Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe and Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville

Thursday 16th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My rising is not normally greeted with that amount of drama and my observations will not in any way warrant that dramatic attention. As a footnote to what my noble friend Lord Astor said, it seems that a local authority in assessing its costs in terms of this process will have both fixed costs and marginal costs. Although I totally understand that he is arguing for marginal costs, there presumably has to be some way in which the fixed costs are recovered as well.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

I do not think that the Minister needs to apologise to the House for the line that she is taking. If I could catch her attention, I would congratulate her on being very bold. Perhaps I will be accused of being a Puritan today. I will come back to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in a moment and try to prove to him that I am not. In Committee, I was invited by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, to raise questions I had raised previously about the Government’s philosophical approach to licensing and whether we are effecting a change of direction to what we have had during the past 15 years. I will not repeat them all. They are on the record and I do not suppose that at this time we have enough time to go into a philosophical discourse on it.

I hope that the Government are about a subtle change over time that will lead, one hopes, to a cultural change over time. It will not be easy, as the Minister rightly acknowledges. A good change that the Government have effected is that they are now prepared to allow local authorities at least to start recovering some of the costs that they have been incurring and have not been able to recover in recent years because of the failure on the part of government to allow them to update their recovery elements. There are some technical points and I support the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and my noble friend Lord Stevenson.

As he might have anticipated, I am opposed to Amendments 240XF, 240XH and 241 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, which would move us back to the status quo and not go down the route which the Government are endeavouring to traverse. I can tell the noble Lord that I would be quite happy to support Amendment 241ZZA, which seeks greater openness and transparency in the way in which local authorities are working out and charging their fees. I would hope that, in drawing up a list and in giving guidance to local authorities, we might be prepared to give them the freedom to recover the costs that they might incur in trying to retrain some of their licensing authorities on how they should deal with the thorny issue that the Minister endeavoured to tackle in our previous session on the differences between the words “appropriate” and “necessary”.

I have been in touch with the LGA and, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has said, it is unhappy about this—not for political reasons but primarily for technical reasons. There would be a problem for the panels in dealing with the change in language without being given appropriate training in order to be able to handle it, but it fears it could not meet the costs. So I hope that the Minister will give favourable consideration to adopting Amendment 241ZZA and perhaps add to the list the training costs incurred by local authorities in seeking to implement fully the changes the Government are endeavouring to introduce in the legislation relating to fees.

I try to be balanced in my approach. Overall, the direction is correct but perhaps some changes need to be made here and there. I am therefore happy to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in his Amendment 241ZZA.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe and Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville

Thursday 16th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

I support the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville. There is a range of issues here that cannot wait five years to be reviewed. The amendment proposing a review after two years would be far more acceptable. I also want to draw the attention of Ministers to reports produced by this House way back in 2002, when the European Union Select Committee reviewed drinking and driving legislation and compared it with that of other European countries. The report pressed the case for the limit to be reduced to 50 milligrammes. The puritan Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe chaired that committee, so I recall it very well indeed. We must keep raising these issues, although time may pass by without speedy implementation.

It was interesting that when I was pulling out my papers on this issue, I came across a press cutting with the headline:

“MPs and peers cast eye on Lords reform”.

The article continued:

“A committee on Lords reform is today expected to seek to allay fears that the issue has been kicked into the long grass by agreeing a timetable to put forward proposals by October”.

That article was dated 9 July, 2002.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, given that Clause 125 is totally composed of reviews, I wanted to add a word on the review of ministerial guidance. I do that absolutely in the spirit of Amendment 241C, spoken to by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, in terms of acceleration.

Much of the way in which the Licensing Act 2003 has been interpreted has been by virtue of ministerial guidance required under Section 182 of that Act. While the currently proposed legislative changes to that Act have been widely welcomed, they will take time to bed down. If the ministerial guidance were immediately to be reviewed and rewritten—it was last reviewed in November 2010; it has been a running process since 2003—subject to public consultation, many of the concerns addressed in the coalition Government’s consultation could be dealt with by providing more balanced guidance to licensing authorities to support them in getting to grips as soon as possible with the adverse effects of licensing.

In terms of involving the community, there should be an explicit statement in the guidance that local people and their representatives have an important locus in formulating policies, and that the invitation to consult on local licensing policy should ideally be simple and jargon-free, backed up by something like a crystal mark. However, the best way to involve the community more is to improve public awareness of licence applications. The Government could help by revising the currently very prescriptive rules for advertising applications that often do not work. I give an example that was, I think, mentioned in our previous debates. There are fewer and fewer local newspapers, and the advertisements in them are usually in tiny print on inside pages. The responsibility for advertising the applications should be passed to licensing authorities that can decide the most effective way to advertise applications, including circulating notices by post, on the basis of full recovery from the applicant of their reasonable costs.

What I am about to say may go beyond the scope of this clause, but it would help greatly if local councils, in response to representations from the public and responsible authorities, were to be allowed to introduce policies controlling the cumulative impact of licensed premises—such a provision was precluded from the 2003 Act—whereby the licensing authority can prevent a build-up of problems, rather than waiting until they have occurred.