Local Government (Review of Decisions) Bill

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon Excerpts

Friday 27th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to support this Bill on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. I thank my noble friend Lady Eaton for introducing the Bill. I am sure the whole House will acknowledge that she speaks with great experience in the area of local government. Her contribution today reflects this expertise. I also thank my honourable friend Mr Mark Spencer in the other place for so successfully guiding this Bill through the House of Commons. Once again I record the support shown for this Bill by Her Majesty’s Opposition. I am sure the children of Lewisham have heard a revelation today—that that jolly character they thought was Father Christmas truly is the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark. Anyone reading today’s Hansard will know that, but let us hope that it stays a secret for at least another Christmas or two.

I echo my noble friend’s words in explaining the objectives and drivers behind this Bill, not least in the work undertaken by my noble friend Lord Young and the recommendations from his report, Common Sense Common Safety, which has helped to inform the Bill. In supporting the recommendation in that report, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has been quite clear that good health and safety is important but is concerned that all too often sensible legislation designed to protect people from harm has been extended inappropriately to cover every walk of life, no matter how low the risk. That is why the Government consider this Bill necessary.

The purpose behind the Bill, as we have heard, is to support the coming together of communities and to help to reverse a risk-averse culture that is threatening the ability, on occasions, of communities to come together. The Bill is about strengthening the openness and transparency of the decision-making process in local authorities, bringing robustness to those decisions through review mechanisms in the Bill. The benefits of bringing openness to the process should result in better engagement between the local authority and the events organiser, and that can only be a good thing.

The Bill builds upon the work that the Government have already done on town hall transparency and greater local authority accountability. We have done this because we consider that communities are too important to ignore. The Bill will help to ensure that barriers that unreasonably prevent communities coming together in a collective celebration of national and local events—the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, articulated points about his local area—or to raise money for good causes are removed. Community events provide the opportunity for people to get to know one another, to share in the history of their community, to make the history of their community and, importantly, to bind communities together.

As we have already heard from my noble friend, the Bill will not weaken the important health and safety arrangements that quite rightly exist to protect people, nor will it impact on the public health and safety regime that exists nationally. We recognise that reasonable and proportionate management of risk is important and this Bill will in no way dilute those measures.

I have been clear that transparency and accountability should lie at the heart of a local authority’s decision-making, and I should also be clear that this Bill should not require a local authority to do anything that it should not already be doing. Again, my noble friend articulated this very point. It requires local authorities to undertake certain actions when they prohibit or restrict events on the grounds of health and safety. In particular, it requires that if an authority takes a decision to stop the holding of an event or imposes restrictions or conditions on the holding of an event, it must put the reasons for such a decision in writing, be that in electronic form or otherwise. This written notification of a ban or restriction must be sent either to the person who made the application or the organiser of the event if no application was made. The written notification must be sent on the day the decision was taken or, if that is not possible, the first working day thereafter. The requirement to issue a written notification extends not just to a ban on an event and thus prohibiting it, but to where there is a restriction on the event, as it is possible that a restriction might be judged to be so unreasonable that it amounts to a ban.

If the person who made the application or the organiser of the event is unhappy with the decision of the authority to ban or restrict the event on the grounds of health and safety, the applicant or organiser may request the authority to review it. The Bill does not prescribe a particular review mechanism because we trust local authorities to put in place their own fair and robust review processes. The Bill does provide that the authority must complete any internal review as soon as reasonably practicable after it receives a request for a review, and in any case within 15 days of receipt of the request, and on completion of the review must give written notification, in electronic form or otherwise, to the person who requested the review. The outcome of the review is that the decision may be confirmed, withdrawn, replaced with another decision or varied, but varied only so far as the decision could have been one reached in the first instance.

Perhaps I may turn now to the Local Government Ombudsman. Local issues are best resolved at the local level. However, we consider that if things cannot be resolved at the local level and the council is at fault, it is of course right that the public should have a right to redress through the Local Government Ombudsman. The Bill makes specific provision for the Local Government Ombudsman to treat a particular class of complaints differently from another class. We recognise that the Local Government Ombudsman already has the discretion to distinguish between the treatment of complaints that are referred to its office. This new clause puts that discretion beyond doubt, and in doing so will help to reduce the risk of a successful challenge from a member of the public who makes a complaint that their own case has not been fast-tracked. The Local Government Ombudsman is supportive of the provisions in the Bill, and we welcome that support.

I would like to end with some assurances. To those concerned about the Bill creating more paperwork and red tape, I can give the assurance from a Government who have striven to remove red tape from town halls, that the provisions that require a local authority to set out its reasons for a decision and to allow a decision on health and safety grounds to be challenged should result in the development of a robust decision-making process on health and safety decisions. To those concerned that this Bill will negatively impact on the resources of local authorities, I give the assurance that it does not require local authorities to do anything that they should not already be doing. And to those with concerns about this Bill leading to increased claims on local authorities, I can assure them that by putting in place a mechanism that provides for sound decision-making and an appeals process, the Bill will, if anything, prevent the need for the public to take action against their local authorities.

I close by reiterating that this is a sound and proportionate measure, as both my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, have said. Local authorities should not cancel every event through an overzealous application of health and safety rules, nor should they allow every event to go ahead no matter what the risk. The words “sound and proportionate” are what we have heard from the contributors to this debate, and that is the aim of the Bill. That is what communities want and it is what communities deserve. True localism is about putting in place a framework that allows communities to flourish: this Bill will allow communities to do just that. From the government Benches, I am delighted to support this Bill with its supportive measures. It is about common sense and it is proportionate. As the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said, I hope that we can now move forward with speed to ensure that it reaches the statute book.