Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, back the words of our able chair on this Select Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I support what she has said and I note from the letter which we, as members of the committee, received only at 9 am today that the Leader of the House said:

“I am, however, pleased to hear that members of the committee are likely to be bringing their live insights into the policy to bear when the amendments are considered”—

so I would hate to let her down. I would therefore like to address in particular the issue of the late-night levy, which, as the Minister said, was introduced in 2011 and has had only seven local authorities take it up—seven, out of all the possibilities. There must be a reason for that. Of all of those, I shall examine Cheltenham, where the council withdrew the late-night levy. It did so because it raised less than 39% of the projected first-year income of £199,000.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

We will not pre-empt what the committee is going to say, so we have to wait until we hear from it.

[Baroness Grender]

The Minister has said we cannot deal in hypotheticals, and yet we are about to accept some amendments which may well, in the light of the conclusions of our committee, be hypothetical. It seems to me that the most sensible solution is to not currently have amendments in this area, because those very amendments may be hypothetical.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I think I explained that the reason we proceeded with the amendments was because the alcohol provisions were included in the Bill on the Commons introduction in February, so this is an appropriate vehicle to legislate on the new measures. That is why we have brought them forward now. This was discussed in the Commons, and these government amendments respond, in part, to the ones that were tabled in the Commons.