Deregulation Bill

Baroness Hanham Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friend and, in deference to my other noble friend sitting on the other side of me, I am sure that he did not mean to say that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea makes a profit from parking because it would, of course, be illegal. I am quite sure that it does not do that. I felt obliged to say that.

Before I speak to the amendment more fully, and with the permission of the Committee, I want to make a small correction to something I said in Grand Committee last Thursday—as I have been requested to do. In col. GC 452 of that Committee’s meeting, I said—or I am reported as saying—that the company, onefinestay, believed that regulation should apply to properties that are the “sole or main residence” of the owner. That is not the company’s policy, and I have agreed to put on record at the first opportunity that the position of onefinestay is that the regulation should apply to all residences, including primary and secondary residences, not simply to one sole or main residence. I have put that on record. I am certain that we will return to this subject at another date and I need say no more about that today.

I return to the thorny issue of parking. For 40 years, until last May, I represented a town centre ward in a London borough. Many, probably most, of the houses and streets in that ward were built before the motor car was invented. Pretty well all the houses there were built at a time when it was inconceivable that the people living in them would be able to afford to own and run a car, let alone two or more, in some cases. One of the consequences is that the basic problem now in what used to be my ward is that there is simply not enough road space to accommodate residents’ own cars, let alone all the other demands on the road space. As a reward for my long service on the council, during my last year there I was given political responsibility for implementing—and, I have to say, changing a little—parking policy. It encouraged me to accept retirement, and I fervently hoped last May that I would never, ever again have to deal with parking issues and parking problems. It follows that I am not entirely grateful to Mr Pickles for ensuring—sounding very much more like Friday night in the pub than anything I would hear on the streets—that I am here talking again about parking policy.

I want to make some fundamental points that I know are not widely perceived. Good parking services in most councils all over the country are there to work on behalf of the local residents and, in most cases, on behalf of motorists, too. I strongly believe that, although I understand only too well why there is a popular impression to the contrary. Having had to deal with the sort of problems that I described, I know from experience that good parking services may not provide the road space necessary to solve the problem but can go a long way to making life more tolerable for residents and manageable for non-residents who need to use those roads and streets.

As has been said—indeed, I began by saying it—local authorities are not allowed by law to make a profit from parking. With deference to my noble friend Lady Hanham, who is sitting next to me, most local authorities are unable to make the sort of income that Westminster or Kensington and Chelsea are able to make. Nor, indeed, do most councils have the sort of problems that those two authorities have to deal with. Most local authorities, including my former authority, do not make a substantial profit—or income; I shall get myself into trouble—out of parking services by the time they have covered all the expenses that are necessary. Such surplus income as may arise is, and has to be, used for transport-related actions. That is important to understand.

We come now to this clause. I think that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, made reference to the Government’s consultation on local authority parking policies which took place at the very end of last year and the early part of this year. I think I am right in saying that eight organisations, as distinct from individuals, responded to that. Six of those eight were totally opposed to the Government’s proposals. The two that were not opposed—the motoring organisations—also did not fully support the Government’s proposals, which makes me even more concerned about why the Government—my Government—are still insisting on going ahead with this measure.

As my noble friend Lord Bradshaw has just said, if anything should be the responsibility of a local authority, it should surely be parking services. The local authority, and those elected to represent the local residents, best know the local circumstances and the local conditions, which vary not just from authority to authority but, frankly, from area to area, even from street to street. It is they who are in a position to determine what should and should not be done in implementing parking policy in a local authority area. Given my 40 years’ experience, I wonder why the Government are so foolish as to want to enter this minefield. For that reason, my noble friend Lord Bradshaw put down the proposal that this clause should not stand part of the Bill—that is, to delete the clause altogether. Frankly, I still think that would be the best thing that could happen. If the Government are minded to go ahead with the clause, I certainly accept that the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, would go some way to mitigate it. Therefore, if that is the case, I would largely support those amendments, but I still believe that it is better to leave this matter to local authorities, whose job it is to deal with it.

The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, also said that yesterday afternoon we received a copy of the draft regulations from the Minister. I am very grateful for that and am pleased that we received it in time for this meeting, although I am sure that the Minister and noble Lords will understand that I certainly have not had time in the intervening 24 hours to have a detailed look at it or even to consult those who know far more about it than I do. I hope that the Minister will tell me that I am wrong on this because I want to be wrong, but, from my first impression, it looks to me as if the draft regulations would allow CCTV enforcement of a school clearway—the zig-zag lines—but not elsewhere. In other words, you can use a camera to enforce penalties with regard to the 10 yards round a school clearway but not a little further down the street. From my experience as a councillor with a number of primary schools located in streets such as I have described, that is simply ludicrous. Cars park all the way down the road. The residents want to have enforcement to stop cars doing that or to deal with car drivers who park inconsiderately and foolishly all the way down the road. However, if these regulations were enforced, and if I am correct—as I say, I hope that I am not—we are going to be in a position of having to tell those residents who want the local authority to enforce them, “I am sorry, we can enforce them for only 10 yards. We can’t enforce them down the rest of the road”. I am no longer a councillor, thank goodness, but I invite the Minister to explain to some of my former constituents why the regulations can be enforced for 10 yards but not for the rest of the road. That is just one point that occurs to me, which I hope the Minister will tell me I am wrong about. However, I fear that I may not be.

This illustrates the danger in the Government interfering with all this. The local authorities best know how to deal with this issue and most of them do so well. Of course, mistakes are made and silly things happen sometimes; they should not, but they do. However, we now have a very good appeals system that works fairly. Nobody has suggested that there is anything significantly wrong with that. Why do we not leave the situation as it is? For all these reasons and many more, my noble friend Lord Bradshaw and I wish to give the Government the opportunity to think again and not to enter what I assure them is a minefield and an area where they simply will not win, and to leave it to the local authorities which best know their own areas to carry on dealing with the things that they have had to deal with for many years.

[Baroness Hanham (Con)]

My Lords, I have been mentioned a couple of times by my noble friend beside me, and I am very grateful to him for explaining the policies of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the use of parking moneys, and why our roads are so beautifully kept. I remind the Committee at this stage of my co-presidency of London Councils and my former membership of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for the fact that I was rushing down from a Select Committee and was about three minutes late for the start of the debate.

I support what has been said about this being a local authority matter. If anybody who has been involved in local government knows anything about it, there are two things that really irritate residents. The first is planning and the second is parking. How parking is controlled and enforced is totally a matter for local authorities. Noble Lords know as well as I do that Westminster City Council has completely different parking regulations to those in Kensington and Chelsea. They were very difficult to cope with to start with, but everybody has not got used to the fact that you cannot just totally rely on the same things. They have different rules of enforcement, too. Kensington and Chelsea does not employ cameras for parking enforcement, while other councils do. Whose choice is it that that should happen? Why is not that the choice of the borough—how it enforces it? If you do not have cameras, you have to put people on the streets. I came across two today, and one was on a scooter with his little yellow hat on, while one was on his bike with his little yellow hat on. They were running up and down the road. You have to have a bigger army of those to keep up enforcement if you cannot use cameras.

Where is the mischief that has brought about this proposal? Who has been complaining about cameras for parking enforcement? Cameras are used for all sorts of things in our streets, some of them extremely helpful. Some cameras catch criminals and help to protect people who are walking up and down the street. Some provide for the traffic flows. It is very annoying being caught by a camera. I can declare that I was caught by one while sitting at a box junction a little while ago. I did not know that there was a camera there, and I was a bit stuck. I got a traffic fine, and rightly so, because what I was doing was against the law. I was not doing what the law said and hoping that I would get away with it, but I did not. That is because I was breaking the law, and when people go against the law on parking arrangements brought in by local councils, which decide on the parking restrictions, it is up to the local authority to enforce it themselves. That is particularly essential for major cities, where there are really tight areas for parking, as well as in small county towns, which are different to anywhere else.

My former position as a Minister in the DCLG leaves me in no other position than to say that I do not know at all why the department has set off down this road, and it would be a frightfully good thing if it got away from it.

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Tope, I am not an ex-councillor. I am not sure that it is a misfortune or fortune still to be an elected member of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. My ward has in it two large upper schools and a very large primary school. Because of the topography and the nature of the communities of Bradford, which noble Lords will know is a very large area, many children, however large or small, are brought by parents in cars. The ensuing chaos is something that you cannot believe. Not only is it chaotic and dangerous; it is also detrimental to economic growth in the area. When cars cause obstacles to vehicles passing through a community, it delays important business traffic and people choose not to open businesses in places where they cannot get quickly to their destination. If councils do not have the opportunity to use everything possible to control unsightly, difficult and inconsiderate parking, we will have even more chaos.

I could not agree more with all my colleagues on the Benches in front of me: it really should be a matter for local authorities to determine how this is dealt with, certainly not somebody who thinks that a zig-zag line outside a school is the only place where there is a problem. We even have situations, because of inconsiderate parking, in which emergency vehicles cannot get through at school times. This is therefore a step too far, which the Government should not be considering.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hanham]

My Lords, I tried to get my name attached to the clause stand part debate but somehow I failed; I think I have to start earlier than the day before. I support this very strongly. At the moment, the area that runs the decriminalised system for waste collection is of course Greater London, and it does so under the London Local Authorities Act 2007. It has been doing that spectacularly successfully ever since. It has its own rules, guidelines, enforcement and appeals process.

What happens now? Schedule 11 makes it clear that that Act is going to have to be changed to be in accordance with this new and, as my noble friend Lord Tope said, extremely complicated system of enforcement. Why does anyone need to tamper with London when it is already running a system and could continue to run it as it is without any further interventions? Why would we want to ensure that the fine that the local authorities in London are able to charge at the moment should be reduced under the Secretary of State’s say-so? Why should we interfere in any way at all with the appeals system, which is currently run by local councils and is a fairly quick and straightforward process?

To say that I am baffled by these proposals would be to put it mildly. There is probably no difficulty with a decriminalised system, but the intervention and regulations—in a Deregulation Bill—that are going to support this seem to be way over the top for anything that is rational. The Minister talks about people putting out rubbish in the wrong place, in the wrong container, at the wrong time and on the wrong day, and talks about how local authorities can run that system, but it does not require five steps of enforcement. At the moment, London puts out an enforcement notice for a penalty, and that is it. Here we have written warnings, a waiting period, appeals, notices of intent—all this over possibly one refuse bag put out in the wrong place. That really seems to be excessive in the extreme.

Schedule 11 should be abandoned. London should carry on what it is doing. It has set the tone and indeed set the stage; it has done the work, and it knows what it is doing. If the Secretary of State or the Government insist on the rest of the country having this decriminalised way of doing things then London will have to do that, but I do not think that it should do it under the measures that are in the Bill. I ask the Minister why Schedule 11 should be there at all, why London, which is already running its own system, should be involved, and why there is any question at all that it should have to lower the fine that it is currently able to charge, which is having a reasonable effect. The penalty notices are for £60. These days, people do not think that a £60 penalty is very much; they are paying £80 for parking. I strongly support my noble friend on this issue, and I want to ensure that the consideration of London is that London should be left running its own scheme.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, if the Committee will indulge me for a moment, I have kind of wandered in off the street on this particular item of business. If the Government wish to simplify and deregulate in this area, the most important thing is that they have to get local authorities to unify their procedures on waste and renewable waste. If you travel around the country, you see that every single local authority has a different policy on renewable waste. That is so bad for the renewable agenda and for recirculation. Some local authorities tell you to put all your renewables in together, such as glass, plastic and tin, and to put your waste into another bin. Others want you to divide your glass, plastic and tin separately, while others will not take glass at all and you have to go to the bottle bank, which is usually full up. If the Government wish to simplify matters, they should have some form of encouragement for local authorities to unify their policies over the whole question of waste, which at the moment is a disgrace.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, living in one local authority area during the week and in another at the weekend, I am very conscious that standards differ from one local authority to another.

It is a brave Minister, I know, who stands up to the Local Government Association embattled. The Government’s intention in these measures is to reduce the burden of regulation on householders. Representations were made on behalf of householders and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, has mentioned, there was also a press campaign which suggested that the threat of large fines and criminal convictions is disproportionate to what is often in the first instance a case of people making mistakes about which bin to put out when and what to put in each. Again, as the noble Lord has just said, that varies from one local authority to another. My family is lucky in that the two local authorities in whose areas we live are relatively permissive about where you put each particular bit of waste.

The noble Lord’s amendment would reduce the fines available to level 1 on the standard scale instead moving to a civil basis. The Government think that it is disproportionate for an individual to be treated like a criminal when they may make a mistake putting their bins out for collection, and it is not right that they risk a higher fine for making this type of mistake than they would, for example, for deliberate shoplifting.

I am conscious that some of my noble friends are concerned that this clause may increase burdens on local authorities. I reassure them that our proposals do not add significant burdens compared to how the current arrangements operate in practice. As always in questions of regulation and deregulation, there is the question of the balance of burdens. The Government’s view is that we should be concerned to reduce the balance of burdens on householders.

I am also aware that some of my noble friends are worried that this clause might have a negative impact on recycling rates. We are committed to meeting our recycling targets and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, has remarked, we have made considerable progress in recent years in that direction. The way to do this is to support people as they do the right thing rather than threaten them with criminal sanctions and fines of up to £1,000.

Currently, under Section 46 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, householders are subject to criminal sanctions and a fine of up to £1,000 if they do not comply with local authority requirements for presenting their waste for collection. In contrast, a shoplifter may be issued with an £90 penalty notice for disorder for their first offence. The Government’s argument is that it is disproportionate for an individual to be treated like a criminal when they make a mistake putting their bins out for collection, and it is not right that they risk a higher fine for making this type of mistake than for shoplifting.

Nevertheless, we recognise that local authorities need some powers to deal with people who spoil the local area by the way they put out their waste, which is why the clause provides for a civil sanctions regime. Under this system, fixed penalties between £60 and £80 will be available if a person has failed to present their household waste as required, and this failure causes a nuisance or is detrimental to the locality. This is what we refer to in shorthand terms as the “harm to local amenity” test, covering such things as putting waste out in a way that causes obstruction to neighbours, unreasonably impedes access to pavements, attracts foxes, rats or other vermin, or is an eyesore.

We expect local authorities to use effective communications to ensure that householders know what they can recycle; for example, by making it easier to know which plastics go in which bin. On the balance of the evidence presented in response to the consultation exercise, which the noble Lord, Lord Tope, raised, I will have to write to him.

I make it clear that we intend to retain the current criminal system applying to commercial waste. The sanctions available to combat more serious offences like fly-tipping are also unaffected by the provisions in the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, raised Schedule 11, which amends the London Local Authorities Act 2007 and gives London authorities similar powers to issue penalty charges to householders. We are amending the London Local Authorities Act so that civil sanctions and financial penalties will be imposed only if a householder fails the “harm to local amenity” test, and the level of penalties will be the same as under the Environmental Protection Act. In effect, the same provisions will apply throughout England. There will therefore be a degree of standardisation. I hope that this may persuade the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Baroness Hanham]

Can the Minister explain something to me? Subsection (1) of new Section 46B of the Environmental Protection Act says:

“The amount of the monetary penalty that a person may be required to pay to a waste collection authority … is … the amount specified by the waste collection authority”.

That would seem to indicate that the waste collection authority had the right to set a charge. It then goes on to say in subsection (2) that:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision in connection with the powers”—

one of those powers being the setting of the penalty. I seek clarity as to whether there will be a power for a local authority to set its penalty charge. New Section 20B of the London Local Authorities Act, in Schedule 11 to the Bill, is quite specific that:

“It is to be the duty of the borough councils to set the levels of penalty charges payable to them”.

That sounds great. If they must do it, they have got to do it. However, under the subsequent subsection (4) of new Section 20B:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision”,

for that.

Which is it? Will it be left to local authorities to set their own penalties? I understand that there will be a regime. Or will it be regulations set by the Secretary of State? It does matter.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Baroness. At this point I may be better off writing to her to explain in detail. My note says that the Secretary of State will make the regulations, but I recognise that there is a degree of ambiguity there. We will make sure that we clarify that.