Localism Bill
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Lord Bichard
My Lords, in speaking to this group of amendments, I draw attention to my own Amendment 10. I rise mainly to pay tribute to and thank the Minister for the constructive and very helpful way in which she has entered into discussions following the amendment that I tabled on Report, together with the noble Lords, Lord Tope, Lord Newton and Lord Filkin. Unfortunately, the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Newton, for very good reasons, cannot be here tonight, but they both specifically asked me whether they could be included in the thanks for the constructive approach that has been taken.
I shall not waste the time of the House by running over the ground that the Minister has already covered. I think we now have a package that is much better as a result of all our efforts, and this is now a very important part of the infrastructure of local government. As the noble Baroness knows, simply for the sake of clarity and comprehensiveness, I would have liked to have had a specific reference in the Bill to the power to suspend from a committee. However, I am grateful to her for having referred specifically to the powers that already exist, and I think that that, too, will help to clarify the situation. Therefore, all in all, I am very grateful for the help that she has provided. I know that sometimes she has had to act in the face of considerable opposition. I shall go no further than that, but I think that we have reached a place with which I feel content and, again, to save the time of the House, that means that I shall not be moving my Amendment 10.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I follow my noble friend with a small “f”—the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. As he said, we moved a number of amendments at an earlier stage of the Bill and I, too, pay tribute to the Minister for listening so carefully and for taking so seriously the points that we made. The apologies of my noble friend Lord Newton have already been given, but I specifically undertook not only to give his apologies—a hospital appointment prevents his being here—but to pass on his warm thanks to the Minister. Those thanks are perhaps not so much for the extent to which she has moved but for the extent to which she has been able to move those close to her during the proceedings here.
I think that we have moved a very long way from the position that we were in in Committee, when the person replying on the Front Bench said that standards were a matter for local discretion. I am probably one of the greatest localists in your Lordships’ House, but I thought at the time, and feel very strongly now, that if there is one thing that should not be left to local discretion, it is standards in public life. We have got to the point that we have now reached because in the past there has been rather too much discretion over standards in public life.
I am very pleased that we are going to have a mandatory code—or, rather, that it is going to be mandatory to have a code—but I am a little sad that its minimum provisions are not to be the same throughout the country. I think that in reality they will be the same throughout the country, because my expectation is that the great majority of local authorities will simply keep the code that they all already have. My concern relates to what I hope will be a tiny minority of councils that decide not to keep the code that they now have, and it relates more particularly to why they make that decision and in what way they might change it. That leads me to ask the Minister whether there will be any form of monitoring, whether by her department or by the Local Government Association, so that we know what changes are happening throughout the country. There may well be some that are a cause for concern. What we do about them may be another matter, but we should at least know about them.
The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, has already told us that he will not be moving his amendment, but my other concern is that councils now have, and will retain, the power as a sanction, if necessary, either to remove councillors from certain committees or sub-committees or simply not to appoint them. Will that also apply to outside bodies, as all councils appoint councillors as their representatives on outside bodies? Will they now also be able to remove a councillor from an outside body to which the council has appointed him or her?
Many councils, including my own, also have local committees or area committees that are constituted and stated in the council’s constitution to comprise all the councillors elected for that area. Presumably there is a power now to remove them from that area committee. Is that the case, and how does that fit with the constitution of the council, which says that all councillors representing that area have a right to be on that committee?
My other concern is about the form of monitoring—I do not mean imposition, but monitoring—there will be to let us know what is happening under the new regime. I certainly am grateful to the Minister for moving us so far on this, but quite a number of us are still concerned about this issue and feel that we are not there yet—well, we are there but this is not perfection and we may well have to return to the issue in the years to come after a number of high profile cases.
My last point is to welcome the lengths to which Ministers have now moved in the appointment of an independent person and in trying to ensure as far as possible that that person is genuinely independent and open. That independent person now plays an even more important role, in effect being the right of appeal—the only appeal that a councillor has—against what he may well feel is the unfair victimisation by a council with a heavy one-party majority, whatever the party, of someone who is a thorn in the flesh but is not necessarily doing anything improper. Again, it is important that the independent person, as far as it is ever possible, is upheld to be genuinely independent.
I join others in very much paying tribute to the Minister. I know from other sources how hard she has had to work at times to persuade more reluctant colleagues of the necessity to move in this direction. I congratulate her on her persuasive powers and the success that she has achieved. As my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, we do not have all that we want but we have a lot more than we thought we would get at an earlier stage in the Bill, and I am grateful for that.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I want to raise a specific issue, but first to declare an interest as a councillor and one-time member of a standards committee. I welcome the amendments because they move us towards a system that is proportionate, will protect the right to free speech, give confidence to the general public, be fair to an individual councillor and should prevent party-political prejudice leading to unjustifiable and unreasonable decisions. The introduction of the independent person—or at least one independent person—seems to me to be a major help in enabling us to abolish the Standards Board for England so that matters can be dealt with locally and we can remove the need for a national referral system.
My one remaining doubt is on how the decisions on allegations will be made. That relates to subsection (3). The Minister said that all local authorities would have to have a form of process for investigating and determining matters relating to breaches of the code of conduct but it is for them to decide what those processes should be. I hope that guidance will be given requiring a local authority to have a formal committee structure to achieve this. Otherwise, it is not clear how that will be delivered. If there is to be a formal committee structure, in my view it should be chaired by an independent person but not necessarily the same one who is the independent person referred to in other subsections. In addition to having an independent chair, there will be independent members, as now, along with sitting councillors. Then the whole council will be able to decide on any suspension from committees that might be recommended.
I believe that because it is extremely important to avoid any perception or possibility of party-political bias in reaching a decision. Standards committees with independent members seems to be a means of preventing what may appear to the general public to be party-political decisions being made. Therefore, pursuing independence at a local level through the independent person and independent members of standards committees is extremely important.
Lord Tope
My Lords, neither the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, nor the noble Lord, Lord True, were Members of your Lordships’ House when some of us spent many happy hours—hours and hours—dealing with what I think was the first part of what was then the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. We argued for hours about petitions and petition schemes. I recall my noble friend Lord Greaves—who I think I have just managed to shut up for a few moments—actually bringing in some petitions to his council so that we could see that they are rather different from petitions that come to Parliament in their general layout and form.
We had a very listening Minister then who listened and indeed made many amendments to what was proposed, but we were still left with pages of prescription about how councils should collect, receive and deal with petitions. We heard that most councils did not have such a scheme. What actually emerged, and it was a legitimate criticism, was not that most councils did not have a scheme but that most councils had not thought to put it on their website, which of course they should, but that is rather different from saying that councils do not receive or deal with petitions.
I have much sympathy with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said in moving his amendment. The crucial difference between us is that I believe he was talking about good practice and I do not believe, especially in a Localism Bill, that it is for your Lordships’ House to be prescribing in legislation what should be disseminated as good practice. I still bear the scars of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, and that, I am afraid, tempers very considerably the sympathy with which I listen to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I will just add a few brief things. My noble friend reminds me of one or two things which I had thankfully forgotten about. I was trying to remember how many amendments I actually put to this chapter of that Bill when it came. That is also something I had forgotten about, which is something that happens.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, quite rightly said that councils have to welcome and encourage petitions. But what is really important is the seriousness with which they treat them and deal with them when they come. You can set up as many bureaucratic, complex, legalistic schemes as you like, but if people do not treat the petitions seriously it is just going through the motions and wasting time and energy. If people treat petitions seriously you do not need a complex, bureaucratic, top-down—and, I have to say, pretty patronising—piece of legislation like Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. I note with some wry amusement that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is desperately trying to hang on to this classic piece of new Labour nonsense, which frankly has not improved the situation of petitions in any council in the country. Those who take them seriously, take them seriously; those who do not, do not.
This is eight pages of primary legislation telling councils in great detail how to deal with petitions. I, along with my noble friend, pay tribute to the Minister at the time, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who listened to a great deal of what we had said—it was 12 pages of nonsense before we started, and between us we managed to persuade the civil servants and the powers that be in the then Government at least to take some of it out. As I told the noble Baroness at the time, if the Government simply want to tell councils to have a scheme for dealing with petitions that deals with them seriously, they could do so in half a page of legislation, not eight pages. I have been through this and reminded myself of the huge amount of nonsense in it. I will not detain—or should I say entertain—your Lordships’ House with any more of this tonight, but it really does deserve to go.
The one point that I will raise relates to Section 16 of the 2009 Act, which is the requirement to call officers to account. I do not know how often, if ever, this has been used since this part of the Act was commenced. At the time, we had a long debate, and in our view it was totally inappropriate for officers of the council to be hauled up and held to account before the public in this way. The people who should be held to account are the elected councillors: those who run the council and who have been elected by the people to be responsible and accountable to the people. Clearly, they will need support from officers, and if officers are not performing their jobs properly, the elected councillors are the ones who should take a grip of the situation and sort it out. That is a fundamental principle, in our view, but we could not persuade the Government at the time that that was the case. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Shutt is, I assume, going to resist this amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 60 and, in doing so, I welcome enormously the amendments tabled by the Minister on behalf of the Government. I warmly welcome what she has put forward concerning the preference for having things dealt with, if at all possible, locally and as soon as possible. If it does not do his future career a lot of harm, perhaps I may associate the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, with the thanks to the Government for moving on this. He cannot be in his place tonight but I am afraid that the two of us are at one in thanking the Government, which I think puts us both in very bad odour.
What the Government have done has been welcomed very widely. I know that the British and Irish Ombudsman Association has supported this final retention of a citizen’s right to direct access. Similarly, the National Housing Federation supports the line which enables MPs and councillors to be involved as the first route at the discretion of the complainant but allows the fallback position. Likewise, the Law Commission prefers a system where the complaints can go either through a local representative or to an ombudsman. I hope that the Government know that tenants are similarly very happy with the new amendments, under which they can either deal directly with their councillor or go to the ombudsman. The organisation Which? similarly prefers the choice of the local route but, if not, then the fallback position if for whatever reason the complainant does not want to involve their MP or councillor. As the Minister said, the reasons for that could well be a conflict of interest: the councillor may be the provider; the MP may already have heard the case in their surgery; or the MP may know the local council official involved. The only other reason that has been mentioned is that there could be a threat to the tenant’s privacy where there are issues that they would perhaps not want to share with an elected official. The only other point when somebody may want to go to the ombudsman, albeit after the delay, would be when an elected representative perhaps would be rarely accustomed to awarding redress and would not have the authority to enforce any award.
The way in which this has been tabled by the Government is to be greatly welcomed. It clarifies the current position of the Housing Ombudsman because the scheme requires complainants to have completed any internal complaints procedure with their own provider before going to the ombudsman. Only in very exceptional circumstances, such as oppression or something like unreasonable delay, would the Housing Ombudsman take a case before it had been through the provider’s in-house procedure. That is also helpful in the wording of the Government’s amendments. All the other organisations similarly take that line.
I am delighted that the wording allows local access or the fall back after eight weeks. It is only that that brings up my very small amendment. I have no difficulties with the idea of some delay after the internal procedure is over for the complainant to take stock and consider whether a complaint to the Housing Ombudsman is still justified, having heard the reasons for being turned down by the in-house procedure. Two months seems a little long, especially as the internal procedure that they would have already gone through could also have been a bit lengthy. My amendment would simply shave a fortnight off those eight weeks. The Government have moved a long way on this amendment and I hope they will go a little bit further. An extra 14 days would make this a particularly good final answer to the original amendment.
Lord Tope
My Lords, as the noble Baroness has just said, the Minister has moved a long way since we last debated this. We all accepted the strong desirability of resolving these matters locally whenever possible, but we realised during or even before that debate that it had an unintended consequence of giving the designated person the right of veto. I do not think that that was what the Government intended and I am pleased that they have recognised that, and that it has been removed. Once again, I thank the Minister for not only listening but for acting. At this late hour at this very late stage of the Bill I do not propose to debate further whether it should be six or eight weeks. I am just glad that we have got to where we have.
Lord Best
Once again the House of Lords consideration of this Bill has led to a really sensible change to the legislation. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Newton—I have supported these amendments all the way—on persuading the Minister who I know has handled this with great distinction. On behalf of all the organisations which have been extremely worried about this and all the people whose complaints will now be better handled, I thank the Minister very much.
Lord Tope
My Lords, perhaps I may take this opportunity to echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Best, at the beginning of his moving the amendment and echo also the words of my noble friend Lord Greaves in thanking very much the Ministers and the Bill team for the very constructive way in which this Bill’s very lengthy process has been approached. As I understand it, we are now sending something like 100 pages of amendments back to the Commons. What is more notable is that all those amendments have been passed without the need for a vote; in other words, we have truly reached consensus. Of course, like all consensus, it has not achieved everything that each of us would have wished but, without any doubt, we are sending back a very much better Bill than the one we received back in June.
Tribute has also been paid to the opposition Front Bench. I do not know whether the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Beecham, had any further hopes for their future careers but, should anyone read the late-night proceedings in Hansard, we have probably now effectively ended their prospects. I pay tribute to them for the constructive way in which they have approached the Bill. It reflects a view with which all of us started; that we were here not to play games or to score points off each other—some of us have known each other quite long enough to know exactly how to score points if we were so minded—but for the genuine interests of better local government and local democracy, which I think we have achieved.
My final thanks are to the Liberal Democrat team on this Bench. Recently, my noble friend Lord Greaves in private referred to my role as being that of team manager. By being the team manager I have been very much more fortunate than much better known team managers in having, certainly, an all-star team but without the all-star egos and tantrums that go with it. I put on record my thanks to my colleagues for the very effective way in which we have approached this Bill, and to the Minister for listening to the good advice that my all-star team has offered and for being so willing so often to take that advice.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, this is the last time I shall speak on the Bill. Perhaps I may start by expressing support for the noble Lord, Lord Best, and his inquiries. I hope that he will receive the confirmations that he sought, certainly on the basis of the helpful background note that we received from the Government today, which confirms that proceeding via development plan documents and local development orders would obviate the need for referendums.
I should like to offer my thanks to several people. Certainly, I thank the Bill Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and her team, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, and the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who has gone on to other things. I know what hard work it can be working on a Bill and what a tremendous amount of effort has been put in. It has been a listening team, which has boded well for the outcome of the Bill. I thank also the noble Lord, Lord Tope, the manager, and his team, who have had a tremendous input into the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Tope, made the point that a substantial number of changes have been made to the Bill. I have not worked on a Bill that has changed quite so much during its passage through your Lordships’ House. That has been due to the power of the contributions around the Chamber. It has not been the Opposition particularly or any particular group. The Government have listened to the voices of experience and common sense. Certainly, the Cross-Benchers have played their full part and I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Best, in particular. I think that we all look up to him on housing matters. I thank my team and I offer big thanks also to the Bill team. Particularly at this stage of the proceedings there are a lot of last-minute amendments in order to try to get everything in shape for the conclusion of the Bill. The team has worked very hard and has always been receptive to inquiries that we have made. This has been a really good exercise in scrutiny of what, frankly, was not a great piece of legislation when it arrived in this place. It goes back to the other place in much better form. I am not quite sure how it will find the time to deal with all the amendments but I wish it well.
Localism Bill
Lord Tope Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Lucas
My Lords, according to the programme we are supposed to conclude the Committee stage of this Bill on Wednesday after one further day’s debate. That does not seem to be a realistic prospect. I would like to make good progress with the Bill and the House has the flexibility to do better than that and to give itself some additional time. We could hoof the Education Bill out of the Moses Room on Monday. We could perhaps use the Moses Room on Tuesday or put the Finance Bill into the Moses Room and use the Chamber on Tuesday. We could sit on Thursday. There seem to be a number of options available to enable us to complete the Committee stage of the Bill before we rise. I very much hope that the Government will be able to tell us which of them they propose to use. One way or another, we are not going to complete it unless we do something.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said. We might wish to be where we are now but none of us would wish to be where we are with the Bill, if I can make that distinction. We are where we are. We on these Benches remain committed to completing the Committee stage of the Bill as soon as possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, there are a number of options available to enable us to do that before the Recess. We are willing to stay as late as may be on Wednesday evening and if necessary to come back on Thursday or take what other measures can achieve that. It is not for us to determine the progress of other Bills or where they may be taken but we and your Lordships’ House can urge the Government and the usual channels to co-operate with each other to ensure that we achieve the objective that we all share: to complete the Committee stage of the Bill as soon as possible before the Recess.
Localism Bill
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Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, first, I wish to speak to the amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, with which we sympathise. It is not just a case of semantics and of substituting one form of words for another. For the reason that he has outlined, we agree with him that if “excessive” is used in the legislation it will inevitably end up in the question that is put to the voters in a referendum, as it would be the technical term. We are denying local authorities the right to campaign for the council tax increase that they want. If we want to approach this matter in a neutral way, the very least we can do is to remove prejudicial legislation, as the noble Lord termed it.
The Minister may well say that “excessive” is not a new term and that it is embodied in the current capping legislation. However, there is a difference between that position and what may happen in the future because the current arrangements for capping will not be put to a popular vote. Therefore, that term is effectively an internal term rather than one that would inevitably feature in the referendum question on some basis or other. For that reason, I believe that we need to recast the term that is in the legislation.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. It is a central point of our concern with this legislation that it is stuffed with detailed powers and that the Secretary of State has to draw back from the nominal rights that it is seeking to give to local authorities. I doubt whether the gap between finishing Committee in July—if we do—and Report in September is long enough to unpick some of the stuff that has come from our discussions today, but at least there is perhaps a longer gap than usual. Our attitude to the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, depends on precisely where the Government are on this. When last Thursday we had our first canter around the issue of capping powers, it was said that all Governments of all persuasions had held to themselves a reserve power. If in fact it is the Government’s position that they are eschewing that power, we do not feel obligated to hold to the position that I think I outlined—that it is difficult for us to deny the current Government those powers if we took them in past years. If that is not one of the criteria of the Government, that point falls away. When he responds, perhaps the Minister can tell us whether the Government see the arrangements currently included in the Bill as capping powers, whether they believe that they should have the right to hold those powers, or whether they are, by one formulation or other, happy to let local electors decide on what the appropriate level of council tax should be. If his response is, “Well, we think there should be reserve capping powers and this is what the Bill is about”, that is one thing, but if the argument is that the Bill is about making sure that electors are the final arbiters in this, that helps us in our position on the matter.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that there is a question about his formulation. Under the Government’s proposition, a level of council tax, if deemed excessive, requires the authority to produce a substitute calculation. As I understand it, a substitute calculation is one that is not excessive. I suppose that most authorities in this position would compute a substitute council tax that was just a smidgen short of what the excessive level would be. I am not quite sure, on the noble Lord’s formulation, what that substitute calculation would be and what would happen in circumstances where there was a referendum, 5 per cent of the electors called for it, and they did not support the level of council tax that was proposed. What are the consequences of that? If the noble Lord could help us with that point, it would be appreciated. It is clear under the Government’s propositions what the consequences would be, but I am not quite sure what the consequences would be under the noble Lord’s formulation.
I think that this has been a very helpful debate. It is incumbent on the Minister to say whether the Government see the powers as capping powers and believe that they need them, or whether that is not their position and this is basically about letting electors decide what the appropriate or inappropriate level of council tax would be.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I suppose I can rise to speak on behalf of the only party in this House that is unencumbered by a history of support for capping, but I will try to resist too much temptation there. My name is obviously with my noble friend Lord Greaves on his amendments. I think he is right and I hope that the Government will consider very carefully that fairly simple change to wording which, as others have said, is actually very important. If these provisions are to be in Bill—like my noble friend Lord Greaves, I would rather that they were not—it is important that we have a neutral wording and not a prejudicial wording, which “excessive” must be, especially if that wording is likely to be used either as part of a referendum question or at least in support of any such referendum.
My particular reason for wanting to say a few words now is to support the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, both in his general and particular plea. The general plea relates to much less regulation and dictation from the Government, a message repeated throughout the Bill. It is salutary to remember that when Ministers first announced the Bill, it was greeted with a pretty widespread welcome right across local government. The aim and intention as enunciated by Ministers was, broadly speaking, welcomed. We knew that there would be some things in here that we would be less happy about, but we thought that most things we would be fairly happy about. Then we came to see the detail of the Bill and the extent to which, as others have said, if it is localism at all, it is localism top-down. It is also prescribed by ministerial regulation and it is potentially constrained by Secretary of State powers. I join the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, in urging Ministers, during what will be a longer than usual gap between Committee and Report, to take courage and look seriously at whether we need to be so risk averse that we hedge everything with regulations, Secretary of State powers, and so on. I said at Second Reading that if we mean localism, we have to trust local government. Some may occasionally get it wrong, but is that a reason to legislate for the vast majority that are to be trusted and should be trusted?
I turn now to the particular of this, which is about council tax capping. I do not have to be quite as measured as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. I do not have to carry that history and I understand that. It is council tax capping, as others have said. In reality, it is probably the most effective capping that a Government have ever had, because I suspect that very few, if any, local authorities will take the risk of setting what is prescribed as an excessive tax. It will be a huge risk: not just the risk of whether they can or cannot win a referendum but the cost and administrative upheaval of having to rebill later.
That seems to me to fly in the face of a fairly basic principle of localism. I have always believed that it was a fundamental democratic principle that local councillors are elected—personally, I wish that they were elected under a fairer system, but, nevertheless, they are elected —to determine the needs of their local community and to balance those needs with the level of tax that has to be raised to meet them. That is a tricky balance. Then they are accountable for their decisions to the people who elect them, the local people. We come back to the fact that if there is to be a referendum on council tax levels, it should be the local people who determine the need for a referendum, not the Secretary of State. To me, that is what localism is about, and that is why I support both the general statements of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, and his particular in the amendment.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, this is a large group. I shall speak first to Amendments 129LZZZA, 129LZZG, 129LZZH, 129LZZJ, 129LZAA, 129LZAB, 129LZC, 129LZE, 129LZF, 129LABZA, 129LABZB and 129LBA.
These amendments from my noble friend Lord Jenkin would require a referendum to be held only in response to a local petition signed by local electors. I understand what my noble friend seeks to achieve. That may indeed be purer localism than the Government's approach, but there would be grave practical difficulties in going down that road. My noble friend seeks to allow the timing to be determined locally, but time will be very short for such a petition to be organised, as council tax must be set in early March. If democratic control is to be effective, and not just cause financial confusion, the electorate's endorsement or otherwise of the authority's decision should follow very soon after. Given the binding nature of the referendum, it would be necessary to establish that each signatory of the petition was a local government elector in the area. That would be a difficult, time-consuming, contentious and potentially expensive precursor to the main event, the referendum itself.
The amendments leave in place the notion of substitute calculations, but do not resolve with any certainty the basis on which those calculations should be made. In effect, the authority will be saying, “If you do not like this level of council tax, we will adopt that one”. Who is to say that the electorate will not feel the substitute to be excessive as well?
Localism Bill
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, I expect your Lordships will be familiar with the provisions of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, and specifically all the requirements laid down in Chapter 1. On the off-chance that all its details do not immediately spring to mind, perhaps I might be forgiven for outlining the relevant chapter.
The duties referred to relate to the promotion of democracy, and the Act sets out a number of issues upon which councils have a duty to promote understanding. They include the democratic arrangements of authorities: that is,
“(a) the functions of the authority;
(b) the democratic arrangements of the authority;
(c) how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part”.
The duty also includes:
“a duty to promote understanding of the following among local people—
(a) how to become a member of the principal local authority;
(b) what members of the principal local authority do;
(c) what support is available for members of the principal local authority”.
This is obviously designed to encourage greater participation and greater willingness on the part of people to stand for election and to serve as elected councillors.
In addition, the Act requires councils to promote the understanding of and information about a range of other organisations with which local councils are connected: for example, monitoring boards, courts boards and youth offending teams. The Act also requires councils to promote understanding among local people about the magistracy:
“(a) the functions of a lay justice;
(b) how a member of the public can become a lay justice;
(c) what is involved in being a lay justice”.
These are fairly simple tools with which to promote the involvement of people in local governance—using the term broadly—with both local authorities and, as I have indicated and as the Act makes clear, a range of other local institutions that impinge upon the life of the community and are very often dependent on the voluntary participation of members of that community. They are examples of engagement with society which any Government, including the present one, would presumably wish to encourage very strongly. I therefore do not understand why this Bill seeks to remove that duty. This Bill purports to be about localism and local government, about involving people in the decisions affecting their lives and those of their community, about encouraging wider civic responsibility, so why does this clause remove a basic, not particularly elaborate or expensive, duty to promote exactly that? What is this clause doing in this Bill?
Lord Tope
My Lords, the noble Lord began by suggesting that we might not remember the provisions of the local democracy and everything else Bill. Some of us in this House remember it only too vividly. The noble Lord had the good fortune, if I might say so, not to have been a Member of the House then, but I remind your Lordships that we spent many, many hours on this part of that Bill.
The short answer to the noble Lord’s question as to why my noble friends and I rejoice at this clause is prescription. We spend many hours in this House, including on this Bill, complaining about central government prescribing in detail to local government what it should and should not do, what it can and cannot do, and even more particularly how it should do it. That is what Part 1 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill did in enormous detail. I am sure my noble friend Lord Greaves will remind us exactly how many pages, words and possibly even letters it took to do this. That Bill started in your Lordships’ House and we spent a long time trying to improve that part of it, arguing that it was not the business of central government to prescribe exactly what local government should do and how they should do these things. Of course we should promote democracy. Of course we should encourage all these things. All good local authorities of whatever political control are already doing that. They have been doing it, in most cases very successfully, for many years and will carry on doing so whether there is an Act of Parliament requiring them to do so or not. So I, for one, rejoice at this clause, and this might be one of the few times I say that during this Committee.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I underline what my noble friend has just said. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, is not here to take part in the discussion today because she was the Minister who had to take this nonsense through the House. She did it with great composure and good manners, although I am not sure what she secretly thought about it. The other Minister involved was the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, who is here. Perhaps he can tell us whether he is quite as appalled that this duty is going as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, suggested.
I regret to say that I, too, am extremely familiar with the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, particularly this part of it, and it is seriously flawed. As an explanation of local democratic involvement, it completely missed out the voluntary sector, local partnerships and so on, which some of us tried to put in but failed. As my noble friend said, it is extremely prescriptive. If it is localism, it is top-down localism of the kind that we are criticising in this Bill, and it is very pleasant to see that this Bill is getting rid of a bit of that.
The effect that this part of the Act has had since it was passed appears to have been zero in most parts of the country. I am not aware of any authority having done anything significant as a result of this legislation, and in two-tier areas it set up a ridiculous bureaucratic system of exchange of information. Again, I have no idea how many councils have actually been carrying out this duty, but I suspect that a lot of them have just been ignoring the legislation because it was fairly useless. So I, too, rejoice that this duty is going, and I wish that the spirit behind this clause was more prevalent in some other parts of this Bill.
Lord Beecham
The noble Lord will be aware that, no doubt for good reasons, I was not a member of the previous Labour Government and I cannot answer for them. They did not do everything that we would have wished in local government. Perhaps this matter did not achieve the priority that some of us would have liked. In replying, the Minister is right to point out possible costs of the detailed guidance that his civil servants are so ready to produce. Of course, that does not mean that that degree of prescription is unnecessarily desirable and that the costs will necessarily have been incurred.
If we want to encourage participation in local government and voter turnout, the people standing for election or seeking to serve their community as magistrates need encouragement and information. The community as a whole needs to be informed about what its local authority can and cannot do, and how it might be influenced. Much of the Bill is about those processes going on in different ways at different levels. The duty would have reinforced the thrust of the Bill. With respect, I still do not see why it is being removed.
I note that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, is not in his place. Perhaps his two colleagues have taken him to one side because he subscribed to my amendment.
Lord Beecham
Indeed, but had he been here, I assume he would have supported the amendment to which he has ascribed his name, and with his long experience of local government—including as leader of the council in which we both serve—I would have thought that might carry some weight with his colleagues, but apparently not.
However, I hope it will be recognised that all of us have a responsibility in public and political life to encourage greater participation. If we are not going to do it under the auspices of a duty, let us at least in our various capacities endeavour to do it more broadly, because local democracy needs that kind of support.
The Bill proposes a different method, which I consider to be less satisfactory and which I believe the noble Lords may also consider unsatisfactory, which is the system of local referendums. We will debate it later today, no doubt. This is a much more elaborate system in a different context, because in that case one is seeking the opinion of a community on a simple proposition, subject to a referendum with little authority, given that there will hardly be a significant threshold to call a referendum, let alone in respect of turnout. This is a much more elaborate and expensive way of doing things than dealing with petitions properly and encouraging them to come forward.
Again, I do not understand why the Government feel it necessary to remove these provisions, accepting, again, that the prescriptive element is otiose and could be dispensed with. Petitions are a better way for the public to draw attention to matters with which they are concerned, and for the public to get a response to those concerns in a reasonably structured way. It is true that in some councils there is a process for public petitions—certainly, in my council there is, and no doubt others as well—but it is not universal, and it is not something which is sufficiently developed. In terms of local accountability and transparency, petitioning is a good method, and preferable to the alternative which is enshrined in the Bill. I ask the Government to reconsider this clause. Even if local referendums remain, which will be debated later, and perhaps a view taken on report, it is not mutually exclusive, and the petitioning process could be left as it now stands in the Bill.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I do not want to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and I will not do so. Once again, I rejoice at this clause and very much wish it to stand part of the Bill, unlike my noble friend, Lord Shipley, and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. We spent many hours—I have a recollection that it was probably many days—on this part of the Bill. We discussed pages and pages in extraordinary detail, debating how to collect, submit, and process petitions. When the Bill started in your Lordships’ House, the debate seemed to be based entirely on the premise that a petition to a local council was of the same format and standing as a petition to Parliament. In fact, all of us who have been councillors will have seen petitions to councils, and know that they are not usually the most formal documents you are likely to come across. They are of their nature at their best, because they are collected by and within the local community and do not have any formal standing or, often, any formal wording, as was originally suggested in the Bill.
We asked for evidence during all of this that local authorities were not dealing properly with petitions. I find it hard to believe that there can be a local authority of any size in the country that does not receive petitions. I wanted evidence that they were not dealing with them properly. The one merit of our hours of debate was that we discovered that quite a lot of local authorities, including the local authority of the then Secretary of State, did not adequately describe their procedure for dealing with petitions on their websites. The fault was not so much with the procedures of the council as with the adequacy of their websites. My own authority, and I am sure many others, improved their websites considerably as a result. That was a useful outcome, but it justified neither the hours that we spent on it nor the fact that it was all laid down in such prescriptive detail in a Bill.
The other useful factor of the debate was that it addressed the rather more modern issue of e-petitions, to which some local authorities probably had not then given sufficient attention. As a result of the Bill, and subsequently the Act, some authorities, including my own, probably gave them more consideration and put them on their websites.
We do not need an Act of Parliament to do that; we do not need pages and pages of prescription to do that; it is quite simply good practice, which could, possibly was and certainly should have been disseminated by the Local Government Association, in which the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, played such a leading part. I shall not disappoint the noble Lord: I once again rejoice at this clause.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I cannot resist adding just a little bit to what has been said. I went back to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act when I saw Clause 29 stand part on the Marshalled List. There are in it 10 pages of detailed, prescriptive instructions to local authorities about how to receive petitions. Our discussions on that part of the Bill were extremely long, and I hold my hands up and say I was largely responsible for that. I remember my noble friend Lord Tope, having arrived back from one of his European trips, coming into the Moses Room, where we were discussing the Bill in Committee, and saying, “Good heavens! You’re not still on petitions, are you?”. But we were. I again pay tribute to the two then Ministers, including the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who is in his place, for making some effort to improve that part of the Bill. I think that it was 14 or 15 pages when it started off, and we at least got it down to 10.
My view is that very few authorities have taken petitions through this system, and that most petitions to local authorities since the legislation came into operation have continued to be dealt with as they always have been. I do not think that my own council has had a single one. We have had one or two that appeared to qualify. In those cases, we have suggested that the petitioners do what everybody else does and just go along to the area committee, talk to the petition in the normal way, and get it dealt with within days rather than the weeks and weeks of bureaucratic procedure set out in that part of the Bill. So I, too, rejoice that this nonsense has gone. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, that we are getting a bigger and more dangerous nonsense, which we will discuss later on today.
Localism Bill
Lord Tope Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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“( ) The chargeable day must not fall outside the period 1 April 2005 to 31 March 2010.”
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, from day one, the Government have been committed to providing meaningful help to businesses hit by certain backdated rates bills, such as some businesses in ports. Despite the financial situation that we inherited, we have honoured our commitment to find a permanent solution to the problem and safeguard jobs and businesses. We are taking the necessary powers through Clause 41 of the Localism Bill to cancel these bills.
I welcome the spirit behind the amendment, which aims to clarify that only backdated rates liabilities between 1 April 2005 and 31 March 2010 can be cancelled. However, the current draft achieves this by limiting the cancellation to the 2005 rating list which applies only to chargeable days between 1 April 2005 and 31 March 2010, as the new 2010 list would apply from 1 April 2010. The draft regulations are clear that only an alteration to the rating list that occurred on or before 31 March 2010 can qualify for the cancellation. The amendment is not needed. New Section 49A(2)(a), as inserted by Clause 41, limits the cancellation policy to properties entered in the 2005 rating list, so the current draft already achieves the aim of the proposed amendment. I trust that this will be sufficient for the noble Lord to be able to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Does the noble Lord have a figure for the extent to which those who are getting the benefit of the removal of the imposition of backdating under the eight-year agreement have already discharged in whole or in part their obligations?
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, I have several papers here but that figure is not within them. I imagine this was raised when we discussed this a year or two back. However, I will write to the noble Lord and see that a copy of the letter is placed in the Library.