should make that clear when people are considering applying to that university. For example, if it offers a sports science course, and welcomes in particular people who are proficient at playing soccer, it should say so in the application so that people who cannot kick a ball at all will not apply, or understand that if they do so it is unlikely that they will be accepted. Clause 3 tries to make sure that where universities give places on criteria other than academic merit those criteria are spelt out openly and transparently. I am surprised that my right hon. Friend is concerned about that. Perhaps he will accept that his interpretation of the clause is incorrect.
Mr Chope
I believe that it is pretty transparent, although some academic work has been done that shows that, inevitably, subjectivity is involved in assessing people’s suitability for going to university. There is no way in which someone who has been refused a place at a university can find out the specific reasons for that decision, although it is normally possible for them to obtain informal feedback from the university through their school or college.
I am not suggesting that the current system is completely transparent, which is why it would be better for it to be plain as a pikestaff that admissions should be made on the basis of merit. There is a feeling, borne out in research for Oxford university, that some admissions tutors for that university are inclined to choose pupils who do not come from independent schools, because they believe that independent school pupils have an unfair advantage and they wish to discount that advantage. They do so on the basis of subjective judgments, which very much runs against the principle of transparency. I hope that the Minister will deal with that point. A problem with the speech by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science on 17 February was that he misquoted some of the evidence from the Ogg, Zimdars and Heath report for Oxford. He used that evidence to suggest that there was a bias in favour of pupils from private schools, when a proper reading shows quite the reverse, with a bias against pupils from private schools.
With all these issues, the problems that concern me are problems of definition. If we are going to try to categorise schools, whether they are independent or private on the one hand, or state schools on the other, how do we categorise those pupils who move from the independent sector into the state sector in the last two years of their course, or perhaps leave an independent school and go to a tertiary college to resit their exams and apply to university? There are quite a lot of independent schools with pupils who came originally from the state sector, often with bursaries. Will those pupils be penalised when they apply to university—or do the universities accept those pupils?—because their last place of education was an independent school, even though they started off in the most difficult circumstances? Many pupils at independent schools are in receipt of education maintenance allowance, which may surprise the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), and it may cause some people to say that that is another reason why EMA is ill-targeted. However, there are many pupils at independent schools whose backgrounds would be regarded as poor or disadvantaged in the context of the higher education access arrangements that the Government are discussing.
Mr Knight
I am afraid that my hon. Friend has not convinced me. It is quite clear that clause 3 is so wide as to blow a hole in clause 1. In response to my earlier intervention, he appears to accept that it would be quite possible, if the Bill were the only arbiter, for a university to decide that it wanted to take unintelligent people with money. It could advertise a course for aspiring gentlefolk when, to use a colloquialism, all that it is interested in is money from rich thickos.
Mr Chope
I do not know whether my right hon. Friend has read today’s press reports about the London School of Economics and one of its erstwhile postgraduate students from Libya. I am not sure whether his remarks would apply to that particular happening. If a university chooses to have a closed scholarship arrangement, as some do, there is no reason why that should not continue under the Bill, provided that it is set out transparently. Ultimately—this is why the desire for ever more Government regulation is ill conceived—why can we not trust those universities to do what is best for them in the great marketplace? No self-respecting institution wants a reputation, to use my right hon. Friend’s example, for taking on a lot of thickos who will not perform at university, because that will push the university down the league tables, and will affect its ability to attract research grants and the brightest and the best. The Government cannot second-guess all those decisions—they have to be made by universities or other higher education institutions themselves.
Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(13 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Knight
B would be able to do that, although our law clearly states that one cannot refuse part of an inheritance—it is all or nothing. Once the decision is made, one cannot change one’s mind, unless others have not acted on one’s initial decision, in which case one can. The son would be at liberty to accept the inheritance and then give it away—indeed, he could give it to the church of which he was a member.
Stranger things happen where there is a will. If someone decides to give up something that they have been bequeathed in a will, what happens depends on the wording of the will. Such cases would need individual consideration.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I apologise to my right hon. Friend for not being here at the outset of his remarks, but I have indicated to him informally my concern that that particular aspect of his Bill may have the unintended consequence of creating a loophole, whereby people can avoid inheritance tax. In the example that he gave, the money would go directly to the grandchildren as a result of his Bill, which means that by disclaiming, B would be able to pass the money on to the next generation, whereas normally he would be able to do so only by incurring a potential inheritance tax liability, if he did not survive for seven years after so doing.
Mr Knight
Under our existing law, there are various reasons why people may disclaim an inheritance, and reducing one’s tax liability is already one of them. For example, someone might decide not to accept an inheritance, where it involved taking on a property that was subject to a long lease that included expensive repair covenants.
Many people in the world, as well as in this country, seek to reduce the amount that they pay in tax. Some seek to do it by concealing their wealth, lying to the authorities and completing inaccurate and misleading tax forms. They are tax evaders—they break the law, and when they are caught, they are properly punished. Others seek to lower their tax liability by making perfectly lawful decisions affecting their own position, which is called tax avoidance rather than tax evasion. There is nothing unlawful about tax avoidance, and I am surprised that my hon. Friend, who is a Conservative Member of Parliament, feels that it is somehow inappropriate.
If a person who is on their deathbed inherits a legacy, and they are worried that by accepting the money, which they will not have time to spend, they will incur a greater inheritance tax bill, I see nothing wrong with such a person disclaiming. If my Bill were law, disclaiming would mean that person’s disclaimed money going to their children, which would be all the better. That person would have reduced their tax liability in a perfectly lawful way, and what is wrong with that? I hope that on reflection my hon. Friend will decide that his point, which he might initially have thought was a good one, is not actually a good one.
Mr Knight
I accept that point absolutely and completely. The effect of the law does not produce the outcome that the intestate person in most cases would have wished anyway, and my Bill seeks to correct that anomaly.
There are a number of ways in which the state can and should seek to dissuade teenage pregnancies, but using the law of intestacy should not be one of them. I am not convinced that after a night out at a disco or bar, just before the moment of unprotected sex—perhaps in the back of a car—two young teenagers are going to feel in any way dissuaded from having sexual relations, and possibly thereby conceiving a child, by the expectation that they may die before reaching 18 or marrying, and thereby disinherit an unborn child that they might or might not be about to create. I absolutely agree with the comments made by the Chair of the Justice Committee.
We hope that most children are brought up in a loving relationship. Let us think of the poor child, who has an unmarried mother who is killed before she reaches the age of 18. What does the state say to the child? “Because of these circumstances, you will not be helped; you will not be able to inherit money that you would have inherited from your grandparents if your mother had reached the age of 18.” Clause 3, therefore, inserts new subsections (4B), (4C) and (4D) into section 47 of the 1925 Act. I remind the House that that Act lists what happens on intestacy. The subsections inserted by the clause deal with the situation of the young child of an intestate who dies under the age of 18 without having married or formed a civil partnership. As C is a minor at the date of Y’s death in the example, his or her interest in Y’s estate will be held in the statutory trusts imposed by the 1925 Act.
On commencement, clause 4(4) provides that only deaths occurring after the commencement of the Bill will be covered by it. Knowing, in this cost-conscious age in which we live, my hon. Friends’ concern about the financial implications, I draw their attention to the fact that the implementation of the Bill is not expected to impose any additional burden or to increase any other public expenditure.
Mr Chope
My understanding is that the Bill incorporates part of the recommendations of the Law Commission, which were going to be legislated for by the Government, but the Government decided not to legislate for those because they said it would be too expensive to do so. How is that action by the Government consistent with what my right hon. Friend says—that nothing in the Bill would add to the costs to the public purse?
Mr Knight
My Bill is not precisely the same as the Bill proposed by the Law Commission; I have made a number of changes to it. I stand by what I just told the House. I am sure the Minister will deal with this point in further detail if it is felt that I am incorrect, but I suspect that the reason my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) is confused is as follows. The Law Commission suggested that special trust provision for minors in forfeiture cases be set up, and when the Ministry of Justice consulted on the special trust provision proposals, which may have played a part in the issue of cost, several criticisms were made of them. Some consultees doubted that they were necessary, and I understand that the Ministry of Justice—I stand to be corrected by the Minister—re-examined those proposals with the Law Commission, and they both then changed their mind and agreed that the proposals were unnecessary. I have not suggested otherwise because I take the view that the law already provides protection for minors’ inheritances. That may answer my hon. Friend’s point.
Mr Knight
I am doing that for the simple reason that I have confidence and trust in the coalition Government and I saw no reason to seek to override them on so footling a matter. If the Minister tells the House that he supports the Bill—which I hope he will in a moment—I expect him in good faith to see that the Bill is brought into effect as soon as is reasonably possible. Because I have confidence, particularly in this ministerial team, I decided to leave it to the Government to make that decision.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(14 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I beg to move amendment 62, page 5, leave out lines 9 to 11 and insert
‘but no preference beyond the second may be indicated.’.
It gives me great pleasure to move amendment 62. It goes to the heart of what we mean by “the alternative vote system”, because there is more than one AV system. I am very much in favour of first past the post, so it is with a heavy heart that I know that we are about to get into the detail of what we mean by an “alternative vote”. Were my amendment to be carried, it might make it easier for those who want to secure a yes vote in the referendum—that is the irony of my amendment—because it will actually make the system much simpler to understand.
Effectively, my amendment would provide for the choice of replacing the first-past-the-post system with the first-or-second-past-the-post system. In other words, it would not be possible for somebody to be elected unless they had either the first or second largest number of first preference votes. Under the AV system proposed in my amendment, candidates who had come third, fourth, fifth and so on would be eliminated after the first round and the second preference votes of those who had backed them redistributed. After that redistribution, the candidate—either the first or second-placed candidate—with the most votes would be elected. So the qualifications for election would be that, first, a candidate would have to have been one of the first two people past the post and secondly, they would have to rely on the second preference votes of those who had backed candidates lower down the batting order in terms of success in the first round.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
If the Committee were to accept my hon. Friend’s amendment, would it not mean that the candidate with the broader base of support among the community he or she was seeking to serve might not be elected?
Mr Chope
That is a defect of all alternative vote systems. One reason I like the first-past-the-post system is that it is clear for people to understand. The most popular candidate wins, and we do not get into this business of having to go for the lowest common denominator.
My amendment would put into the Bill the only AV system already operating in our country—it operates in London and the rest of England for mayoral elections.
Mr Chope
It is indeed.
The effect of my amendment would be to adopt the system that Professor Dunleavy describes as London AV, rather than the three alternatives—classic AV, Australian AV and London AV—also set out in his document. The amendment has obviously been selected for debate because Mr Speaker recognised that there is more than one system of alternative votes. The system that I am describing can be described as the supplementary vote system, but there is also one known as the Australian system.
Mr Knight
Listening to my hon. Friend, I have reached the conclusion that the strongest argument in favour of his amendment is one that he has not yet advanced—namely, that of consistency. If there is one form of AV currently operating in the UK—the one that he describes as London AV—it would make sense that any system introduced be identical to that system. Have Ministers given him any reason why they propose a totally different form of AV from the one that is currently in force in London?
London Local Authorities Bill [Lords] (By Order)
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(14 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes his point perfectly. We in this House have the privilege of the opportunity to try to introduce some common sense into these measures before they become set in law. I hope this debate will enable that to happen, certainly in relation to clauses 8 and 9, against which petitions have, for good reason, been submitted. Depressingly, the petitions were presented in the other place as well, and they did not have any impact. Nobody seems to have been listening. I hope somebody will start to listen soon because we are talking about potential threats to the viability of lots of small businesses in the ever-important hospitality industry. There is the possibility of gross injustices arising from these provisions.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
If this Bill were to be enacted, how would the provisions of clause 9 apply to a vendor who has no window to his customers and no door, such as the owner of a hot dog cart?
Mr Chope
Absolutely, Mr Deputy Speaker. The great joy for people in Christchurch is that even when they reach a certain age they can travel. They travel outside their constituency to places such as London, and they expect that in London they will find facilities similar to those that they enjoy in Christchurch. Sometimes they are disappointed, and that is where the relevance of all this lies. As they have such high standards at home, they seek them elsewhere.
I am concerned that it would be a retrograde move to allow local authorities in London to reintroduce turnstiles. Not long ago, a short debate was held in the other place in which Baroness Greengross asked Baroness Andrews, who was then an Under-Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, about extending the provisions of the Public Lavatories (Turnstiles) Act 1963 to railway premises. The answer was that it would not be desirable because a lot of railway premises were having their loos and the access to them modernised. However, it was implicit in the answer that the then Government did not believe that the law needed to be changed and that they thought it desirable that we should not need turnstiles in order to gain access to public toilet facilities. This is a particular issue for disabled people, because they find it most difficult, although others may wish to gain access to a public toilet as quickly as possible and they do not want to have their progress impeded. I do not think that we need to spell out the point at any greater length, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Mr Greg Knight
May I put it gently to my hon. Friend that he has the argument the wrong way round? Surely we should be applauding this measure, because if local authorities are allowed to introduce turnstiles and thereby charge people an exorbitant rate to use the lavatory, the people of London will have far more lavatories to use as more and more councils seek to tap into this revenue raising idea.
Mr Chope
I do not know whether my right hon. Friend had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he was making that observation, but I suspect that he did. If he did not, he is living on another planet. In the City of Westminster, for example, the council raises an enormous surplus in parking charges, many of which are paid by people who do not reside in the borough. The original idea was that those fees should be reinvested to improve public facilities in Westminster, but that has not happened in practice. The idea that if local authorities can impose more charges for access to public toilets, the quality and availability of those toilets will improve is pie in the sky.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes another very good point. I am sure that if the coalition Government are short of new policies to enact they will think seriously about my hon. Friend’s suggestion. Before they do so, however, they might look at the document produced a couple of years ago by the Department for Communities and Local Government, which set out a strategic guide, spread over the best part of 100 pages, on “Improving Public Access to Better Quality Toilets”. Nowhere in that strategic guide was anything that suggested that the answer to all the problems was to reintroduce turnstiles, which were outlawed in an enlightened moment in 1963. They should probably remain outlawed and I do not think that the case for reintroducing them has been made.
I am also very concerned about the Bill’s provisions on pedlars and street trading, to which I have already referred—my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley engaged in a short exchange with me on that point. Those powers go far in excess of what is reasonable. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green did not consider them when he introduced the Bill. In a sense, this is a warning shot, because a number of us have been jealous of the rights of small groups to be able to carry on their activities and not to find themselves subject to harassment by officialdom. The wide powers that are given under the Bill to Westminster city council and to Camden borough council are a licence for harassment. They give tremendous powers to local authorities to harass the people they wish to drive out of business because it does not suit their purposes and because they find it rather difficult to try to enforce the law as it stands nationally. They want to give themselves extra powers to impose penalties on the grounds of suspicion, and I think that that is wrong.
One is left asking whether anything in the Bill is worth saving, or whether it would be much better to put the promoters out of their misery and not give it a Second Reading. My hon. Friend the Minister thinks that we should give the promoters the benefit of the doubt. For my part, I think that they have had three years in which to try to get their tackle in order and they have manifestly failed so to do. They have not really come to terms with the change in the mood out there, which is very much against interference and regulation by local authorities, pettifogging bureaucracy, penalties, putting pressure on people and making it very difficult for them to argue against penalties, which makes them have to go along and pay another fine or penalty. The promoters misunderstand the mood and there is a great demand for some consistency in our criminal law across the whole country rather than having special regimes for licensing in the London area, as proposed in clause 23, or special regimes for penalties for street trading, as found in the clauses that promote powers for Westminster and Camden.
I obviously support my hon. Friend the Minister as regards the parts of the Bill to which he is opposed. There is so much wrong with the Bill that there is a danger that if we allow it a Second Reading, an enormous amount of our colleagues’ time will be taken up in the Opposed Private Bill Committee. If the promoters are as reluctant to compromise as they appear to have been in the other place, we will end up taking up a lot of time on the Floor of the House on Report and Third Reading. It might be better to put the promoters out of their misery at this stage and force them to go back to the drawing board and propose a fresh Bill that is more in tune with current thinking.
Mr Knight
I hear my hon. Friend’s argument, but all what he says could be put right in Committee. If he feels that the Bill is too pettifogging in some areas, amendments could be moved in Committee to improve it to such a state that only reasonable actions could be taken by local authorities to deal with what is a very real problem. The argument he is developing is not against the Bill per se but against its current drafting. Is it not then for us to amend it in Committee?
Finance Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and Greg Knight(14 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Chope
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. What he said is no great revelation for young people when they go out and party or communicate with each other via modern means of communication. They know that the risks of getting caught are not that great, and that if they are caught, the consequence will be penalty points on their licence and a fine. They will often be able to pay off the fine over an extended period.
Young people now face very substantial insurance premiums and those from the most deprived areas are often those with the highest premiums. One factor that is taken into account is the postcode. If the chance of someone’s car being stolen is high because of where they live or because they do not have garage, the premium will be higher than for someone who perhaps lives in a rural, perhaps law-abiding community. That is an additional problem that these young people face when it comes to motor insurance.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
This tax will hit not only young people, but people of all ages. Does he agree that those arguing that the motor car is a luxury and that taxes on luxuries are quite acceptable are ignoring the real problems that people in rural areas face? For them the motor car is not a luxury but a necessity.
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. What he and others are identifying in this debate is an element of confusion in public policy. Compulsory third-party insurance for people who drive cars is a matter of public policy. If such compulsory insurance is required by the law, we are effectively saying as law-makers that it is a good thing to have it. Are we seriously saying as law-makers, “Well, if you comply with the law, we are also going to charge you extra tax for your compliance”? It seems to me that we need more clarity of thought on the matter. If we do not think that insurance is important and necessary, we should remove the requirement for compulsory insurance. I think that motor insurance, and particularly third-party insurance, is not only desirable but essential. If we are to have it, however, why should we also have insurance premium tax on it? In particular, why do we need to increase the insurance premium tax at this time?
The yield from all the increases in insurance premium tax comes to some £400 million a year, but I suggest that the cost ramifications arising from uninsured driving, and the accident and injuries resulting from it, might be on a scale similar to the total yield of the entire increase in insurance premium tax. Because the current system imposes a flat rate on the level of the premium, the higher the premium, the worse the risk and the greater the penalty incurred.
Mr Knight
I do not think my hon. Friend should gloss over this point too quickly. As he has said, this is a percentage tax, so we are effectively saying that a young driver seeking to insure an Escort RS motor vehicle should pay more in tax than a 55-year-old driver of a Bentley.
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend has particular expertise and knowledge about that particular end of the market. I am sure that the Committee is obliged to him for that information. The point he makes is absolutely correct. If we are thinking in terms of equity and fairness as the guiding words of the day, let us see if we can look again with radical eyes at this whole structure of taxing insurance premiums. Let us see whether the Government accept the amendment today; if they do not, let us see whether they have anything else to put on the table by way of responding positively to the points raised in the debate. We can then decide whether we wish to divide the Committee on this issue or just put down a marker.