Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Soley and Lord Newton of Braintree

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I am going to intervene very briefly. First, I apologise to the House for not having been involved in this long and very complex Bill before. I am intervening now because I am a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which met yesterday to look at this Bill. We have a real problem with this incredibly complex Bill, and with many amendments coming forward, in understanding the full implications of some of the sections. I want to refer to some aspects of the report which is out this morning as a result of the meeting we had yesterday. Two of the sections relate both to petitions and hybridity and to referendums. I am not sure that they strictly apply to the Minister’s new clause but they apply in general on the issue of referendums.

In his opening comments the Minister agreed the possibility of a local authority being able to decide whether it wants to hold a referendum, which is fine. However, in paragraph 31 on page 9 of the committee’s report we recommend that regulations under Section 9MG of the 2000 Act, which is added in the Bill—they relate to,

“the conduct of elections and referendums the results of which have significant legal effect”,

and we had quite a discussion on that yesterday—

“should be subject to affirmative procedure”.

I am sure that the Government will consider that in the usual way. Given that we only had an opportunity to look at this yesterday, it is quite difficult to get this in the precise position.

The other thing I wanted to mention, because it affects petitions and hybridity, is the recommendation in paragraph 29 on page 9 of our report, which refers to the hybrid instruments procedure. It says:

“Given the lack of any statutory requirement to consult before making an order under section 9HF, the Committee is concerned that the disapplication of the hybrid instruments procedure—and thereby the opportunity to petition Parliament—leaves inadequate means to ensure private or local interests are taken into account when the power is exercised”.

We wish to draw that power to the attention of the House, as we do in paragraph 32 to the,

“disapplication of the hybrid instruments procedure by paragraph 77 of Schedule 3 to the Bill, so that the House may satisfy itself that there will be suitable alternative procedures in place”.

I do not wish to delay the House with an issue with which I have not been involved and do not have great knowledge about, but we expressed considerable concern yesterday about some of the powers in this Bill. There are others in our report, but the two I have focused on are, first, the conduct and the effect of referendums where they might have a legal impact. There was considerable discussion on what would happen if it went to court on an appeal. The second was this issue of hybridity. That is not directly relevant to what the Minister has just said but it picks up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, about petitions. It is an area of which the House needs to be aware and I very much regret that this is all rather rushed from the way the legislation is being put through. My ability to assimilate this enormous Bill in the fewer than 24 hours since the Delegated Powers Committee met yesterday might put me slightly out of the normal amendment procedure, but the two issues have a general impact and I hope that the Minister will take them into account. I know that the Government will respond to the report in the usual way but, speaking as a member of the committee and not on behalf of it, anyone who reads our report—I hope that people will have a chance to look at its main recommendations today even though it is very short notice—will see its considerable importance for this Bill.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, declaring once again my wife’s interest as a councillor and, I suppose, my interest in my wife, I speak with some diffidence in a House awash with experts with experience of local government in one way or another. I am one of the few without that. All that I want is to ask a question for clarification, which picks up on the questions raised by my noble friend Lord Greaves. It is clear that these amendments are intended to deal to some extent with the concerns expressed about planning and licensing. I should like to be absolutely clear. The new clause on petitions and special cases to be inserted under my noble friend the Minister’s amendment refers to a special-case petition. I am shorthanding and if I am getting it wrong, I expect someone will tell me.

The proposed new clause says that if it is substantially the case, people have,

“a statutory right of appeal in respect of the substance of the … decision, or … a statutory right to instigate a review of the substance of the matter or decision”.

From my experience as an MP, my understanding is that if it is your planning application and it is refused, you have a right of appeal. But if you are the neighbour or the neighbourhood who objected to the planning application and it is granted, you have no right of appeal. Does that mean that if you are the neighbour or the neighbourhood and the planning application is granted on planning grounds, you can now instigate a petition and have a referendum on the granted planning application?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

Before my noble friend sits down and the experts start coming in, I welcome the clarity of his statement about planning applications, leaving aside the more complex high-level issues raised by my noble friend Lord True. Thinking back on my time as an MP, I see that it would sometimes have been very pleasing to have been able to point constituents aggrieved by the granting of an application in the direction of a petition. Looking at it objectively, though, I am bound to say that the whole area of the application of planning policy would turn into a nightmare world, so I very much welcome the clarity of what has been said.

[Lord Soley]

I again apologise. I would not normally come back on this issue, but it is very important. The job of the Members of this House and of the House of Commons is to hold the Executive to account. I had a note put into my hands a few moments ago from Hansard saying:

“Please may we have sight of the report you quoted from”.

The note then says in brackets:

“(The copy from the Printed Paper Office finishes on page 8 with section 25)”.

Of course, I was quoting from clauses after that. I picked up the papers just before Questions finished. This means that anybody else who came into the House for this debate this morning probably would not have got a copy of that report; here I am grateful for the comments and support of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. It is hard to hold the Executive to account if Members cannot get a copy of a report which is regarded as important by the House in all cases.

Having handed the note in—which is I why I was not in my place when the Minister referred to me, as I was trying to get it—it has now gone, and they are now going around looking for another report. It is deeply unsatisfactory. One reason the Government are getting into problems in a number of areas is that business management is failing. The noble Lord, Lord Newton, and other Members on that side of the House who have been familiar with managing government business in previous years will know precisely what I mean by this.

I emphasise that, like all members of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I am aware of the sort of Bills we will have to look at in advance. When you get something like this, you make yourself aware of the basics but do not get down to the detail until you are close to the date of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee meeting and when you are in that meeting. You have to go into the small print to get it in order and so it is very difficult to speak to it the following day when the report has not been available to any Members of the House except those who were fortunate enough to get a copy before I picked up what must have been one of the last ones. That is deeply unsatisfactory. The Government should take this very seriously.

I know that the Government take seriously the reports of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Indeed, since I have been a member, most of our recommendations have been accepted. This Minister, most notably, has been very good on this as well. However, we are looking at how the Executive are held to account by the House. To have a situation develop where a particularly complicated and large Bill like this is before the House and an important report from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee is not readily available must cause concern. You cannot even refer to it. Obviously, I knew what the arguments were because I was in the committee meeting yesterday, but it is not satisfactory and I think a number of Members know it. Although I welcome the Minister’s comments that he will be taking on board the committee’s report, that is like saying, “We hope that we will be able to meet the committee’s concerns” when it might be too late after that until we get to Third Reading.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Soley and Lord Newton of Braintree

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I am not saying that that would happen.

I think that we need to rely on the good faith of the Electoral Commission, which clearly seeks to do everything in an unbiased and impartial way, but making that a statutory requirement would raise a lot of questions that we might not want to answer.

[Lord Soley]

I have considerable agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Newton, on the very difficult issues raised by this profoundly important set of amendments. If my memory serves me correctly, the last time that I discussed the matter with the Electoral Commission, it was talking about preparing a leaflet or pamphlet on this very issue. I think that the same issue came up on Second Reading, too. The difficulty is ensuring that the leaflet is right and unbiased. I phoned the Electoral Commission this morning to find out the latest position and, perhaps slightly worryingly, both the numbers that I normally use and get through on without any trouble were unobtainable. I am sure that there is a very good explanation and that I will be able to get through soon, but that means that I cannot tell the House where the Electoral Commission is up to on this important issue.

The amendments from the noble Lords, Lord Lipsey and Lord Rooker, spell out the right principle that we need material that says, in plain English, what an alternative voting slip will look like and so on. However, as soon as we get into explaining how the system works, we are in much more difficulty. It is very hard to write a leaflet on how a voting system works—particularly how it works in comparison to an existing system—without getting into a minefield of problems about possible outcomes or computations of the effect of one’s vote. There is a lot in Amendment 109A, in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, that if we are to go down this road, having the Speaker’s committee involved in the Electoral Commission would be a good idea to provide some political insight. Otherwise, I can envisage that the leaflet that might come out could produce literally thousands of phone calls from political parties and their agents up and down the land saying, “This is biased”. That is only a short step away from the courts. The same point might be made about the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury—we would get into an absolute minefield.

I hope that the Government will give this serious thought. The Government may already have talked to the Electoral Commission—perhaps they had another phone number that worked this morning that I did not have. I know that the commission is exercised by the issue and is keen both to get the information out to the public about the importance of the referendum and to convey information to people about the different voting system. However, if we are to go down the road of requiring rather more detail on the effect, we have to look much more carefully at Amendment 109A in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, which would at least provide for some political control. Without that, the Electoral Commission will, frankly, be hung out to dry and probably crucified as well.

I hope that the Government will give this important issue careful thought, given that, as my noble friend Lord Lipsey said, we have done so little on this and the changes will all come very suddenly. We must make a major effort to convey to the public the importance of this vote. On that point, my noble friend Lord Lipsey is absolutely right. The problem is what should be put into or left out of the leaflet.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Soley and Lord Newton of Braintree

Monday 31st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I support the amendment. It touches on two things. The first is the general principle that we need to improve registration. I have argued before that we have something of a postcode lottery in how good registration is from one local authority to another. That general point relates to this debate because the amendment would require that we deal with that before the referendum. I suspect that the Government are concerned only about whether they could do so in time. However, we must start the process.

As an adviser to the Electoral Commission, I have felt for a long time that we need to improve the registration process. I do not think that anybody on either side of the House disagrees with that. My experience is that until we get an agreement on a body that will raise the standard by saying what that standard should be across the country, some local authorities will carry out registration extremely well, others will do so very poorly and others will be in between. We know which local authorities perform well and we know which perform very badly. The in-between group is more difficult to identify. The Electoral Commission must have a duty placed on it to come up with a standard in electoral registration that local authorities must achieve.

Having just filled in my registration form again, I know that the form suggests very heavily that not to fill it in accurately is illegal and that one would risk prosecution. It implies that registration is a legal requirement in exactly the way that was described in the earlier intervention. I would like the Electoral Commission to have a duty to say that all local authorities have to make every effort to get people on to the register. I recognise that there is a time problem in relation to this amendment and the referendum, but I do not see why we should not make a start. We could do that now. It would be possible to say that, given the variable standards at the moment, the small number of local authorities that we know do not make the effort have got to do so. Perhaps we could then build on that for future occasions, when we would expect the Electoral Commission to say that all local authorities have reached a minimum standard.

The issue of underrepresentation in key areas is crucial. We all know that some areas have much greater underrepresentation than others, and we all know that some local authorities in those areas do not make anywhere near enough effort to get people registered. Those are the authorities that we should focus on. It would be very good news if the Government said to the Electoral Commission, “We expect you to send out to those local authorities a note warning them that if they do not raise the standards in their area and do more to make sure that people are on the electoral register—and do that at least as well as the best local authorities—you will continue to breathe heavily down their neck until they deliver the standards that you expect”.

Underrepresentation is a major problem. It has distorted so many issues that we have debated in the Bill that we should not allow it to continue. What troubles me is that the Minister and the Government have made no effort to find a way of addressing the problem. I ask that in due course they take up this amendment and extend it beyond the referendum to a general expectation of local authorities and the Electoral Commission that they apply that standard.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, perhaps I may briefly intervene. I am too often tempted in these debates, but this will, on the McNally score, put him 4-2 ahead of me.

The noble Lord's speech was very interesting. In effect, he distinguished between whether efforts should be made to improve the registration system and the way in which that might be tied to a particular part of the Bill. That is exactly my position. I have no problem with trying to improve the registration system. However, there could be big questions of cost, not least arising from any prosecutions that may take place, for example of large numbers of 16 to 18 year-olds. That prospect appeared to lurk in what the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said. Those issues can be considered on their own merits. What would not be sensible—this is where, for once, I am on the side of my Front Bench—would be to tie those to a provision of a particular Bill as a condition before something comes into effect.