Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Duke of Montrose

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall comment on each of the amendments. First, I commiserate with the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I do so as a past president of the National Association of Local Councils, the parent of parish and town councils in this country, which would dearly have loved to have had the facility to vary the way in which it deals with meetings. I am sorry that the Government have not seen fit to acquiesce to any of this. The Minister suggested that the measure went too far and that it would open the floodgates to local government holding virtual meetings as a matter of course. Were that his fear, the Government’s fear or that of the other place, it seems to me that it would have been perfectly possible to come back with a proviso that the Secretary of State would make regulation.

One matter that has never been explained to my satisfaction is the juxtaposition—the fact that, by definition, accountability is somehow measured by physical presence. I do not get that, and I do not think there will be many Members of this House present today who will get it. This issue will come back through sheer force of practicality and necessity. We have to move into the modern age, in that sense. I will leave my comments on that there.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on his success in getting what I can only describe as the obvious provision into this Bill, namely that we have to take climate change seriously and that it underpins everything that we do. To that extent, it was inevitable—if not in this Bill then in very short order—that something would have to be included somewhere in primary legislation, but I congratulate him on his persistence in getting this far. Even if it is not the whole bun, it is certainly more than a currant in the bun and he is to be congratulated.

In that context, there are other things in the Bill that have been left on the cutting- room floor. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is not here at the moment. His amendment on healthy homes is about something that is inevitably going to come back. It is not going to disappear; this is going to have to be the benchmark whereby society expects homes to be created.

The series of amendments which I have been trying to get through unsuccessfully was to do with building safety remediation. The fact is that so many leasehold homes are unprotected yet are faced with remediation costs and liabilities, without which they will not get insurance at any sensible cost. These homes are not excluded from the necessity of remediation by virtue of their height, whether it be 11 metres and below or above 11 metres, because the Building Safety Act 2022 says that it will cover all these other buildings.

It is simply not correct that somehow these homes escape the inevitable consequences of that. That is going to come home to roost because there is an entire market sector—an entire financial sector—that is dependent upon that being resolved. If it is not resolved now in this Bill, as it clearly will not be, then it will come back in short order because this is a matter of an existential threat to leasehold tenure, or indeed whatever tenure there might be instead of leasehold. If you have a building in multiple occupation, where different parts are apartments, this problem is going to come home to roost so long as there are defects caused in the original construction and the constructor and developer are able to walk away from that liability.

In congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on getting his motherhood and apple pie amendment passed, let me remind your Lordships that other bits that have been left behind are also going to come back and haunt us as things go forward.

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

With the leave of your Lordships, I will touch on another small point. In Monday’s Hansard, the heading for this Bill said that legislative consent had been obtained from the Welsh Government but that the Government were still looking for legislative consent from the Scottish Government. In fact, a Scottish Government paper relating all the trials and tribulations that my noble friend had been through—it had 26 pages—was still operating. Are we still looking for more consent from that direction?

Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Duke of Montrose

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

I do not envy my noble friend the Minister having to deal with this issue. The points that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, have brought up are very much ingrained in the minds of anybody who comes from my part of the world, in Scotland. It was the very same thing with a certain Mr Hamilton, who had been found guilty of sexually assaulting children and then went on to carry out the Dunblane massacre of primary school children. The net effect of that was the passing of the Act banning handguns, which does not address the issue of whether the police will bring charges when they see the seriousness of a situation, or understand that there is a risk in issuing a licence to someone who might appeal and cost them a lot of money. Of course, the banning of handguns has been counterproductive because nowadays, if you go around anywhere in the UK, the only people who have handguns are criminals, who know very well that, if they go into any situation, they will not be in danger of meeting someone with a handgun.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I have an interest to declare as the holder of a firearms licence. I understand very well what the noble Baroness was saying in introducing her amendment, but we must be clear about what is already happening. The amendment refers to the necessity of performing background checks, but I believe they already are being performed. I speak with some experience of dealing with firearms officers in different parts of the country, which I hasten to admit is by no means necessarily a representative sample. None the less, these checks are being dealt with with a good deal of thoroughness. They have access to the police national computer, and the National Firearms Licensing Management System, the domestic violence unit and others are all sources of information. In addition to that, every applicant for a firearms licence must have a sponsor, who has to make a positive statement that they know of no reason, under a whole list of criteria, why that person should not hold a licence.

Furthermore, there is another element: the applicant must have permission from a landowner on whose land they are going to shoot, or be associated with a club where they are shooting and have the countersignature of the person who is the secretary of the club. So there are a considerable number of safeguards here. However, I am bound to admit that in the Atherton case, as in the Dunblane case and the Hungerford case that went before it, licences were given by the police for weapons, which, in the more historic cases, it was totally inappropriate for any private citizen to have possession of. The result of that was that these awful offences occurred.

With regard to the substantiated evidence of violence, there is already a duty on a police officer not to grant a licence to anyone who is a danger to public safety or the police, or to those of intemperate habits. As I say, there are safeguards. I double-checked with the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, which very kindly responded to my inquiry for this afternoon. I am not a member of BASC, but it provides the secretarial back-up for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Shooting and Conservation, at whose meetings I am an occasional visitor. With regard to public safety, the chief officer must follow guidance issued by the Secretary of State. Guidance, of course, means just what it says; each case has to be considered to a degree on its merits. I do not really see how it can be any other way. As I see it, firearms officers in the various police forces are taking their responsibilities extremely seriously.

On the question of full cost recovery, which the noble Baroness has raised before, the difficulty with any cost is that it is potentially a blank cheque of some sort. It takes no cognisance of the police efficiency with which the matter is dealt, nor of wider public safety issues that may lie outside and beyond the specific application. The costs incurred could be very high if the system is not effective. The question then arises—I do not have an answer to this—of how much society should pay for the protection that licences afford, as opposed to costs being recovered from the individual. There are many different walks of life where similar situations apply, such as whether the cost of a driving licence or the grant of a passport covers the full cost of the scrutiny. There are certain things that are done in the name of society and for its protection when it is not considered appropriate to recover the full costs. I made the point in previous dealings on a similar amendment at an earlier stage, and I think that it is probably fair to say, that the present level of the firearms licence fee looks quite low. However, that is a different matter; it is a matter for making an order as to what the fees are, which is rather separate from the question of amending the legislation and the framework for how things are dealt with.

There are issues about the fact that, notwithstanding all the guidance that is in place, licences for firearms have been granted to people who were patently unfit to receive them. I do not know any way to ensure infallibly that that can never happen in future. It may be impossible to devise a means for the number of people in the country who could be affected by these things, whether they are people with firearms licences who are resident, on a visitor’s permit or whatever. It will be extremely difficult to legislate out all possibility of that sort of thing, although one must always be vigilant—and, of course, they are terrible things that we should strive to prevent happening. However, I am not sure that the amendment would advance things materially as the noble Baroness suggests.