European Union

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they plan to take to build a closer relationship with the European Union.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I beg—briefly—to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

We have already begun working to reset the relationship with our European friends and neighbours. The Prime Minister met with President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels on 2 October, and they agreed to strengthen the UK-EU relationship and our mutually beneficial co-operation, and on the importance of holding regular UK-EU summits. This is not about renegotiating or relitigating Brexit but about looking forward and realising the potential of the UK-EU relationship.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her comments. We really do need to reset our relationship with the European Union. Things such as free movement, movement for young people and working with the European Investment Bank have to get to the top of our priority list. Can we put this nonsense of not liking Europe behind us and get down to business?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The previous Government said they would get Brexit done; they did not think about what would happen afterwards. This Government want to and will make Brexit work.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I have seen a lot of concentration camps. I was in the European Parliament for 25 years, when I saw Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau. We had our own pet one down the road from Strasbourg called Struthof. I went to them several times over those years. They were horrifying and remain horrifying. However often you visit them, the emotions are the same.

My first concern about the idea of the Holocaust is how we teach it. I was very impressed by what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, because the truth is that the Holocaust was German inspired but widely supported throughout Europe.

I am a very sad person—I spent the summer reading through some of the newly released Vatican archives on the Second World War. I am a Roman Catholic so I am not attacking my own Church, but I will say that the record of the Roman Catholic Church in collaborating with the Germans when they occupied Italy and in failing to defend its Jewish population is nothing to be proud of. Nor is its record in defending Jews in Germany, in encouraging its Church, in backing Father Tiso in Slovakia, in backing Austria and in the role of the Church and individuals.

When Austria was applying for EU membership I visited Vienna and was told that Austria was the first victim of the Germans, despite the fact that there were more Nazis in Austria per head of population than in Germany. So my first plea is to make sure the history is accurate.

The second thing I would like to mention is the centre itself. Mainly because I am a Euro fanatic, I was the European Parliament representative on the Jean Monnet foundation in Paris and we constructed an education centre. The first thing we found was that we had far more coaches than we could cope with. I do not think 11 coaches is anywhere near what you will need. That is roughly one every 40 minutes. The demand will be much higher than that, or the whole thing will be a failure, so first we must look at that. We found at the Jean Monnet centre that we started off with 20 coaches and in the end had to produce a park for about 45, because the demand went up. So the first thing is capacity.

Secondly, for all the worldly touch-and-feel looking at the pictures, people like to look at items. There is nothing quite as moving as a child’s shoe or dress in a pile in one of these camps, and I am sure that our colleagues of the Jewish faith would be able to help us erect a proper learning centre where people could immerse themselves and see what it was really like. That is what is needed here.

Someone said we have the right idea in the wrong place, which is true. If it were me—it will not be, because they do not trust me enough to put me on any committees here—I would have a monument in Whitehall. That is where the war memorials are. I would have a learning centre at the top of the Mall. Take the Admiralty Arch and convert some of that. If it was good enough to give John Prescott a flat, I am damn sure we can take it over for a worthy cause such as a learning centre. Immediately behind it is a car park where they do Trooping the Colour. I say, “Back to the drawing board, friends”, and if the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, moves a vote and tries to take us back to the drawing board, I will be scurrying into her Lobby.

Recall Petitions: Voter ID

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, there will be a lot of changes in respect of overseas voters. I will have to write to the noble Lord on recall petitions.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I lived in Brussels for 40 years and voted in Belgium. I had a voter ID card throughout that time, and it was never an issue with any of the parties there. Is this not a bit of a false debate?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My noble friend is right. We have had this debate over and over again, and it is clear that many countries, including Northern Ireland, have voter ID. It works very well, and the people of Northern Ireland are very happy with it. We agreed to do this in our manifesto and will continue to do so. We look forward to it working as well here as it does in many other countries.

The Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those given to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for this excellent report. I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, who I am sure will make distinguished contributions to this House.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, is not in his place, because it was with him that I had my first dealings with devolution, when in the 1970s we toured various parts of Britain asking, “Would you like to be run by Merthyr Tydfil council?” The answer we got generally was no, but we have come a long way from there and we now have much devolution in this country.

I spent many years in the European Parliament and travelled widely in Europe. My experience was that, with one exception which I shall come to, in every country where they had devolution the people who had got the devolution did not think it was enough and the people who had given it thought it was too much. We therefore need to be careful when we look at how much we devolve. The one country that was the exception was Germany, where they seem to have divided, but there, the second Chamber is concerned particularly with regional policy and the Länder. If we need to look at a second Chamber, it may need to be totally different from this one. It would certainly not have most of us in it, because I doubt that many of us would wish to serve on a regional authority and then be posted to the upper House, let alone at our age stand for another election. If we have a second Chamber, my conclusion is that it has to have a specific job to do; it cannot just be a revising Chamber given basically the job of “sort out the mess they leave behind”.

I would like to move on to that, because we do now have a lot of devolution of course. In my area, we have a police and crime commissioner, unknown and voted for by a handful of people—less than 20%; we have a Mayor of Cambridge, who is resident in Peterborough, so we do not know what he gets up to; we have a district council and we have a county council; and now, of course, we have a number of working parties between all four of them. None of the working parties is elected; no one really knows what they get up to, apart from the fact that they are about to wish a congestion charge on us—although I do not think that it will ever get through because they do not have much support for it. I suggest that the first thing that we should do is to look at the level of devolution that we actually have and see whether any of it needs sorting out.

The second—and, because of time, final—point that I want to make is in support of what Andy Street said about the devolved powers. The fact of the matter is that Whitehall still has too much power. Can we talk about devolution when the Secretary of State for Levelling Up is deciding whether Great Yarmouth should be given money to renew its pier? Of course not—it is absolutely ridiculous. The first thing that we need to devolve is financial responsibility which, since the days of Jim Callaghan, has been gradually pulled back into Whitehall. If the Labour Party’s devolution proposals are worth the paper they are written on, they have to be accompanied by the financial devolution that will let local authorities set their own financial priorities and raise the tax to pay for them, with a suitable grant from the centre but not one that is tied to whether or not you modernise your pier.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Morse, on their excellent maiden speeches. I draw attention to my entry in the register, in particular my presidency of BALPA, the pilots’ union. I am addressing what is fundamentally a transport issue to the Minister. I realise that he is not a transport Minister, so all I am going to ask him to do is to say that he will pass my comments on to the Transport Minister and ask her to respond to me in writing. That is as much as I could really hope for.

The subject I want to raise is the problem of what is called the potential airline insolvency Bill. This issue has been around for two or three years. It comes to the fore when an airline such as Monarch goes under, and then it disappears from the headlines and people forget all about it—until the next tragedy happens.

In March 2019, the Airline Insolvency Review published its full report. We are now two years and two months on from that. Just over a year ago, before the Covid shutdown, I table a QSD asking for a report, and the then Minister what had happened and what was going to come forward. First, the review called for arrangements to be put in place to finance the cost of protecting customers. Everyone will remember that when an airline goes bust, you suddenly have customers all over the world who need to be brought home. Secondly, it proposed that the airlines themselves should fund a financial package that would cover these eventualities and the cost of repatriating passengers. Thirdly, it said that some legislative cover was needed for all of this. It is not only passengers who are affected; people often forget that staff are also affected. If an airline goes bust, the staff are just left with the administrators; they do not even get their wages paid. Of course, in the case of airline pilots, they could not only have no wages; they could be on the other side of the world. There are severe difficulties. The suggestion, which I think very sensible, is a kind of US chapter 11 situation whereby an airline could keep flying for a short time in order to bring passengers back and get a sensible wind-down.

This is not an area of great controversy. I do not think that the party opposite would find any difficulties with this; indeed, the vice-president of BALPA is the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, with whom I have a very good relationship. I would therefore like the Minister to put to his colleague that this is exactly the sort of Bill that could be introduced in the Lords, that would be unlikely to cause any great problem here and that could then be sent down the Corridor. It is something we need, particularly at the moment, when the aviation industry is in dire trouble.

It will take some time to get it out of that trouble. There are a lot of problems, which I am not going to go into, associated with reopening the industry. Certainly, the transatlantic routes need opening up, because that is where the principal finance comes from. I would be grateful if the Minister took that on board.

I make one other observation before I close. It is now two years since the Government promised a workers’ rights Bill to look at basic problems such as the gig economy and employment regulations. This is another issue that has not been addressed in the gracious Speech. Will the Government look at introducing not a complex but a simple Bill to sort out some of the manifest injustices and to correct the law as it has been applied according to successive court judgments? There needs to be some tidying up in this area as well. I hope that the Minister will be able to write letters to get other people to do the work to address the two suggestions I have made.

Covid-19: Places of Worship

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, singing remains a high-risk activity at this time, so there cannot be any congregational singing in any form. Professionals may still practise music or record music for broadcast from a place of worship during this period.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I draw the Minister’s attention to the statement from Cardinal Vincent Nichols on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy. He said that,

“we have not yet seen any evidence whatsoever that would make the banning of communal worship, with all its human costs, a productive part of combating the virus.”

That is a very clear statement on behalf of all the Catholic bishops. The right honourable Sir Edward Leigh MP, the president of the Catholic Union—I declare an interest as a life member of that body—states in a letter to the Prime Minister:

“We have seen no evidence of people meeting for church services contributing to the spread of the virus in this country.”


He has, however, suggested that the Government, as an exception, could allow religious services as long as all those attending apply online beforehand. A number of churches are using this method. Are the Government prepared to move even an inch on this, because there has not been a single statement in this debate in favour of what they are doing?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I hear what my noble friend said, and I point to the Prime Minister’s remarks in the other place. He said that this was a burden on people of faith, but he reminded everybody that this was only for 28 days. He offered the hope—the candle in the darkness—that, if we got this right, we would be able to go back to something much more like normal life before Christmas. The first day of Advent falls towards the end of this period; as we know, the period will be kept under review.

Business and Planning Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I want to mention one particular amendment—Amendment 61, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain—and then make some general comments. The planning pipeline problem has been with us for as long as I have been in politics. When I saw this amendment, I reflected that as long ago as 1975, I was invited by the then Environment Secretary, Mr Tony Crosland, to join a working party he had set up to deal with the planning pipeline. Unless we pass something like Amendment 61, we are never going to get on top of it because getting planning consent is not regarded by many developers as anything to do with getting the buildings up; it is to do with getting yourself a nice comfortable pipeline so that you can choose from a number of planning consents as to the way you can make the most money or the way in which you can manage to get your planning consent redesigned so that, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, 20 houses becomes 40 houses. I do not expect that the Minister will accept Amendment 61, but I hope that he will accept that it is vital to get to grips with the planning pipeline. That will involve a method of revoking consents, which is absolutely essential in getting these houses built that this country needs so badly.

I said that I would also make a general point. Nearly all the amendments in this group are about maintaining standards. It is very important that we do not get carried away with Bills like this to a point where we are getting rid of the standards that we have looked for and developed over so many years. Most of the standards, whether they be on animal protection, noise or the timing of developments, have been hard won and hard fought for. I hope that, in our general philosophical approach to this matter, we do not let standards be weakened out of panic. Of course we want to get the economy going again, but we do not want to do that by sacrificing all the gains we made in the past. Overall, without speaking specifically about any other amendments, I hope that the general thrust, which is the protection of rights already won, will be at the heart of the Government’s response to this set of amendments.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb [V]]

My Lords, having listened to the speeches of other noble Lords, I am beginning to wish that I had signed more amendments in this group. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, for example, on land banking, and the noble Lord, Lord Randall, both made excellent points, and I wish I had been involved in that.

I want to speak about construction permits, because the conditions that are placed on them at the moment are subject to a lengthy and intensive consultation and decision-making process. The conditions try to strike a balance between the competing interests of developing land and protecting the community and the wildlife around the development. I am deeply concerned that Clause 16 will throw much of that balance out of the window in favour of long construction days with little regard for the impact on the community—their rest, their sleep and their mental welfare—and on wildlife. Construction hours can already be long and noisy, routinely running from 8 am to 6 pm, especially at a time when large numbers of people are staying at home and, in the summer months, may have windows open or be outside. Therefore, extending construction hours will create an unacceptable noise burden for too many people.

I am also concerned about the impact that extended construction hours will have on the construction workers, many of whom are self-employed. What will the Government do to ensure that extended hours do not create unsafe working conditions or lead to other detriment for those workers? There might be limited situations in which extending construction hours is warranted, but generally Clause 16 is far too broad and will cause far too much disruption for local residents near noisy building sites.

--- Later in debate ---

I suggest that only those planning permissions that have expired before the Bill was introduced should be subject to additional environmental approval. That would take it back to 25 June, which is why I put that in the amendment as a practical suggestion to limit the requirement for additional environmental improvements. I hope I have explained that adequately for the benefit of the Committee, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

I have a very short intervention to make. I looked at this set of amendments in conjunction with the previous set. This is a sensible extension of the time limits, in my view, and I hope that those who will benefit from it—the developers—will have realised that this is adequate quid pro quo for the keeping-up of standards, which was the subject of most of the previous set of amendments. If we are to have a level playing field, this is what is wanted in return for what we want from them.

[Baroness Pinnock [V]]

I have a short comment to make on the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. He makes a strong argument in his request for a time extension to planning permissions and environmental approvals. I look forward to what the Minister has to say in this regard, because it seems to me that the case has been made.

Business and Planning Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th July 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Balfe]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 7, at end insert “, except that no application may be made in respect of premises that fall within a cumulative impact zone.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to stop premises in cumulative impact zones, which are areas already identified as contributing to community problems because of alcohol availability, from benefiting from this easing of restrictions.

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I also intend to speak to Amendments 3 and 11 in my name.

This Bill demonstrates exactly why we need to get back to work as a House of Lords. Some 70 Members will speak in different parts of this Committee stage and there is a large number of amendments to what is a highly contentious Bill. This weekend, the Government said that we should go back to work; perhaps we should start by setting an example and getting the House of Lords back to work.

Before I get to the meat of this, I note that Labour is not supporting any Divisions so we will probably have a Division-free day. However, many items in the Bill deserve considerably closer scrutiny. I hope that, before it comes back next week, there will be considerable concessions from the Government; otherwise, I fear that there will be Divisions. Looking at recent history, the Government are not on a great winning streak there.

By way of background, Amendment 1 seeks to provide that premises in an exclusion zone cannot benefit from the provisions of the Bill. Exclusion cumulative impact zones, as they are called, were introduced in the Blair/Brown years after the Government introduced in the early part of this century a number of changes to the licensing laws, which they felt would help to bring about a café economy. Well, they did not; they brought about absolute chaos.

My wife spent four years on Forest Heath District Council, a rural council up here in East Anglia. For most of that time, she and her Labour and Liberal fellow councillors were involved in trying to get a cumulative impact zone imposed on a town called Newmarket, where we were living at the time. The fact of the matter is that the licensing laws were relaxed to such an extent that they caused enormous problems.

They still do. In the town of Cambridge, where I have lived for a good number of years, there is a cumulative impact zone on Mill Road. We have plenty of experience of the problems that excessive alcohol licences can lead to. There are more than 50 licensed premises in the Mill Road area. We have gone to considerable effort to get alcohol licences either in place or extended. Only a couple of weeks ago, we had an application from Brothers Supermarket. It wanted a licence to sell alcohol from 8 am to 11.30 pm. The person representing it knew all the legal arguments—indeed, they were a good advocate—but it was next door to another premises called Nip-In, where you could nip in at any point and buy alcohol. The problem was that, when this application went forward, it had 76 objections to it and not a single person sent in a representation in its favour because it was widely recognised not that there was anything wrong with Brothers Supermarket but that the area was totally swamped by alcohol licensing.

This Bill seeks to make that even easier, which is why I have tabled this amendment. Where there is a cumulative impact zone, it is clearly already in place and it demonstrates that there are severe problems with alcohol. You do not get a zone declared unless the police are on your side and there is fairly unanimous support from the council. That was the case here. Not only did no one support it; the police were against it and representatives of all three political parties sent in statements opposing this particular licence. After a three-hour hearing, it was rejected.

This Bill seeks to get things decided within seven days. How on earth is that to be done if multiple applications have to be dealt with? It is quite likely that there will be. I seem to remember that the Blair/Jowell Bill was also enacted in August and local authorities were caught off their guard.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and several other noble Lords are vice-presidents of the Local Government Association. I am not and I have not had anything to do with local government since I left the Greater London Council in 1977, so to put it mildly, I am a bit out of date. What I would like to hear in this debate is an explanation of how the LGA proposes to handle this vis-à-vis its councils. The cumulative impact zone is just one of the problems, but there are others, all of which are highlighted here. A second one that I draw attention to in my Amendment 11 is to ask whether the police will be consulted because, at the moment, the Bill does not say that they should be. That is why the amendment seeks to add after “local persons” the words

“including the local police force”.

Surely the police have a vested interest in whether or not order can be maintained, and they should be consulted.

In Amendment 3 I refer to locked-down premises. In our area, and I dare say in the rest of the country, we have had two very different experiences of the period of lockdown. I have already mentioned the licensed premises close to our house, but there are some premises, one called 5 Blends Coffee House and the other Tom’s Cakes, which were locked down for the whole period. Obviously, they need to get back into business again but some of the other ones do not, and, as will become clear in the debate, there are problems with pavements as well as other issues. The 5 Blends Coffee House has room for tables outside because it is on a corner, but Tom’s Cakes, because of the street furniture, has no room, although it does have a garden at the back, which presumably can be used without permission. Further up the road is a health food shop called Arjuna Wholefoods, which has a licence and enough room outside to set up tables. I do not think that the owners will do so, but if they did wish to set up those tables and serve glasses of wine to their customers, that would only add to the problems in the area.

What I am asking the Minister and the Government to do is to agree to take a much closer look at this and, particularly where there are cumulative impact zones, to say, “Right, a problem with alcohol has already been identified in the area and that should be enough for it not to be exacerbated by making it even easier to extend licensing facilities and thus make it easier to buy alcohol.” I also do not think that it is unreasonable to ask that the police should be consulted, and when we consider locked-down premises, is there any reason why the Sainsbury’s shop in Mill Road should not be allowed to open an off licence on the pavement, given that it has a licence to sell alcohol? I do not think that it would wish to open an alcohol vending service, but what if it did? The shop has been open throughout the lockdown and, if anything, its trade has gone up because more people have been tending to shop locally. There is a need to distinguish between a firm that sells alcohol which has been open for the whole time and one that has not. With those words, I beg to move.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Balfe on his interesting and in-depth trip down Mill Road. That brings back all kinds of memories from being a student at Cambridge. I will speak briefly, but I ask my noble friend the Minister to address all my points in detail when she sums up the debate because that may be the most expeditious way of resolving them. I shall speak to Amendments 36, 37, 40 and 43 in my name, and I thank other noble Lords who have put their names to them and have agreed to speak.

These amendments all have a clear purpose, one that I believe is in line with the purpose of the Bill, which is to get the economy moving again. We should have done this earlier and we could have done so, but we are doing it now and that is a good thing. I have a few issues with this part of the Bill, where I believe that we could improve the outcome for businesses, for individuals and for society.

The amendments address the position of small independent breweries which find themselves shut out of the provisions of the Bill—and thus the economic restart—as currently drafted. The amendments seek to enable small independent breweries to sell alcohol directly to the public for a temporary period in a safe and measured way that is in line with the other temporary measures being put in place for other sectors of the economy. In the circumstances, I believe that this would be both proportionate and low in risk. It could be done by using the normal licensing procedure in these circumstances and for this to be seen as a minor variation, as set out in Amendment 40.

Similarly, Amendment 43 seeks to allow the use of temporary event notices. Increasing the number of these notices would give the local authority even more control over the situation because it will issue them to businesses that have already been issued with them. There will be a track record and the authority will have a knowledge and understanding of how those businesses operate. That would not be a shot in the dark because HMRC knows these businesses. They will be on the system and they will have passed the fit and proper person test. The notices would be for a temporary period to enable small independent breweries to get back into business rather than potentially going to the wall or, indeed, needing to come cap in hand to the Government. This would resolve those issues.

There is also an important secondary benefit in having more venues open: patrons would be more able to observe social distancing because there will be more places to go to have a drink. Moreover, small independent breweries are not often located in residential areas or in zones such as those described by my noble friend Lord Balfe. It makes sense to spread people out so that they can go out for a drink safely and thus help start up the economy again.

As I have said, I hope that my noble friend the Minister can address all of the specifics raised in Amendments 36, 37, 40 and 43. I look forward to her response and to hearing the comments of other noble Lords.

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[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, my noble friend has answered my question and I am absolutely delighted with her answer.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister has very effectively dealt with most of the points that I raised. The key thing is that she has confirmed that local authorities can refuse licences in cumulative impact zones. I am certainly very happy with local authority discretion. I have spent much of my life in politics arguing for devolution of power and for local authorities to be given the right to make decisions in local self-interest. It is clearly now up to Cambridge City Council, in my case, to decide what it wishes to do in the cumulative impact zone. I look forward to it considering things firmly.

As far as my other two amendments go, I am also happy with my noble friend’s response, in particular that the police will be consulted. Again, this is up to local authorities. I am sure that they will do so.

I took the points made by a number of noble Lords about the hospitality industry. The Bill goes somewhat further than the hospitality industry, but it is that industry that we seek to help. It will be a long struggle. Many of my friends are very reluctant, shall I say, to go back to restaurants, certainly indoors. If the Minister has time to read it, last weekend the Office for National Statistics published a very interesting document following a survey of how people regarded lockdown and the consequences thereof. To answer the direct question that I am asked: I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 1.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, has withdrawn, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Balfe.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

I am indebted to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for giving me a new description, which I am proud to have, of having reached a more stately stage of life. I plead guilty to that.

Mention has been made by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe and by others of the need to get the economy moving, that this is a temporary measure and all the rest. I ask noble Lords to remember that we are sending out terribly mixed messages. I happened to be in Cambridge station yesterday, and there people are still being advised not to travel. They are still saying that you should stay at home, at the same time as the Government are saying that you should now suddenly not stay at home.

I do not accept that this will make that much difference. I referred earlier to the Office for National Statistics survey, which shows quite clearly that a very large number of people—indeed, a majority—have no intention of going back to an enclosed restaurant in the foreseeable future. We need to distinguish between a temporary measure and what I am beginning to sense is almost a panic measure—the belief that, if we pass this Bill, suddenly everybody will go back to restaurants; that is not necessarily true.

I make another point about my tour of Mill Road, Cambridge, which I introduced in the first series of amendments. I did a very close survey of it in connection with the alcohol licence I mentioned earlier, which was opposed. There are two, if not three shops in Mill Road which are owned by Muslims, and two of them, at least, do not, on principle, sell alcohol. The idea that seems to be punted around that everybody wants to sell alcohol as a way of getting back to normal is not necessarily true. There are shopkeepers that do not wish to sell alcohol but to make a living selling groceries.

I also welcome Amendment 17, in the name of my noble friend, Lord Holmes, in particular the provision that asks local authorities to visit the area. There is no real substitute for local people, particularly local councillors, looking at an area where an application has been made and applying some common-sense judgment. I would say that that is common-sense judgment very much bearing in mind the broad guidelines put forward by my noble friend Lord Blencathra. Some people will ask, “How wide should it be?”, so those guidelines are extremely important, but it is also important that local government and local councillors are made accountable for the decisions in their area. You cannot have local democracy if you are constantly falling back on saying, “Oh well, the Minister says this, the Minister has said that”. So I welcome that, and I think “the local authority must” is an important element.

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[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, I have sympathy with what my noble friend Lady Noakes has just said, but I have lent my support to Amendment 16 in the name of my noble friend Lord Holmes. It is appropriate that a local authority should be able to include conditions when granting pavement licences in line with any concerns expressed in the public consultation—with the proviso that the consultation takes only seven days, so I am afraid that I do not support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Low. However, my noble friend Lady Noakes had a point when she said that such conditions should not be so restrictive as to make a nonsense of what is requested in the licence being applied for. I hope that common sense in this regard will prevail.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

I do not agree with my noble friend Lady Noakes: we are not trying to make it more difficult; as I see it, we are trying to get the balance right. I referred in my initial speech to the changes in the regulations—what I think of as the Blair/Jowell reforms—which opened up our high streets to a wild west of alcohol licensing. One thing those measures had in common with this legislation is that they came into force in August. We are proposing to bring this into force at precisely the time when local authorities are going for their summer break—indeed, at precisely the time when we are going for our summer break. By my definition of local authorities getting “a move on”, extending the consultation from seven to 14 days is quite reasonable; I do not think that it is difficult at all. If someone sends an application by second-class post and gets their proof of posting at 5 pm on a Friday, it is unlikely to get there before the next Tuesday—particularly in Cambridge—so we are not even giving seven days. Seven days from date of receipt would be bad enough, but seven days from posting is just not enough.

I asked in my previous contribution whether people who wished to extend in front of unused shops would need to get the permission of their lessee or owner. That is an important point, because otherwise we are basically saying that a premises can just expand on to next door’s territory without any agreement.

I asked earlier, and did not get an answer, whether a local authority could reject an application because it had not had enough time to consider it. In other words, if it arrived on a Tuesday and was due to be determined on a Friday, and it is August and everybody is on holiday, could the authority say, “No, we reject it. We need another seven or 14 days to consider it”?

Amendment 16 states that conditions may

“incorporate views and concerns expressed in the public consultation under section 2.”

How will those views and concerns be gathered? If the local authority asks for views and concerns, it will effectively be giving the general public 24 or maybe 48 hours and then it will have to meet to decide what to do with the public consultation. We keep hearing about the need to open up the economy, but the majority of people in Britain do not feel safe going into a restaurant as it is. I do not agree that the economy will be opened up by this legislation. What we will get is basically another version of the wild west. We need to legislate at a reasonable pace, because if we do so in haste, we will regret at leisure. That is what happened in the earlier, 2003-04 experiment and it is what we are heading for here. Please let us take this at a reasonable pace.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew [V]]

My Lords, the points I would have wished to make in this group of amendments have already been made skilfully by others and I see no need to repeat them. All I would say is that I absolutely support and adopt the approach taken and submissions made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey. The noble Lord said extremely skilfully what I would have tried to say, so I have nothing further to add.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh]

There is nothing specific in the Bill on communication between lower-tier authorities and county councils, other than that the intention of it is to move speedily to support the hospitality industry. That is the underlying purpose of the measures we propose.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

In my contribution, and in the previous one, I asked first about the position of unused shops and whether there is a need for the applicant to have and submit the permission of the owner or lessee of the shop, if they propose to put tables and chairs outside it. I did not hear an answer; I might have missed it. Secondly, I asked whether it would be legitimate for an application to be rejected on the grounds that the seven days provided was not enough time for the consultation with local people that is provided under the Bill. I did not hear an answer to that but, again, I might have missed it.

[Lord Greenhalgh]

For clarification, the definition of adjacent does not necessarily refer to premises. We will write to the noble Lord on his second specific point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Shipley [V]]

My Lords, I want to speak to Amendment 45. I referred to the same issues raised by this amendment on the late night levy at Second Reading. On 8 June, I noticed an article in my local newspaper, the Journal, headed: “Campaigners Say Levy Should Be Cut To Save Pubs”. It said that fee levels, having been set by the Government, could be changed only by the Government and that the council was having to seek their permission. It was pointed out by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, that even though pubs registered to trade after midnight in Newcastle had been closed for 10 weeks, they were still being charged the late-night levy. The council claimed it had no power to change that situation but had asked the Government for additional powers to reduce or waive the fees. In Newcastle, some 240 premises pay the levy, which helps to fund extra policing, street cleaning, taxi marshals and the Street Pastors; I should declare that I am patron of Newcastle Street Pastors. There needs to be local flexibility. I hope that the Minister will look very carefully at this issue and recognise that fee-setting should be a devolved area of policy.

I suspect the problem may have arisen unintentionally at the time that the Bill was passed. This is not about the level of alcohol consumption, nor about how alcohol is served. It is about a charge being levied for a service that is not being provided. Maybe there has been some movement on this matter between government and local authorities. There are three principles at stake: we need clarity on the level of fees levied when pubs are required to close, and the rules for remission of those fees ought to be clear to them; we need clarity on the powers that local authorities have, and will have, on this levy; and we need a full review of licensing legislation to re-examine which powers should be held centrally and which locally. I hope very much that the Minister will understand this problem and will agree with my suggestions.

[Lord Balfe [V]]

My Lords, I welcomed the Minister’s statement at the beginning. I am glad that she made it then; it has saved a lot of argument, has it not? I have two major points. The first follows up on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. In Cambridge, where I live and from where I cite things, the local authority has multiple problems with alcohol. One of the ways it has tackled this is that there has been a tendency in the case of stores near the centre of town—in other words, those situated on the way in to the clubs where drinking takes place—to say that they can sell alcohol on an off-licence basis only until 10 rather than 11 pm. Although the store can stay open until 11 pm, the alcohol licence permits it to sell only until 10. Can the Minister tell us whether this power will remain with a local authority so that, in certain areas and in certain circumstances, the alcohol licence has to cease before 11 pm, with the decision made obviously on a case-by-case basis?

My second point is in support of the amendments about open containers and beer glasses, which really are—or can be—pretty lethal weapons. I hope that the Minister will agree either to accept the principles of these amendments or to bring forward a government amendment. The potential for open containers or beer glasses to cause damage is, I am afraid, quite considerable; there is a very strong case for saying that closed containers should be used for the sale of alcohol. I invite the Minister to say either that she will accept an amendment at the next stage, or that the Government will bring forward an amendment to cover these points.

Housing for the Homeless

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My congratulations to my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on securing this debate. I hope the Minister is enjoying his new life in replying to it. I want to concentrate on one issue. I live in the city of Cambridge, where we have a homelessness problem and a council that does its best to cope with it. But one of the city council’s initiatives is to help the voluntary collection of money for homeless charities in the city. I suggested to it that it should do that as a statutory thing, but apparently it lacks the powers. Will the Minister look at giving local authorities the right to collect for charity, and the right to ask council tax payers to add a voluntary donation to their council tax when they pay it each month? Obviously, it needs thinking out—you cannot do it in a minute. However, it is a practical thing which, combined with government gift aid, would make a big difference.