Lord McKenzie of Luton
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Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I think that we should thank my noble friend Lord Wills for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue. He had a distinguished ministerial career and responsibility for this area, which very much showed in his contribution today.
We are living in an era of transparency, which has already been very much the byword of many of our debates on this Bill. We are also living in an era in which there will be increasing partnership working, outsourcing and joint working, very much along the lines on which the noble Lord, Lord Tope, focused when he talked about scrutiny functions in our debate on a previous group of amendments. The focus of FOI in the current era is therefore entirely appropriate.
My noble friend’s Amendment 52A very much chimes with the group of amendments that we have just discussed in its presumption that meetings should be held in public. On Amendments 133A and 133B, he acknowledged—and the noble Lord, Lord True, touched on this—that we need to focus on the practical ramifications of driving freedom of information through a contractor, a subcontractor and then perhaps a sub-subcontractor chain. I am thinking particularly of the construction industry and how diverse and complex some of its contractual arrangements are.
In a sense, my noble friend offered the route to a solution when he said that there should be some sort of de minimis or cut-off point in the application of this. His focus, as he acknowledged, was partly on the business left over from when he was a Minister, but he also dealt with some practical examples, such as Swindon, and cited the Islington Council situation, which is not theoretical but actual.
The noble Lord, Lord True, said on the one hand that he was an enthusiast for freedom of information, but on the other urged his noble friend to be sceptical about it. I am not sure that those two concepts sit very comfortably together.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I do not disagree, but I thought that the noble Lord said that he was also an enthusiast for freedom of information. Maybe I misunderstand him and he is not, but if he is I do not think that that sits with his urging his noble friend to be sceptical.
As I said, my noble friend has given us an opportunity to have an interesting debate on an important subject. In particular, he has done us a service by focusing on particular issues relating to the Housing Ombudsman, and I am keen to hear the Minister’s response specifically to those. His request is not for the Minister to give a detailed response to his quite extensive and detailed amendment but for her to say whether the Government agree with the principle behind it. That is a very important ask, particularly, as he pointed out, because the coalition agreement has a commitment to freedom of information and to extending its scope. This area is worthy of further analysis and I hope that the Minister can give us some comfort on that matter.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I move the amendment in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, and speak to Amendments 71 and 72.
The Bill will enable local authorities to return to a committee structure and, indeed, to be more free than they have been for some time to determine what governance structure they wish to have, and which best suits their particular circumstances. That is wholly to be welcomed. It is clear that the Government rightly believe that that should be a matter for the local authority in a local area rather than central government.
A number of local authorities are already working in anticipation to improve, in their eyes, their decision-making structure, particularly to enable all councillors to play a more effective part in decision making than many of us feel has been possible with the executive/scrutiny split. Indeed, I have for the past couple of months been chairing a working party for my own local authority, looking at exactly that. It proved rather more difficult than I had expected because most of my colleagues in my local authority do not remember the old committee system. They have grown up believing —rather mistakenly, in my view—that the executive/scrutiny split was the natural and normal way of doing things; whereas the old dinosaurs like me believe that there was once a rather better way that would leave them less frustrated than many of them are in their role on the local committees.
All of that is to be welcomed. On Monday evening, I will present these proposals to my council group in the hope that they will be acclaimed. However, I think that they will initially be met with some puzzlement: “Are we really there to make decisions?”. “Well, yes, there were another 44 of you elected who ought to have a part in the decision-making process, because that is what you were elected for”. Hopefully all of that will happen but, as things stand, I then have to break the news to them that, desirable though all this is, and much as though the Government are happy for all of this to happen, none of it can happen for another three years. The Bill says that none of this can be introduced until after the next elections. In the case of London boroughs, that is 2014. For those authorities that have only this year had whole-council elections it will be a further four years.
If the Government believe it is right for these things to happen, I can see no reason why, once an authority, through the proper process, has agreed what it wants to do, it should not implement that now. I hope that we shall have a sympathetic response from the Government. I shall not challenge the Minister to explain why she feels that in London—in her own authority perhaps—there needs to be a three-year gestation period, or in other areas a four-year period, while we all wait.
Some authorities, some quite well known to the Minister and some certainly known to me—it will possibly happen more so in my own authority—have de facto set up a committee system already. The committees meet and de facto make recommendations, but in fact the executive, as it is legally required to do, meets immediately afterwards for no more than five minutes simply to rubber-stamp decisions made by the committees. That must be a nonsense. At the moment, it is a necessary nonsense, as that is what the law requires, but for us to continue in that ridiculous state for another three or four years makes no sense at all.
I hope that the Minister will be able to accept our amendments—it would be an unusual victory for me to achieve—or at least be able to express sympathy with them and say that she will come back on Report with something to give effect to them. It is quite important that we get an indication that this will happen on Report, or that it will not happen, because many of us will be looking to implement the changes from the next annual council meeting in May. It so happens that my authority is well advanced with this but others may perhaps only just be starting to think about it or may not even yet have realised that they can think about the changes. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we have sympathy with these amendments and look forward to the Minister's reply about why there should be this proposed three-year wait. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, talked with some affection about the committee structure. I was leader of Luton Borough Council at the time when we went from a committee structure to a leader and executive structure. My experience was that when you are in control, the leader and executive arrangement is particularly helpful. In 2003, we ended up with a hung council and, although we were the largest party, there was a Lib Dem-Conservative coalition which appointed Lib Dems to the executive. Being on the receiving end of that, we were somewhat less enthusiastic, but I still remain committed to it. I think that the best route is to have a leader and an executive.
One thing that was lost with the committee structure was the opportunity for new councillors, particularly younger councillors, to get involved with the cut and thrust of political debate because the structure and role of scrutiny committees are different. I think an opportunity to learn through that route and to have that debate was missed. We support the right for councils to choose and to revert to a committee structure, if that is what they want. On that basis, it seems that there is no great justification in waiting three years, but the Minister may be able to convince us. Subject to that, we support the amendments.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
My Lords, speaking as yet another dinosaur who remembers the old system and who was a councillor and is still a councillor in the London Borough of Barnet, I think that the proposal to allow local authorities to choose whether they return to the committee system is very welcome. The only thing I disagree with, and my noble friend Lord Tope obviously disagrees with, is that one has to wait three years before a local authority can make that decision. I cannot see the logic of that.
I have had the benefit of being a cabinet member, as they are called, in a joint administration in the London Borough of Barnet and I am currently an opposition member in that borough. When I was a cabinet member, one of 10 people exercising full executive power in the London Borough of Barnet, I enjoyed the power wonderfully. I used to give little speeches saying that democracy was not being exercised as 10 people had executive power but 53 people in the ruling parties and in the opposition had no real role to play and roles were found for them rather than their playing a constructive part, as they did under the committee system. Therefore, I have experience of being in power and in opposition and I still believe that the committee system is the right one. Under the system we are discussing, back-bench members in the ruling parties and in the opposition feel that they do not have much of a role to play.
Lord Newton of Braintree
I am made nervous by the intervention of the noble Lord because he knows much more about local government than I do, except in the indirect way that I have described. However, these are decisions of the local authority. I think I am right in saying that ultimately planning decisions could go to the whole council, although they are normally dealt with by the planning committee. Am I wrong on that? Some real issues arose towards the end of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, concerning decisions delegated to officers by the planning committee.
However, I find it very odd. I know about the worries that underlie this sort of thing, but I make the point that planning decisions are often very, very important to local communities—I am thinking of things like supermarket applications and the like. It cannot be right that a councillor representing an area should not be allowed to express a view to his constituents that he then reflects in what he does on the council, or indeed the planning committee. If there is corruption involved, that is a different issue; but if it is a genuine view, formed on the basis of what constituents have put to him on the effects of that application on the neighbourhood, he should have the same right as a Member of Parliament in respect, for example, of an airport application, which is to express his views to his constituent and to reflect those views in his votes in the House.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I rise to speak to our amendment in this group, Amendment 96ZA, which calls for a review and report on the operation of the section and is framed really as a probing amendment. I support the probing that has been undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, because we are seeking to understand how much difference this provision will make to the status quo. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Newton, that his exposition of what he believes the current arrangement to be is not the full position, as I understand it. That is my understanding from a non-legal background, but I will try to come on to it and explain that point.
Views have been expressed to me that this clause provides a slippery slope that will potentially undermine the integrity of decision-making, especially on planning decisions, and will be a charter to allow bias. Others welcome the clause, as we have heard today, and consider that perhaps it does not go far enough, with some confusion around the term “closed mind”. In order to understand it, I have tried to set down a baseline to judge whether it has moved us on from the current position. Perhaps the Minister will take the opportunity to explain what this intended change will mean in practice.
As I understand it, the courts currently recognise two types of predetermination: actual predetermination and apparent predetermination—the latter is why the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is pursuing the point about “to have appeared to have had”. Actual predetermination is where,
“a person has closed their mind to all considerations other than an already held view”.
That means that the exercise of a discretionary power where one or more of the decision-makers does not in fact exercise the discretion at all is unlawful as an abuse of that discretion. Apparent predetermination is where,
“the fair minded and well-informed observer, looking objectively at all the circumstances, considers that there is a real risk that one or more of the decision makers has refused even to consider a relevant argument or would refuse to consider a new argument”.
However, predetermination of course has to be distinguished from predisposition, where a councillor may hold a view for or against a particular development, say, but has an open mind as to the merits of an argument before making a final decision. There is a difference between predetermination and predisposition. The courts, as I understand it, have moved towards a more pragmatic approach in recent years. The Standards Board of England summarised the position in a rather helpful way—I think we will miss that body—so perhaps I can just read what it says are the practicalities of local government from the case law and what has happened to date. The Standards Board says:
“The courts have accepted that these practicalities mean that the fair minded and informed observer accepts that … Manifesto commitments and policy statements which are consistent with a preparedness to consider and weigh relevant factors when reaching the final decision, are examples of legitimate predisposition not predetermination … The fact that the member concerned has received relevant training and has agreed to be bound by a Code of Conduct is a consideration to which some weight can properly be attached when determining an issue of apparent predetermination … Previously expressed views on matters which arise for decision in the ordinary run of events are routine and councillors can be trusted, whatever their previously expressed views, to approach decision making with an open mind … To suspect predetermination because all members of a single political group have voted for it is an unwarranted interference with the democratic process … Councillors are likely to have and are entitled to have, a disposition in favour of particular decisions. An open mind is not an empty mind but it is ajar”.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am pleased that we have been able to have this interesting debate. As the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has said, both case law and the Standards Boards have moved on this issue, but there has been a considerable degree of anxiety about it in local government service areas, as my noble friend Lord Newton said. I think the Committee will agree that that has not been in the interests of local democracy. That is why Clause 14 forms such an important part of this Bill and why we are bringing it forward, so I welcome the opportunity provided by this debate. My noble friend Lord Greaves has produced, if I may say so, a typical set of House of Lords probes, and I accept totally what he is seeking to do. I think it is the wish of the Committee that I should go through the amendments that he has tabled and make it clear what the particular wording means and why we consider it important that these little nuances are brought in.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, that nothing in this clause stops proper decision-making. Indeed, nothing in the provisions means that decisions are not going to be taken properly, having regard to all relevant considerations. On Gypsy and Traveller sites and the issues to which she referred specifically, I assure her that local authorities operate under fairly firm statutory guidance on provision for these matters. Any debate about this matter would have to be conducted in a proper fashion. In the end, councillors make decisions within that framework. We know that some people hold quite strong views on such issues. We accept that. In a democracy, we have to accept that people come with strong views. Whether they come with a closed mind is a different issue altogether.
I will come back to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, but it might help if I first go through the amendments. Amendment 88 removes “(to any extent)”. We believe that by putting in “to any extent” we bring clarity to the issue. We are seeking to give councillors clarity that they should be fully entitled to the freedom to campaign on issues that are important to their local communities. There should be no suggestion in the drafting of this provision that there are degrees of having a closed mind that need to be taken into account when deciding whether this provision applies. That is why that phrase is in the clause. It is to make it absolutely clear that there is no degree of a closed mind that might be the subject of predetermination. If this amendment were accepted, the position on predetermination would be less clear for elected members and the public, which would defeat the whole purpose of this clause, which is to provide clarification on the current position.
Amendment 89 is an unnecessary drafting change. The phrase we are using here is taken from previous case law and provides clarity that a councillor is not to appear to have had a closed mind if they had previously campaigned on an issue. The fact that they may have campaigned on an issue does not necessarily mean that they are providing evidence that they appear to have a closed mind. This drafting seeks to provide clarity for councillors—we want them to be sure that they are doing the right thing, and we would all agree that councillors want to do the right thing—as well as judges and the courts. Indeed, the reason this is in the Bill is to provide some statutory law where so much has been dependent on case law.
On Amendment 90, the word “just” in this sentence indicates more clearly the function the provision is performing, which is excluding certain conditions from the judgment to be made about whether someone had a closed mind. Read literally, without the word “just” the sentence could mean that any decision-maker doing something that indicates the view that they will take is automatically considered not to have a closed mind, so the inclusion of the word “just” avoids the potential for this misinterpretation, which would lead to a result that we do not want. The word “just” therefore defines the matter more clearly.
Amendment 91 would narrow the range of councillors’ activities that we are seeking to ensure cannot lead to accusations of a councillor having a closed mind. Our current drafting makes it clear that if a decision-maker had previously “done anything” that indicated what view they took on an issue, they would not as a result be considered to have a closed mind. I reassure my noble friend that we fully intend the phrase “done anything” to include anything that a member may have said, written, or perhaps even held aloft on a placard. The amendment is therefore unnecessary.
On Amendments 92, 95 and 96, the legislation has been written to apply to elected, co-opted and other members of councils. There is no need for the provisions to be extended to paid officers in local councils. I assure my noble friend that separate rules are in place for dealing with officer bias in decision-making. This clause is not designed to address officer bias. The definition referred to in Amendments 95 and 96 of the type of decisions covered by these provisions does, however, need to include this reference to functions of an officer of the authority, because certain officer decisions are exercised by elected or co-opted members of the council for technical reasons; some of the functions carried out by elected mayors, the chairman of an authority, and leader of an executive are regarded as functions of officers of the authority.
On Amendment 94, we do not accept that this distinction should be made between the role of a co-opted member on a committee of the authority and the role of a co-opted member on a joint committee. Co-opted members of a committee of an authority would be free to express a view or campaign on an issue without being at risk of being unfairly accused of predetermination, but co-opted members of a joint committee would not. There are certainly instances in which co-opted members can sit on joint committees, and there is no reason to suppose that they will be any less capable of reaching a fair decision—something that lies at the heart of all of this—when sitting on a single-authority committee.
Amendment 96ZA makes a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but I refer noble Lords to our published impact assessment of these clauses. The impact assessment states that there will be a full policy-implementation review of the whole Localism Bill, including the policies on predetermination. That will provide all the information that I believe the noble Lord is looking for in this amendment, so I hope that when the time comes the noble Lord will not press his amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked whether, if as a matter of fact a councillor had a closed mind, the councillor could participate in a decision, what evidence would be used to determine that he had a closed mind and how this would be affected by the proposal in Clause 14. If a councillor is actually biased, he cannot participate in a decision; evidence of a closed mind could be that he has declared that he has a closed mind or that he refuses to listen to any new arguments. In reality, if a councillor says that he is not prepared to listen to any arguments and is self-evidently not prepared to do his duty by doing so, as we would all expect local government to do in a democracy, he would self-evidently be saying that he had a closed mind.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I understand and take that point. But if you had someone who declared that they had a closed mind, is not the import of subsection (2) that, if they declared that at any point up to the time when the decision was made, it would be ignored? That is what the provision says. If that is right, how do you adduce the fact that someone has a closed mind? That is what I am struggling with. We accept that, if you have got a closed mind, you should not be involved and that decisions could be unlawful. If people have room to review the facts, that is fine. But my concern is what evidence you would now get. Prior to this, if someone had said, “I have got a closed mind” and there was surrounding evidence to that effect, it would be clear where we are. But under this proposal, you have to ignore what someone has done. What someone has done is what they have said, what they have written and the banners that they may hold aloft. How does the Minister square that issue?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, the situation, as I understand it, is that statements made prior to a decision being made in the period in which a campaign or a discussion is being held should be evidence that a councillor may have a strong opinion, but that does not necessarily prejudice the decision that they are going to make. But if they say at the time that they are making a decision that they have a closed mind, they should not participate in that decision. The practicalities of this are to put pressure on all councillors, however passionate they are about an issue, to consider their position before they vote as to whether they have genuinely considered alternatives that are presented to them. In which case, as long as they have done that, this clause means that in no way can they be considered to have had a closed mind if they have done that in all conscience. This is designed to provide a framework of behaviour in local government, which I am sure that the noble Lord would seek to encourage.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
It is important that we get to the core of this. From what the noble Lord is saying, is it the case that if someone said every day of the week for two months leading up to the decision that they have a closed mind, that would be ignored under these provisions and that if they did not say, “I have a closed mind” on the day on which the decision is made, there is no difficulty?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
It is fair to say that anyone who did not say that they were considering the matter with a fair consideration of the argument might well be in some difficulty. But what is disregarded by this clause is that evidence of the view that a person takes of a matter is not evidence of their state of mind when they are making that decision. It is important to understand that this is designed to enforce an openness of mind at the point of decision-making, which, after all, was always the purpose of predetermination.
The problem with predetermination was that it excluded people who had campaigned and, as my noble friend Lord Newton in his helpful contribution pointed out, the difficulty that a lot of local councillors had was knowing to what extent they could participate in the decision-making process if they had campaigned strongly on an issue. All this now does is say to a local councillor, “However hard you have campaigned on an issue, you should still make decisions without a closed mind or not participate in that decision”. But that is for the councillor himself to determine, rather than be determined by this clause.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and I am sorry to have interrupted him on two or three occasions, but this is a very important issue. We accept the anxiety in local government about what councillors can and cannot do, and the importance, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, of the democratic component of this so that people are not precluded from campaigning on issues they feel strongly about. But that is the position at the moment, for as long as their minds are ajar.
Sometimes very cautious advice is given and therefore people tend to be more restricted than the law may otherwise allow, but notwithstanding all that—I think we have common cause in what we see as a proper outcome in this, so that if you have a closed mind or you are going to be involved in a decision, you should be able to judge the facts objectively and not predetermine the matter—I still see a difficulty in this provision. That is because I cannot see how you would ever get evidence of someone having a closed mind on the basis of this provision. It seems that you would have to ignore what they had said and done and campaigned around right up to the point when they make the decision. That seems to me to be an anomaly and I am still not sure where it leaves us.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, I am so encouraged and enthused by being described as helpful by my noble friend on the Front Bench—for the first time in a long time, perhaps even uniquely—that I feel the need to intervene again. I agree to some extent with what the noble Lord has just said, but my concern is that, in all honesty, I feel as though I have strayed into wonderland or into a bit of my philosophy course when I read PPE some 50 years ago. This distinction between predisposition and predetermination is like angels dancing on the head of a pin. As a councillor, you would have to be mad not to say, if you wanted to have any effect at all, that while you had had a view, you had looked at the new evidence and it had not changed your predisposition. That would not amount to predetermination. The whole thing is complete nonsense.
My concern is that it leads to a fracture in the relationship between councillors and their constituents. They have to fence with issues, pretending that they do not have a view, or telling their constituents that they do not have a view or dare not have a view because it might affect their ability to vote. That will not be understood by any ordinary person. Councillors are elected to represent people and in relation to their views. Indeed, in some circumstances they may want to express a view. This is daft, and MPs would not put up with it.
Let us take the example of Stansted, which I think has been the subject of votes in Parliament. The MP for Saffron Walden, my neighbouring constituency in the old days, was against it and would no doubt vote against it. In Braintree I was cautious because I was in favour of Stansted, but not all my constituents were, so I did keep my head down a bit. But if I had been against it, I would have been appalled if I could not have said so and then voted in Parliament. If my noble friend has a chance to say another word, can he say why things should be different for councillors from how they are for Members of Parliament? I can see no answer to that.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
As I understand it, the impact of this clause will make it clear that individuals can campaign as you would want, but I hang on to the point that for as long as they leave open the possibility of a change of mind in due course, having examined the facts and merits of a case, they are not precluded from campaigning at the moment either. That is why I am seeking to probe just how much difference this clause makes.
Lord Newton of Braintree
I understand that, but reference was made to Mr Justice Andrew Collins, a great and good man. However, I would not want to be the judge who had to distinguish between predisposition and predetermination in circumstances where the person involved denied predetermination. You would have to be a mind reader, so it is not sensible.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this is a substantive issue, which affects licensing. There is an important point here that needs addressing. I have no idea what the Minister will say in response to this, but perhaps some thought needs putting into it. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, said there was a clear distinction between quasi-judicial decisions and general policy. There is always an argument as to how quasi-judicial planning is, but there are some licensing functions which nobody can possibly argue are not quasi-judicial—not least because it is not very long since they were actually dealt with in the magistrates’ courts. One of the Local Government Acts—I think it is the 2007 one, but I am not sure—transferred the function of granting permission and licences from the courts to the local authority.
In my experience, there are two main areas. There are licence applications for events and entertainments. If you want to run a cinema or theatre or you want a temporary licence for a big shindig in the park, or whatever it is, you have to apply to the local authority for a licence. There are alcohol licences, as well as licences for premises, pubs, clubs and retail premises—for new ones and for changes and extensions to existing ones. Then there are occasions when there might be objections from the police to an existing situation where the question of revocation or restriction of the licence is considered. All those things are matters of public policy. They are not huge, overriding policies and will never be in a manifesto, but the question of whether a particular premise is a suitable place to be a pub or club is general policy. The question of whether alcohol should be sold from particular retail premises is a matter of policy and ought to be treated as policy. The removal of predetermination restrictions should apply to that. But if you are dealing with the question of whether a particular individual is a suitable, fit and proper person to hold an alcohol licence in any of those circumstances, that is not policy. Under those circumstances, judicial rules really have to apply, and you cannot possibly have people going round saying, “That man is a rogue”, or, “That man did my sister down”, or whatever it is, “and therefore I am going to vote against him having a licence”. Members of the licensing committee have to be trained, they have to carry out proper procedures, the whole thing has to be done by due process and it is a matter of whether an individual is a fit and proper person.
The other area is taxi licences for operators, drivers and so on. Again, these are matters that refer to a particular individual and to whether that person is an appropriate person to drive a taxi and carry a member of the public around, or whether they are an appropriate person to run a taxi business. The question of whether premises are suitable to be taxi offices is probably a planning decision rather than a licensing decision. That is public policy, in my view, and it is entirely reasonable that you should be able to go around an area meeting people who are concerned, or even campaigning, about it. The question about whether Joe Bloggs or whoever is a suitable person to run a taxi business or to drive a taxi is like the situation with alcohol licences: they are not questions that councillors should go around debating in public, or in private before the meetings. They are there as if they are magistrates, considering on the facts and the evidence, usually on the advice of the police, whether or not these people are suitable. There is a specific case there where the predetermination rules should be applied, and strictly. The purpose of moving this amendment is to probe the Government’s thinking on this issue. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I will be brief. I am not unsympathetic to the noble Lord’s amendment but I am not sure that I agree with the basis on which he proposes it. I think that he is distinguishing some circumstances where predetermination can be dispensed with from others where it should not. Without reopening the arguments that we have just been through, I do not believe that that is the import of Clause 14. In a sense, we are still awaiting the definitive government view on that. The issues around predetermination ought to run throughout the decision-making process. It is not quasi-judicial planning issues; there are lots of other decisions that councillors may make. As I understand it, if they have discretion on decisions, it must be real discretion. If they have pre-empted it by predetermination, there is the prospect that that decision will be unlawful, whatever area of decision-making is involved. However, I would not particularly disagree with taking those licensing operations outside the provisions of Clause 14.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, for temporarily forgetting that he is on the opposition Benches and not the government Benches and, in effect, making the case that the Government will be making to my noble friend Lord Greaves. On this issue, I am afraid that I beg to differ with my noble friend.
I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham; I imputed this set of amendments to him and not to my noble friend when we were discussing the previous grouping. It probably rather shook him to discover that he was the author of a set of amendments that he had not actually been involved with.
On Amendment 93, it might help to clarify just how radical the change is. I hope to provide some reassurance with what I am going to say. The Government’s view is that an elected member is equally able to listen to arguments and evidence and come to a fair decision on what my noble friend has referred to as a personal licensing matter as he is on any other licensing matter. That means that there is no justification for leaving unclear the circumstances that mean that a councillor has to withdraw from participating in any licensing decision process. That lack of clarity arises from the fact that we as a Government do not accept the distinction being drawn here between what a councillor can say about a decision relating to a personal licence and what they can say about a decision on any other licensing matter. We strongly believe—this is at the heart of our policy on predetermination—that councillors should no longer be restricted in which of their opinions they are free to express to the communities that they are elected to represent. Councillors, like any other individuals, will have regard to laws on libel and data protection when discussing individual circumstances or information which they may hold. However, it would be wrong to restrict them in this way from commenting on what may be a matter of great interest to their constituents.
I ask my noble friend to withdraw the amendment. I am afraid that the Government are not prepared to see these as exceptional circumstances from the general principle of predetermination and the freedom of councillors to express their view prior to making a decision.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I had hoped that the Government might take a rather different view on this. Having listened carefully to what the Minister has said, I am now even more convinced that I am right and they are wrong. The Minister referred to libel and data protection. I am not sure that either has much to do with it. Data protection would come into it with personal details being divulged to whichever licensing committee it was, which are private and should not be made public. If councillors made them public, they would be liable for it.
However, that is not at all the point that I am making. For example, there could be two rival taxi businesses in a community. The taxi business is fairly cut-throat. People do not make a great deal of profit and work very long hours. There are attempts to do the other side down, perhaps in a legal way. One faction is larger than the other and gets to the councillor who happens to be on the licensing committee. They say, “We do not want you to give a taxi operating licence to this person or taxi driver licences to these people, because they will be able to expand their operation and compete with us. We will find it more difficult”. These are personal applications. It would be outrageous if that councillor went around saying, “Yes, I will block the personal applications for taxi driving or operating licences from this or that person”, before the meeting. Councillors should be banned from saying things like that. Any councillor who goes around making such promises should be banned from taking part in the decision.
These decisions, particularly the alcohol decision, were until recently made in magistrates’ courts. Can you imagine a magistrate being in that position: going around and promising a community that they will block a particular person from taking over a pub and being the licensee because that community wants somebody from that community who it favours? Imagine the pub is in the middle of a big estate, and the estate has somebody who they would like to take over the pub, but the owners have an alternative in mind. To go around campaigning against that person getting a licence to run that pub would be absolutely disgraceful. It should be banned by law.
The more I listen to the Minister, the more I am absolutely convinced that I have raised a genuine problem. I disagreed with the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton. He was saying that he wanted everybody to be treated the same, but he wanted it to be more restrictive for everybody. The Bill says that predetermination —I keep wanting to say “predestination”, but that is not quite it—should be abolished for everybody. I am not suggesting that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is saying that, but it is what the Government are effectively saying.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I do not think that that is what the Bill is saying. If predetermination equals a closed mind—I was trying to get an answer from the Minister earlier—and if predetermination as a concept is abolished, then there are very serious issues, particularly on planning and licensing arrangements, on which the noble Lord touched. That is the point I make about predetermination.
Lord Greaves
Yes, I accept that. I accept that there is a difference. It seems to me that there is a difference between the Government’s rhetoric and what they are saying will happen: that councillors will be freed from the kind of constraints that the wife of the noble Lord, Lord Newton, found, and which I found when I got back on the council. I think that relates to the probing that the noble Lord has usefully undertaken in the past hour or so, but there is no doubt that the regime will be more liberal than at present. We are probing what it will be exactly. The noble Lord said that it will be very radical and that perhaps we were not appreciating how radical it will be.
In general, I am fairly happy with that. However, I am not happy, and I suggest noble Lords should not be happy, about how it applies to applications for personal licences by individuals where they may be seen as controversial in the community. There may be other incidences as well. Let us look at an alternative. In a fairly built-up area, there are two corner shops which do not have alcohol licences but one of them applies for such a licence and the other one objects. The shop owner who objects could have lots of friends in the community who will instigate a petition, saying that the other shop owner should not have a licence. The motivation will be competition, not that the shop owner has spent the past five years in jail or is a fraudster or is generally unsuitable; it is simply competitive rivalry. As a result, the friends persuade a councillor with whom they have close connections, and who happens to be on the licensing committee, to oppose the licence. They hold a public meeting and present a petition. Surely that should not be allowed and yet, as I understand it, that kind of thing would be allowed under the new regime that the Government propose.
There is an important and serious issue here. I ask the Government to take the matter more seriously and to take more legal advice on it. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am not sure we have had a may/must amendment yet on this Bill, but perhaps we have and I have missed it. This is an important amendment. I rise to speak to my amendments in this group: Amendments 97A, 98E, 98F and 98H. I will also speak to the other two amendments in the group, if I may.
There is widespread concern within local government that the Government have not got this exactly right. At the very least, it needs some fettling and a number of probably quite major changes if it is going to work fairly. As my noble friend Lord Tope said earlier, there is a widespread feeling in local government—it is not universal—that the demise of the Standards Board for England is to be welcomed. The Standards Board for England’s regime has turned out in practice to be expensive. It has been arbitrary in too many cases, and therefore it has been seen to be unfair. It has been open to abuse, and it has been open to attempted political manipulation, not by Standards Board members or its staff, but by people trying to use the system in order to do down opponents.
In our judgment, the removal of the Standards Board for England is a good idea, and we congratulate the Government on doing it, but something has to replace it. We cannot simply go back to the free-for-all situation we had up until about 20 years ago when standards codes and sanctions against councillors were hardly known. The system then seemed to work. There did not seem to be any more rogue councillors than there are now, and people did not seem to step out of line more than they do now, but the world has changed. We are now in a world in which standards in public life have come in and are accepted right across the board of everybody who takes part in public life. We have even had to grapple with these matters and come up with solutions here in the House of Lords. Local authorities are no different, and to pretend that local authorities generally, or some local authorities in particular, can be excepted from this situation is not the world that we are now living in.
The Government’s proposal in the Bill is that there will be no national system, no national organisations and no bureaucracies; it will all be left to local authorities. In our debate on a previous amendment, my noble friend Lord Taylor said that it will be up to local authorities to behave sensibly and do what they think is best in their area. There will be no uniform or national standards code, so each authority will be able to adopt its own code or not have one. It can keep, amend or do away with the present code. If any of my description of the present system is wrong, I hope the Minister will intervene and tell me, but I do not think it is.
Authorities will be able to choose whether to have standards committees. Since local authorities all have them at the moment and are institutionally fairly conservative bodies, most of them will probably keep them in one form or another, but it will be open to an authority not to have them, so there will be a hotchpotch pattern; they will be able to invent their own rules for how standards committees work within their own codes of conduct.
In addition, for the offence of failing to declare appropriate interests, either by not entering them on to a register of interests or by failing to declare them in meetings at appropriate times, the only real sanction left is the criminal law and, subject to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ agreement, people will be arraigned before a magistrates’ court if the DPP thinks it is serious enough. Meanwhile, parish councils will be left in some sort of limbo. They might be able to have their own systems or to continue to be part of a district council’s standards committee and system of standards, but if the local district council does not have one or decides to do away with it all, the parish councillors will have the choice either of doing it themselves, which might be rather difficult for small parish councils, or not doing it at all.
That seems to be the regime that is on offer. Perhaps the way I have presented it suggests that I am not terribly impressed with it. Nevertheless, I think my presentation of it is factually correct.
We have been here before and had something similar to this. When standards committees were first brought into local authorities, local authorities were left to do their own thing. Many of them did it very well, but in some places it was not done well. It was done either inefficiently or in an arbitrary, uneven or unfair way. In a small minority of places—it is always a small minority—it was not a good thing. It was fairly dreadful. Some authorities used it to victimise individual councillors in order to conduct campaigns against opposition groups on the council and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals. That is always the danger if local authorities in an area like this are left to their own devices, because there will be some places where malign, malevolent politics gets in the way of a fair system. Therefore, we propose in amendments in this group, and in the next group, which I will speak to later, a system in which every authority must have a standards committee. It seems ridiculous that someone could be dual-hatted or triple-hatted, and on three different authorities at different levels, some of those authorities having a standards committee and some not.
Equally, we are suggesting a uniform, standard, national code of conduct. We are not talking about local diversity. There cannot be local diversity about what is appropriate conduct for people in public life. We are talking about standards in public life. While standards and rules for councillors may be different from those for Members of the House of Lords, Members of the House of Commons, people on national quangos or whatever, the organisations are different. Nevertheless, they should be based on the same principles and underlying standards in public life.
There does not seem to be any reason why, if I am a member of a district council, a parish council and a county council, which I have no intention of being except for one of them, there should be a different code of conduct on each council. Surely, that cannot be right. Nor can it be right that of the 11 or 12 district councils in Lancashire, some do not have a code of conduct and some have a very different code of conduct from the adjoining council. Codes of conduct should be laid down nationally.
We are saying that the drawing up of the code of conduct and its approval should be done by local government and not by the Secretary of State or national government. It should be the responsibility of representatives of local government and, in terms of legislation, the LGA obviously is a key representative. We want systems for appeals and we want to sort out parish councils. We want to look at criminal offences, but they are in the next group so I will not talk about them any more at the moment.
On something like this there has to be protection for the public against rogue councils. Much as I have an underlying, innate aversion to national uniformity in anything, some things are so important and fundamental that they underpin everything else. This is the right way forward.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that we cannot have a free-for-all and that it should be mandatory for every local authority to have a code of conduct. There should be a universal code and an appeals procedure. If that means that we would support each of these amendments, that is where we are.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I apologise. I should have jumped up before the Minister. I will speak to Amendments 98K and 98M in this group.
On the two other amendments in the group, Amendments 98J and 98L, which would remove “and other” and “or other” respectively, an important, if not fundamental, point to be made is that the Government are proposing to use in this Bill language which in local government is rather out of date. Local government used to talk about financial interests and non-financial interests. If you had a financial interest, you had to declare it. You then had to do whatever the council instructed you to do, such as leave the room or sit there and not speak. If you had a non-financial interest, you had to declare it, but you were not usually subject to those sanctions.
My experience is that local government nowadays talks about personal and prejudicial interests, which are similar. However, prejudicial interests, while they include financial interests, are wider ranging and may include interests which are not directly financial but are nevertheless thought to be prejudicial to somebody taking part in discussion and debate. Personal interests, which have to be declared, are those which people should know about but are not thought to be prejudicial to people taking part in a debate. It seems to be common practice in local government nowadays for those words to be used. I was fairly sure that they had been used in the previous legislation, although I have not looked it up. Perhaps along with my noble friend, I would ask the Government to check the nomenclature, because there is no point putting in legislation words which are not now used on the ground and, in any case, are narrower perhaps, and less clear certainly, than the words and categories now used in local government.
My amendments in this group follow on from the amendments in the previous group. They are part of a package of the way we suggest the new standards regime needs to be changed. First, if there is to be a local system of councillors being sanctioned by local committees and no National Standards Board procedure, there needs to be an appeals procedure written into the system. There has to be a way in which someone who feels aggrieved by a local decision is able to appeal to a wider group against the sanction made against them. As I understand it, this is normal human rights and administrative tribunal procedure. In many ways these bodies will be operating as administrative tribunals and we hope that the Government will look at this issue. We suggest that it should not be a national quango such as the Standards Board for England and that it should not be run by central government; it should be operated within local government by representatives of local government and it should be set up in co-operation with the LGA. As my noble friend Lord Shipley said, we have set out ways in which this can be done.
My second point concerns parish councils. The Government have not bottomed the issue of parish councils on this new standards regime. I have a long briefing about the problems that it will cause to parish councils but I shall not read it all out. If parish councils have to operate their own procedures, there will clearly be resource implications. Big town councils might be able to do it—although it might be wasteful of their funding—but small parish councils will not possibly be able to do it. If there are many individual local codes so that parish councils operate different systems and some do not have any, how will members of parish councils be trained to understand the code? How will parish clerks, who play an absolutely crucial role, be trained in the new system?
My experience from talking to people involved in standards committee throughout the country is that where there are lots of parish councils they seem to occupy quite a high proportion of the time of standards committees. The reason for this is obvious: parish councillors are not getting the expert advice on standards matters—on declarations of interest and so on—which they ought to be getting; and parish clerks are perhaps not being trained or not passing on that advice. I am a huge fan of parish councils but there may be something about parish-level politics and government that leads to individual rivalries and encourages people to make complaints against each other. Whatever it is, there is no doubt that parishes form quite a large part of the workload of standards committees in many different places. To leave them adrift, as this Bill seems to do, does not seem the right way to go.
In our view, the parishes probably need their own system. That system ought to be operated via the established means of communication and training that parish councils have with the National Association of Local Councils and other bodies such as the county organisations, and there ought to be county-level standards committees for parish councils. Whatever the system is, doing it within the parish council community is a sensible idea—particularly if the parish council finds itself cast adrift with a district that does not have a system. In any case, if districts have different codes of conduct and different systems for standards committees, the parish councils will have to join in those willy-nilly whether or not they agree with the systems and the codes. A separate parish system seems to be the way to look at things.
My final point relates to criminal offences. Again, we think the Government have not thought this issue through properly. On failures to declare interests, a major failure is a very serious matter indeed, whether it be a failure to register or a failure to declare during a meeting. A minor failure would require a sanction—but not a draconian sanction such as being hauled up before a magistrates' court. Yet the government system seems to mean that if the offence of not declaring or not registering an interest is not sufficiently serious for the DPP to agree to prosecute, there will be no sanctions at all. That does not seem to be the right way forward.
As for the criminal investigations and vexatious complaints, that needs thinking through; there are enough vexatious complaints on standards already that end up with people being found not guilty and having no sanctions against them—or, in my case, the complaint was proved and the sanction was nothing. People can imagine what happened. There are enough cases of people using the standards procedure for political or personal vexatious purposes. Think of the prospects of this being used when criminal sanctions are possible. You would get massive headlines in the local papers that the complaints had been made, it would all come to nothing but the damage would all have been done. It has to be thought through a bit more carefully.
I join my noble friend Lord Tope in hoping that we can have discussions with the Government in the mean time and that at the very least we can get the thing thought through again. If no change occurs at the end of the day, so be it—but we are convinced that the Government have not yet got it quite right.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am not sure that we would agree with everything that the noble Lord has said, but we would appreciate the opportunity to join in the discussions with government together with the coalition parties.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I thank noble Lords. I am sort of having a second bite of the cherry within the group, because I can talk specifically about the proposals of my noble friend. I hope that I can really reassure him. He talked about appeal structures and the like and the need to maintain them—and of course human rights legislation provides for this. But in actual fact the sanctions that the Secretary of State intends to provide for in regulations under Clause 18(2) will be relatively low-level sanctions based on powers of discipline that councils already possess. It is not our intention to confer any new disciplinary powers of the sort that would give rise to a need or expectation for a bureaucratic appeal process.
I cannot support Amendment 98M, which would insert a new clause relating to parish standards, although I understand the interest in it. The legislation as currently drafted gives parishes the power to have a code or a standards committee if they would like. Parish councils are free to make arrangements to work jointly with other authorities. My noble friend is mistaken if he believes that advice is not available to parish councils. The last Government published the Quality Parish and Town Council Scheme; it was published by the department in 2003, and it gives information about model charters whereby principal and local councils in England can work in partnership. That document can be viewed on the DCLG website. We intend here also that the regulations to be issued by the Secretary of State under Clause 18(1) will specify that the registration of parish members' interests will be carried out by the monitoring officer of the district within which the relevant parish falls.
There was some talk about the criminal sanctions for failing to register, and I note noble Lords’ concerns on that. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked, too, that he might be a party to discussions that we might have before Report on those issues. I assure noble Lords that we would be happy to discuss that aspect of Clause 19 relating to breaching regulations under Clause 18. With that, I ask my noble friend Lord Tope to withdraw the amendment.