Non-Domestic Rating (Alteration of Lists and Appeals) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2017
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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The Earl of Lytton
That this House regrets that the Non-Domestic Rating (Alteration of Lists and Appeals) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2017 and the Valuation Tribunal for England (Council Tax and Rating Appeals) (Procedure) (Amendment) Regulations 2017 have been introduced without adequate regard for the concerns of experts in rating appeals, following incomplete testing, and on a truncated timescale (SI 2017/155 and SI 2017/156). 30th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, Session 2016–17.
The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, in moving this Motion, I draw attention to my interests as a vice-president of the LGA, as a practising chartered surveyor and as a former Valuation Office employee. I am very grateful to the usual channels for finding a slot for this, to my two valiant external advisers for all their help and to the Minister for meeting us earlier in the year.
Noble Lords will know that the Valuation Office Agency, or VOA, is an executive agency of HMRC with responsibility for compiling the rating list on which business rates are based. Section 41 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 stipulates that the list shall be accurate and that revaluations shall take place every five years. Business rates raise, I believe, around £28 billion annually. I am told that the 2010 list has been the subject of more than a million appeals and, at 30 June 2017, 223,430 of them were said to be still outstanding.
When deferring the 2015 revaluation, the Government undertook to have a thorough review of business rates. The deferral was claimed to give business ratepayers certainty. The 2014 Treasury/DCLG discussion paper also stated:
“The next step is to improve the business rates system in England so that it works better in the 21st century. We want to find ways to make the business rates system simpler, more transparent and more responsive to economic circumstances”.
However, ratepayer certainty included continued unfair 2010 rating list levels of assessment based on values at the peak of the market but applied to the economic climate of a crash. The certain purpose was the maintenance of the business rate yield. Furthermore, since 2010 there has been a process of blocking the sharing of valuation information, the shrinking of avenues for challenge and appeal, and an increase in the costs and complexity for ratepayers to the point of “like it or lump it”.
In 2016 a consultation on the check, challenge and appeal, or CCA, proposals received virtually no ratepayer support. Following repeated demands, the Government did not release the responses, as noted rather critically by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, or SLSC, in its 30th report of 2016-17, and despite reassurances given to me by the Minister. The responses finally appeared just before the summer recess and only following further freedom of information requests. No matter; the VOA had already embarked on the changes, regardless of views. I suggest that the entire consultation was something of a waste of taxpayers’ money and possibly an affront to public expectations.
On 17 March this year, just two weeks before the new rating lists were due to come into force, the Government laid the two SIs before Parliament to implement virtually unchanged the scheme as first proposed, and, as noted by the SLSC, curtailing parliamentary scrutiny in order to salvage the government timetable.
In theory, a web-based CCA system could and should be relatively simple. HMRC has a good record of building robust online platforms for such things as VAT, PAYE and income tax, so when, still as a beta test, CCA went live on 1 April, rather surprisingly it demonstrated overcomplexity and substandard IT architecture, with inferior user accessibility and convenience.
To access CCA, you first have to create a new Government gateway account. You must provide detailed personal information which relates to your identity and is unconnected with the business ratepayer or the premises. Given that the property itself is fixed and that the billing authority generally knows both its location and the ratepayer identity, this seems excessive and intrusive. Tough luck if you do not have a UK passport, because then it is down to a fully manual process.
The key to checking one’s assessment is adequate information, but online CCA does not apply to all rateable property types. The first stage involves confirming the physical facts, which would be fine were it not for decades of poor data input and property inspections by the VOA. So, from April is added the requirement for the ratepayer to do the job for it, including providing answers to unknown and possibly unknowable construction history matters going back as far as 1900, and topped off with a £500 fine on VOA say-so for any false information, courtesy of the Enterprise Act 2016.
Whatever the business use, one must claim properties individually, and I am told that CCA cannot cater for ratepayers with large numbers of assessments; for them, the system is all but inaccessible, as each property must be separately and manually entered. Only when registered can one obtain the so-called additional information and appoint an agent to handle one’s case. The agent must perform the same sort of account-forming process with proof of identity. I am told that it can take up to an hour for each and that it is an iterative process, to be completed for each ratepayer client. Registration is not instantaneous. Once logged on, the degree of additional information is minimal. So, for a business to get a reasonable sense of whether its rateable value is likely to be correct, the task is labyrinthine, costly of time and inherently uncertain. No wonder the Federation of Small Businesses described the system as a “shambles” in its press release of 25 July.
Suffice to say that the CCA website has met with a hail of complaints: that it simply does not do what it claims, frequently crashes, is full of glitches and involves significant delays in verification of registrations, and so on. For ratepayers seeking temporary reductions for material changes in circumstances, this matters, with a real risk of injustice because of their inability to lodge a challenge within the timescale. For billing authority requests it is the same issue, with potentially costly write-offs. At the beginning of August, four months after the website’s introduction, the VOA admitted that the matter needed attention and brought in staff from HMRC digital to help deal with it. Meanwhile, CCA remains partially operative at best.
Assuming that you achieve the check stage, things can move on to the challenge stage, and that is the prelude to a reference to the Valuation Tribunal for England, or VTE. But here, in SI 156, there is a further hurdle: the need to provide detailed evidence of a valuation. This new requirement now amounts to nothing short of a proof of evidence by or on behalf of the ratepayer sufficient to justify the challenge. The burden of proof is on the appellant; the VOA does not have to prove anything, despite the fact that it has unique access to all rental returns and transaction data to enable it to compile the list. Moreover, the VOA is required to respond only to the matters contained in the challenge deposition. There is no requirement, as in previous times, for it to justify the wider accuracy of the assessment. Newer or additional evidence may not be added at a later date, other than in very exceptional circumstances. So a great deal of up-front work is necessary just to tease out whether the VOA has got its sums right or used acceptable or appropriate evidence.
Worse, the VOA since 2010 cites confidentiality under the Commissioners for Revenues and Customs Act 2005 as the basis for withholding valuation information from ratepayers, notwithstanding the specific provisions of Section 18 which allow disclosure in relevant circumstances. It is a convenient gagging provision. One supposes that the VOA would never knowingly use questionable evidence and that it employs men and women of utmost integrity, but mistakes do happen. Its parent, by contrast, might be disposed towards any other means available to it to maximise revenue.
There is supposed to be a separation of the revenue and valuation functions but I wonder whether that still pertains. The Government, quite reasonably, point to the large number of unmeritorious appeals against 2010 list assessments. Many made by relatively few claims firms were blanket appeals. Some use highly questionable tactics, even leaving ratepayers with large bills for incompetent advice and lousy service. I suggest that poor maintenance and management of the tax base also creates opportunities for such activities. However, apart from that, does abuse on one side ever justify a Government impeding fair redress for the taxpayer in a country where it is supposed that the rule of law prevails? It can only get worse if, as planned, VOA manpower shrinks by 20% in the next three years.
SI 156 also introduces a new system of charges for appealing cases to the VTE. I suppose the Government felt that reducing appeals to employment tribunals by introducing fees was a good precedent but after the recent Supreme Court decision I am doubtful. At least the employee has the alternative of workplace mediation but nothing similar exists for the business ratepayer.
Some rating assessments are very small but none the less highly significant for those who pay the rates and do not necessarily get small business exemption. Even a modest level of fees matters if your business involves a lot of very small assessments. I submit that the new fees are inappropriate and unreasonably fetter access to justice for no demonstrable public benefit, the point made eloquently by the VTE itself in response to the 2016 consultation but apparently ignored.
Additionally, there is a subtle shift in how the VTE is to treat valuation evidence. The VOA is charged with maintaining an “accurate” rating list. Compare and contrast that with the new test of “reasonable” valuation in rating appeals. The VOA maintains these terms mean in effect the same thing, but if this SI passes into law the argument must surely follow from some eminent member of the Bar that Parliament clearly meant something different. After all, the terms “accurate” and “reasonable” are clearly not the same and one can quite reasonably reach a valuation conclusion that later proves manifestly inaccurate, as everyone knows. It is bad policy to leave such things to the courts.
I leave to one side the issue of secondary legislation attempting to overturn a definition in primary legislation, but it looks to me slightly suspect.
In so far as these new factors compound to fetter ratepayer access to a fair means of redress, my attention has been drawn to the case of Daly v the Home Secretary in which the Judicial Committee of this House on 23 May 2001 approved a 1999 Privy Council decision to adopt a three-stage test in determining whether a limitation by an Act, rule or decision is arbitrary or excessive. These stages, in summary, are: first, that the legislative objective is sufficiently important to justify limiting a fundamental right; secondly, that the measures are designed to meet that objective and are relevant to it; and, thirdly, that the means used are no more than is necessary. I find little if any evidence that such tests have been applied to these statutory instruments. Furthermore, many decisions taken by the VOA which are clearly adverse to ratepayers in their implementation appear to be based on VOA policy rather than the law. If this is administrative convenience dressed up as precedent to overcome decades of poor management, then I suggest there is more legal turmoil to come.
This was an avoidable state of affairs that looks like faulty departmental thinking and cost cutting. It is bad public relations, as evidenced by the widespread criticism of the new system, and appears to be designed to frustrate fair redress. It appears to be consistent with a longer-term policy beyond these SIs alone—ergo, not just a bedding-in problem, which I am sure the Minister may wish to pray in aid. It raises doubts over the stability of the tax yield given the likelihood of more concerted appeals in a system seen as increasingly unjust; it necessitates continued large provisions by billing authorities against list alterations—the last figure I was given was £2.5 billion—and it offends the basic understandings between taxpayer and taxman that underpin the rule of law.
Her Majesty’s Government have not addressed unfair transition, the illogical system of reliefs, the several questionable exemptions or the pitfalls for the unwary. Public conveniences and graveyards attract business rates; a public park does not. Charity shops sell new goods, often in direct competition with other high street premises, yet command 80% mandatory business rates relief. Web-based retailers often contribute little or nothing and yet put vans on streets and create waste streams that have to be dealt with. It all shows that little has been done to give effect to any meaningful reform of a creaking business tax, and if not in time for this latest revaluation, then when are we going to see it?
The question remains, “What are business rates for?” That has been ignored and so at present a modest office occupier, as I have said before in this House, still pays more than twice the council tax on a larger and much higher-value home and yet receives virtually no services. This country has the highest such annually recurring business property tax of any of our European neighbours.
This is not an example of pulling together but of tearing apart a once-respected system. It is for these reasons that I have tabled this regret Motion.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I apologise for missing that point. I am not sure whether it was made when I slipped out—it conceivably was—but it is a fair point anyway. If I may, I will write to the noble Lord about it and copy that to other noble Lords who participated in the debate.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister for the comprehensive answer he has given to the Motion. I am also most grateful to all other noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. I would never go so far as to try to question matters of reasonableness and accuracy, or to cross swords with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, especially as he is the Convenor of our Cross-Bench group—and a much cherished and honoured Convener as well.
However, two things come out of this. First, there is an urgent need to sort out CCA online. I am particularly grateful to the Minister for inviting me to discuss the process issues, because they are numerous. If I could arrange to come and see him with a team of people who could explain what the issues are and why they are so grindingly irritating to ratepayers, and give such a bad impression of the whole thing, then trying to clear the air on that would be very good.
Secondly, yes, the overall system needs fixing and there is to some degree a focus on these SIs in that context. But various things follow from that: there has to be proper finance for it overall—a point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham; there has to be a justification of the impost in absolute and relative terms, compared with other things, and we have lost sight of that a little; and there has to be in the change in the style of management. We are to some extent in this together and if the Government are serious in saying, “We are pro-business”, we cannot have a situation where businesses are set on edge by such a system. It is entirely negative and unnecessary, so there has to be a change in the style of management.
Part of the key to this is the transparency of information. As soon as people start thinking that information is being concealed from them, they become suspicious that there is some malevolence hiding behind it. The proof of the pudding will obviously be in the eating here. The whole point about a non-domestic tax, particularly since it affects so many businesses, is that it must rest on the taxpayer’s confidence that it is being dealt with efficiently, expeditiously and, above all, fairly. We should bear in mind that business rates have a long and cherished heritage. When I started dealing with rating matters back in 1975, it was one of the lowest cost and most efficient means of collecting money for local government purposes. If we do not get that right, the alternative is mounting further appeals. If this provision eliminates individual appeals and starts giving rise to a whole series of class actions, the impediment—the drag—that it will cause in the system will be the same.
This has been a very welcome opportunity to air these views. There are certain things that I dare say the Minister and I are probably destined never quite to agree on. It would be almost inconceivable if that were the case. I appreciate that an effort is being made here, but we need the financial resource and manpower to go into that to try to sort this out. If it is not sorted out, it will continue to cause us problems. Having said that, and with thanks to all noble Lords who have spoken and to the Minister, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Business Rates Hardship Fund
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right about the importance of the high street. The Chancellor announced £435 million-worth of relief in the Budget and, as I have indicated, allocations have been made to local councils. We are certainly looking to them to implement this; some have set a good example—such as Leeds and Haringey—and we are looking to others to do the same. We will certainly consider what further action we need to take if they do not comply with our instructions.
The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, will the Minister explain why the means of claiming small business rates relief is often hidden away in obscure parts of billing authority websites? Furthermore, given the need for an accessible redress system, when will the check, challenge and appeal process for online rating appeals move beyond the beta test stage?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, the noble Earl is right about the importance of small business and rural rate relief, and we are very clear about that. As part of the £435 million package we have set out how that is to operate, and we are looking to local councils to implement it—and they are doing do. He is absolutely right also about the importance of the check, challenge and appeal system operated by the Valuation Office Agency, and we are in close contact with it to make sure that that is working effectively.
Subterranean Development Bill [HL]
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I welcome the Bill and commend the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, on introducing it. I have some interests to declare. As noble Lords will recall, I took an allied piece of legislation, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, through all its stages in this House. Now, as then, I am a practising chartered surveyor. My professional work includes issues to do with excavations and party walls, so I am afraid I stand before the House guilty as charged. I am also a member of the Pyramus & Thisbe Club, which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, and a former chairman of both its national council and its Sussex branch. It is an organisation of professionals with a special interest in party wall and neighbour issues, notwithstanding the rather quaint name that it rejoices under. I am chairman of the professional panel of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors that is concerned with neighbour issues—that is, rights of light, party walls, high hedges, boundaries and access rights. Therefore, I have some insight into that. I had the privilege of being part of the professional team that assisted the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, in drafting the Bill and am glad to have had some input.
The drive for deep excavations is a product of high property values, high transaction costs, planning restrictions and scarce space—usually but not always affecting urban sites. In such areas, people build up, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, has said, convert roof voids, build on at the rear and, having exhausted all these options, dig down to gain extra floor space. Although these are partly regulated by the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, it does not currently provide a complete answer. Just as I explained to the House in 1996 the problems of inadequately regulated loft conversion and other activities affecting party walls, I now do so again in the context of deep excavations. The structural consequences are just as serious and the financial ones potentially huge.
There are several issues arising from deep excavations, especially in densely built-up environments. First, the public interest in the urban substrata is often not adequately addressed and important factors can be overlooked. Secondly, there are particular risks for subsoil support to neighbouring properties, as we have heard. Often, where damage occurs, there are inadequate safeguards in terms of insurance cover, warranties or security of expenses to protect the interests of innocent neighbours. Some of the damage to neighbouring property can be very severe and remediation costly. Often, the only remedy may be protracted and expensive court proceedings. These risks are not sufficiently internalised by developers in that if the contractor goes bust or the property owner carrying out the work becomes insolvent, neighbours can be left with the adjacent blight of an unfinished and possibly unsafe hole in the ground, with no recourse and no ability to enter land and remediate themselves.
Where serial basement construction is carried out in an area, with a number of successive schemes in different properties, residents and businesses can suffer prolonged periods of unreasonable inconvenience. Any development risks causing some inconvenience, and disamenity is, to some extent, a fact of urban life. Certainly, one would not want to fetter that unduly. However, it is necessary to assess the point at which it becomes unreasonable. There certainly are such circumstances.
Local authorities may not have sufficient controls. We have heard about health and safety but it may also be a case of permitted development, as was pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes. Building regulations approval can be outsourced to a separate commercial entity. These factors can collectively sometimes leave the wider community interest unprotected. Wider adoption of a code of practice would go a long way to help this. Although I may be accused of self-interest, I have to observe that some projects are inadequately designed and ineffectively supervised.
This should not be seen as an anti-development Bill. It is in the interests of the best use of scarce urban land that it is optimised and the conditions applied to that should not be disproportionate. Nor is it designed to control the enlargement of houses on a premise that eventually there will be no smaller and more affordable ones left. That may be a complaint but this Bill should not be used to address it. It certainly should not provide for private rights of veto or entitlement to compensation for inconvenience that in the urban context may be a simple fact of life. However, the Bill will pave the way for stiffer controls to ensure that the attendant risks to the interests of society and of neighbours and the potential for excessive risk-taking and inconvenience caused by development are addressed by the person wishing to excavate. The Bill provides for wider-ranging notification than the Party Wall etc. Act, giving neighbours better advance notice. However, I appreciate from the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, that it does not give them a longer period of notice. That point may need to be looked at.
The Bill will enable works to be suspended in certain instances, which is welcome. It will make more overt the rather knotty problem of the provision for security for expenses and thus, I hope, provide greater neighbour protection. I hope that this can be looked at in much more detail so that it is simplified. The Bill will also clarify liabilities. I welcome the idea of producing a code of practice to ensure better administration, and particularly the suggestion that this should be administered by competent professionals.
All these are highly commendable aims. I welcome them in broad principle and so do the majority of practitioners to whom I have spoken. The Bill is not perfect and there are some technical issues of detail and lack of clarity that need to be sorted out. We can deal with these at a later stage. The Bill complements existing party wall legislation, which is considered to work acceptably well. In fact, many of the aspirations in the Bill could be dealt with under revised party wall legislation, but I understand the reasons why the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, has approached this as a free-standing Bill—he was right to do so.
I trust that, in answering, the Minister will accept that there is an important issue to be addressed. I sincerely hope that the aspirations behind this Bill will reach the statute book in some shape or form. If I can be of any assistance in discussions about achieving that I should be glad to do so.
Localism Bill
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
My Lords, legally, town councils are parish councils. I think that is the answer the Minister will give. It is true, anyway. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, is poised to come in again. A town council is a parish council that has passed a resolution under about three lines of the Local Government Act 1972 to call itself a town council. It can have a town mayor if it wishes, but it does not have to. I think that is all there is to say about it, but the noble Earl might have other things to say.
I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is ridiculous if a parish council can put in a lot of time and effort to consider taking over local services, has to do it through the expression of interest procedure and can then be outbid by other people. There is no sense in that. The Minister might say that it is unnecessary because if the district, unitary, county or whatever council agrees to it, it can happen anyway. My experience is of a borough council that tries to offload things to the parishes such as public conveniences when the parishes do not want to take them on, but that is a different matter. Throughout local government, there is a culture of conservatism and fear of taking on and doing more things. Changing that culture is the most important thing that we have to do. The amendment would be a very useful addition to the Bill.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, there is nothing like the words “parish council” to get me out of my seat. Noble Lords will know of my interest in parish and town councils. To answer the first question, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is right: fundamentally, structurally, parish and town councils are effectively synonymous. The differences are in the way in which they operate, but structurally in their clerks, membership and rules of engagement with which they have to comply, you can more or less say that the term is synonymous one with the other, except that one happens to apply to a town. It is an area where we have great difficulty with what we might call the family of parish and town councils, because town councils such as Weston-super-Mare have huge budgets and are on a principal authority scale, whereas many tiny rural parishes, although they may have quality parish council status, are extremely small. That lack of consistency makes it very difficult to deal with parishes as a cohesive whole.
I say straight away that I have not conferred with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am very pleased that he has moved this amendment. There are some extremely good examples of where principal authorities have felt that they had the confidence to pass on to a parish or town council a function that they knew could be dealt with readily, cost-effectively and which was well within the capacity of the town or parish council concerned. But I am bound to say that nationally, the track record of passing things down to the lower tier has been fairly poor, taking things as a whole. That is one of the issues that lies behind localism. We need to get that straight.
What the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested was a sort of localism-light in the sense of trying to avoid a bureaucratic and procedurally-driven process. On the whole I would welcome that as well. At Second Reading, I said that these things have to be rendered down to a localism scale—a community scale, not based on the sort of procedures and checks and balances that perhaps apply to the much more senior aspects that must be rightly dealt with by principal authorities.
I give one example. In my own parish council in Shipley in West Sussex, which is one of the largest geographically but has one of the smallest populations in the whole of West Sussex, a parish councillor commented some time ago on the problem the parish council was having with verges. People were encroaching on road-side verges by extending their gardens, filling-in road-side ditches, and doing all sorts of things that might include impairing forward visibility along the road. They were planting things, and so on and so forth. The verges, in so far as they were part of the highway, would have been vested in the highway authority, which in that instance is the county council. We know that all county councils are subject to cost constraints, and certainly West Sussex where I live is no stranger to that and has introduced some commendable measures to try to square the circle, so to speak. But it cannot be in all places at all times and it cannot police those verges. Such things should be preserved in the generality of the public interest—they are assets of community value in many cases but they are often orphan pieces of land. They may historically have been part of an enclosure plan or something like that which attached them to a particular estate or riparian owner, but over time, and with the process of land registration, that link has been lost. The boundary may have been drawn to an ordnance survey boundary that was set back from the hard edge of the road, so you end up with orphan strips.
Parish and town councils in some instances—I am not saying in every instance as they may not have the facility to do it—would like to get hold of those to manage them properly and make sure, in particular, that they are not filched by neighbouring householders or have things dumped on them where nobody seems to be responsible. They may get driven over because it happens to be a convenient place to pull off for dog walking, as happens in my part of the parish. That is just one example of something that could be of benefit.
In general, I support the amendment but there is a caveat. The words,
“net additional expenditure or net reduced revenue”
is a proviso that the noble Lord wants to insert under subsection (3)(a). There is a problem with activities, services and things being passed to parish councils shorn of any resource to deal with it. That is the classic thing that we refer to in parish and town council circles as double taxation. The parish then has to raise by precept a means of funding that expenditure because the principal authority has said, “Yes, you can have this but there is no funding to go with it”. I therefore enter a caveat on that. On subsection (4), I would flag up that it might be extremely difficult to verify, knowing what little I know about local government finance, to deal with the matters that the noble Lord is trying to cover there. I well understand his reasons for putting them in, but I do not know how you would prove it. However, in general I support the direction of travel of the amendment.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, I knew it was a mistake to mix with these experts. I had better apologise for not understanding the point about parish and town councils and indeed for stirring up the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, with his well-informed speech.
I want to make two observations, one of which builds on that. Town councils, in terms of their size and perception of themselves, can be, as in his example of Weston-super-Mare, completely different animals from most of the parish councils that I know. My constituency contained two main towns—the towns have not changed but the constituencies have—one of which was the main town, Braintree, and the other was Witham, which was almost the same size, with 30,000 people in those days and possibly more now, which had a town council. If I had tried telling them that it was just a jumped-up parish council, I would have expected to lose the odd vote at the following election. The Government appear to be saying that all these bodies, which are not insignificant, are just jumped-up parish councils. I do not think that that is very sensible. Whatever parliamentary draftsmen may say, it might be sensible to incorporate town councils in the wording of the Bill. I leave that thought with my noble friends.
Beyond that, there was one other thing that I wanted to say. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that district and borough councils are not always great at wanting to devolve downwards. Presumably one of the objects here is that they might be encouraged to do that in appropriate circumstances. The only thing I ask, having endlessly declared that my wife is a district councillor, is that nobody tells her what I have said.
Localism Bill
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I need to declare my interest which I have not previously declared—there has been no need to do so until this part of the Bill—as a landowner and a practising chartered surveyor as well as my interest in local councils.
I need to bring a technical aspect to bear here. However, before I do so, I should like to comment on something said by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, in her introductory remarks. The provisions of the Bill go well beyond what might be described as the recovery of assets that were in, but have passed out of, community use. As regards some of the things about which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is concerned, a much wider aspect seems to be appearing.
In my professional life I have prepared lots of lists of property assets. I worked for nearly seven years in the public sector and during that time dealt with a lot of things for local authorities, health trusts and government departments, so I know something about preparing lists. I suggest that the proposed list is very far from being a free bet. The process would involve drawing up, managing, publishing, and possibly providing free of charge, a list of indeterminate size and complexity. Why is that the case? It is because regulation cannot foretell what propositions will come forward as a result of the Bill’s provisions.
The obligation is subject to what the Secretary of State may decide following consultation. It is perhaps a pity that the Government have not yet published their response to the results of the consultation on their paper entitled, Proposals to Introduce a Community Right to Buy—Assets of Community Value. In due deference to the noble Baroness on the opposition Benches, the right to buy was not a term that she coined, it was in the consultation document, as I perceive it. I look forward to that response informing the Report stage of the Bill. I hope that I will receive a reassurance from the Minister that it will be forthcoming before that stage so that we all have time to consider it.
I go back to the list. There will be rules about content, additions, deletions and modifications. The list will have to delve into issues of ownership, some of them quite detailed and probably some that are commercially sensitive and may even be confidential. The list will have to be maintained alongside another “not in” list of failed nominations. All I would say at this juncture is that even on a conservative basis this will be a resource-hungry exercise for local authorities.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Hodgson, this is my maiden speech on the Bill. I intend it to be generic rather than go into detail and I hope, therefore, to be brief. I regret the hour at which we are holding this debate, although my noble friend the Minister showed admirable initiative in opening it with the statement that she did. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, did not have the opportunity to paint the larger landscape before we started getting into the detail.
I am speaking in particular to Amendment 136ZD, in the names of my noble friends Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Cathcart, to which the former spoke a little while ago. I express my admiration for their exercise in clarification. The instincts that underlie generosity to one’s community are the big society writ early. I was a London inner-city Member of Parliament for nearly a quarter of a century, and London is nothing if it is not a collection of villages where the instincts of the big society apply. I have in a recent debate identified in my own constituency Pimlico and Soho as model inner-city communities, if in different modes. I have, however, had an address in Wiltshire for half my life and these characteristics of the big society or, as Burke might put it, the small platoon society, are perhaps evidenced even more vividly in the countryside because of the way everyone knows everyone else and where the roots of families are at least as deep as those of parallel families in the cities, if not more so.
I pay warm tribute to those who give of their substance in rural areas and demonstrate their recognition of local need and to the imaginativeness of their responses. My one plea to my noble friend the Minister is that that generosity of spirit should not be unduly curtailed by the letter of the law, which can turn the landscape into briars and brambles which deter rather than welcome sensible development. I, in turn, have welcomed the amendment as being an insurance policy to support one’s desire to be helpful to the community rather than to ring one’s assets around with defences against hazard.
I end with the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hodgson and support his Amendment 136, though by placing it in line 19 of page 61, it means it offers late rather than early assistance in illuminating the first four lines of that page. It is the opposite of the example once set by a Polish Bishop who was visiting a parish in his diocese, an episode that could be helpful to many a parliamentarian. When greeted by the curate, the Bishop said, “When I visit parishes in my diocese, I am accustomed to be greeted by the sound of bells, and that has not happened today”. The curate said, “My lord, there are three reasons. The first is there are no bells”. “Pray go no further,” said the Bishop. Although my noble friend Lord Hodgson has placed his amendment quite far down on page 61, I still think it is an extremely valuable contribution to the Bill.
Localism Bill
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Beecham
It will be a real test of political leadership to withstand populist pressure of that kind. One of the concerns expressed by many of us during discussions on the Bill is that it gestures too much in the direction of populism and will make life more difficult, particularly, as the noble Lord says, for smaller local authorities that are likely to come under greater pressure than those in bigger urban areas or counties.
Earl of Lytton
My Lords, as this is my first contribution at this stage of the Bill, I declare an interest as the president of the National Association of Local Councils, which noble Lords may know as the national body for parish and town councils. I am also president of the Sussex Associations of Local Councils. I will limit my declaration of interest to those two because they are most relevant.
I appreciate the way the noble Lord, Lord True, introduced this particularly important set of issues. He started off with the question of triggers. That led the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, to comment on triggers for parish and town councils. It may save time if I deal with an aspect of that by way of illustration. We will later get on to a question in relation to paragraph 18 to Schedule 12 of the Local Government Act 1972. Subsection (4), which relates to parish councils, states:
“A poll may be demanded before the conclusion of a parish meeting on any question arising at the meeting; but no poll shall be taken unless either the person presiding at the meeting consents or the poll is demanded by not less than ten, or one-third, of the local government electors present at the meeting, whichever is the less”.
As one can readily see, that is a very low trigger. I am aware of a situation where a coastal parish council considering an extension to its village hall found the process hijacked by a small group of people who raised the 10 minimum. As the matter then proceeded to a parish poll, they were faced with the cost of something approaching £4000 for conducting that, because it had to be dealt with by the principal authority under the normal rules.
One gets a sense that this is devoid of proportionality. We have talked about the gravity of the subject, but there has to be some sense of proportion. I know that there is an amendment in the Minister’s name about this. There are other issues concerning overlaps. I think the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to this, sort of, in code. By overlaps, I mean the possibility of a referendum being used to countermand the other duties of a principal authority. We cannot be having that many bites at this particular cherry. Mayhem lies down that route.
Regarding the cost-benefit and cost-burden, if there is no proportionality, it is a free bet in economic terms and we will have free riders, people who have an agenda and who want to take charge. This could be the moneyed who have moved into an area or whatever it happens to be, or some particular cause célèbre. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves—or it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Rennard—referred to the fact that the run up to an election might be a good time to trigger something that would get in the local paper, or whatever it happens to be. Democratic coherence is at stake here. We are talking about localism and about having the elective democracy, to which the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred. We cannot bypass that by a process of sectoral interests.
Why do I mention this? It is because I strongly believe that when it gets down to the parish pump level, it is important to have something that is proportionate, cannot unduly fetter the operation of parish or town councils’ affairs, and respects the principle that when you elect a body of people to represent your interests they must to some extent be given a free hand. The test is at re-election. That is not to say that there are no matters that lie outside the normal voting pattern, but there must be a clear way of making sure that they do not cut across one another.