Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Viscount Astor and Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville

Thursday 16th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Astor]

Amendment 241, to which my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones referred, is in my name and concerns fees. Subsection (7) of the new clause to be inserted in the Licensing Act under Clause 122(2) states:

“In determining the amount of the fee, the licensing authority must seek to secure that the income from fees of that kind will equate, as nearly as possible, to the aggregate”.

Paragraph (a) of subsection (7) states that,

“the licensing authority’s costs referable to the discharge of the function to which the fee relates”.

I do not see any problem with that clause, which seems enormously sensible and would collect most of the costs. However, paragraph (b) of subsection (7) refers to,

“a reasonable share of the licensing authority’s general costs”.

That seems to be a recipe for confusion because there will be endless arguments about, first, what is a reasonable share and, secondly, what are the licensing authority’s general costs. I thought that when local government—there are many noble Lords here who are more expert than I am on it—determined fees and collected them, those fees related to the actual things that it was doing. The idea that this can cover general costs, as my noble friend says, would enable a local authority to say that general costs in many other areas—whether for collecting refuse or whatever—could somehow relate to this and then collect the fees. So there is a concern.

I hope that my noble friend can give me some comfort that this will not allow local authorities, which, as we know, are always short of money, to use this to collect fees, which would mean a greater burden on the industry than there should be. [Interruption.]

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

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