Christopher Chope
Main Page: Christopher Chope (Conservative - Christchurch)Local Government Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill
Christopher Chope Excerpts
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
This important Bill would extend the powers of the local government ombudsman to provide redress against local authorities that unreasonably ban events on the grounds of health and safety. The inspiration for the Bill comes from none other than Lord Young, whose commendable report to the Government on these issues last autumn resulted in a number of Government commitments. The Prime Minister wrote a foreword to the report stating that the Government agreed with all its recommendations and were keen to see them implemented. One of the recommendations that strikes a chord with people up and down the country—and certainly with hard-working voluntary organisations and charities—relates to local authority interference in charitable and other public activities based on arguments about health and safety.
As a suitable curtain-raiser for my Bill, and with wonderful timing, the edition of the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times published on Saturday 12 March carried the headline “‘Crazy’ safety rules ban running in pancake races”. The article went on to explain:
“‘Ludicrous’ health and safety rules have been panned for stopping competitors running along Beaulieu High Street in the traditional village pancake races. The annual event was flipped upside down as children and adults—including firefighters—were forbidden from going faster than walking pace on Tuesday afternoon. They were permitted to toss their pancakes.”
That was one thing that the health and safety people did not interfere with. The report went on:
“One eager youngster was even disqualified for infringing the ‘over-zealous’ rules by breaking into a run to cross the finishing line first. The road was closed to traffic and although the running ban was imposed to protect children, it was extended to adult races for the sake of ‘consistency’”.
Needless to say, my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), who was not in Lymington at the time, made some very robust comments that were communicated to the local paper. Who would stand up and justify such a ludicrous state of affairs?
Tom Brake
I am not going to do that, but I am going to ask my hon. Friend whether he has checked the veracity of that report. He will recall that a story went round the world about a head teacher who had banned children from taking part in conker competitions unless they were wearing goggles. It transpired that that had actually been a joke by the head teacher, and that it had turned into a “true story”, even though it was nothing of the sort.
Mr Chope
I am sure that this story is correct. The reports in the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times have a reputation locally for always being very accurate. Its editor, Charles Curry MBE, is over 90. I think he is one of the oldest newspaper editors in the country and I know he is conscientious in ensuring that everything that appears in the paper is fully in accordance with the truth.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
May I say how sorry I am that my hon. Friend did not move his Training Wage Bill? I would have voted for it, as I did for his sovereignty Bill, even though that needed some improvement. His second Bill did not need any improvement at all; I would have voted for it wholeheartedly.
On the present Bill, my hon. Friend has usefully drawn our attention to questions that need to be raised about local councils. We know that the Health and Safety Executive has tried to dispel the myths that have developed, and I pay tribute to the organisation. The conker incident was one it dealt with. As for local councils, however, my hon. Friend might want to turn his attention to the chilling effect of the questions that are raised. Too often, people ask whether there is a question that needs to be answered, but because they do not get an answer, they blame the local authority, which might not have taken any action and might not have been consulted. I hope that, whatever happens to the Bill, any local authority people reading our debate will agree to provide easy access to information and will try to let things happen rather than block them—unless there is an overwhelming reason why the organisers of an event need to be hindered.
Mr Chope
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention and for his indication of support for the Bill I did not move. I did not move it because the Government indicated that they would not support it, whereas they have expressed—informally, at any rate—some support for this Bill. It is important for Bills to make progress as well as be subject to debate, so I thought it would be better to move straight on to my Local Government Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill. I am sure that the issues raised in the Training Wage Bill can be debated on another occasion, as they are fundamental to our current record level of youth unemployment.
Sir Peter Bottomley
May I, through my hon. Friend, invite every employer—public, private or voluntary—to ask how many young people they employ and why the numbers are so few? If the numbers are few because the cost is too great and the effect of employing them not great enough, we can raise their effectiveness, lower the cost or both.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The message from it is that we need to do more preparation to ensure that the next time my Training Wage Bill or similar provision is brought forward, the Government have to face the pressure from employers and from youth organisations, which should help to see it carried through.
As far as local authority issues are concerned, I share my hon. Friend’s point that we must not tar all local authorities with the same brush. Indeed, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health showed its sense of humour and commitment to the game of conkers by sponsoring the conker championships after the incident mentioned earlier. It wanted to shrug off the spoilsport image and dispel the myth that it makes children wear protective goggles for a playground game. It also entered a team in the world conker championships held in Ashton, Northamptonshire back in 2008.
Sir Peter Bottomley
Is it possible that that team used plastic protective gloves when dipping conkers in vinegar to harden the outside in order to get a better chance of winning?
Mr Chope
I do not have that sort of information. Since this is all mythical, I am sure that could not have happened in any case, any more than people would have put their conkers in the oven without using protective oven gloves. Obviously, my hon. Friend has great experience in dealing with conkers. One of the most dangerous aspects is using the skewer to make a hole through the centre of the conker, as people need to make sure that they do not puncture themselves at the same time. This all goes down to experience, and why should we not allow people to gain experience in the normal way in the hurly-burly of everyday life and have a bit of fun at the same time? Why are we creating a health and safety culture in which people over-react or fail to act responsibly?
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I am distressed to hear about the Shrove Tuesday fun deniers in Hampshire. When we are putting through a Localism Bill, it might initially sound counter-intuitive and centralising to give more powers to the local government ombudsman, but we must remember that localism devolves powers to, and through, individual citizens and communities. What we are discussing is a great example of protecting the individual celebrations that enrich the lives of many of our communities.
Mr Chope
I share my hon. Friend’s misgivings. It is extraordinary that a national Parliament should have to intervene, and that we cannot have common sense applied at the local level, but if that is how it is, that is how it must be. In his report, Lord Young hoped that it would not be necessary to introduce too much legislation to implement his recommendation, but said that legislation would have to be introduced if there was no other way of ensuring a sense of perspective and proportionality.
I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Local Government will respond to the debate, and I am grateful to him for his informal communications with me over the last couple of days about the Bill. The Bill was drafted as an attempt to implement Lord Young’s recommendation. Clause 2 states:
“Where a local authority bans or imposes restrictions on any event on the grounds of health and safety, the local authority must provide the event organiser with written notification of the decision on the day on which the decision is taken…The written notification must include…the details of the ban or the restriction, and…reasons why the ban or the restriction has been imposed…On receipt of a written notification an event organiser may ask the local authority to review the decision and the local authority must conduct such a review within two weeks of the request being received and issue written notification of its further decision to the event organiser.”
If the local authority must justify its decision in the first place, and give reasons for it, it will probably be a lot more cautious about seeking to ban such events. An individual officer could not use his discretion or apply his prejudice to ban such events, as he would be brought to the attention of the chief executive and councillors of that local authority and have to provide justification. If the matter had not been dealt with satisfactorily within a fortnight, it could ultimately be referred to the local government ombudsman. The Bill would not impose an enormous extra burden on the local government ombudsman, but, in effect, would use his office as a long-stop to ensure that sanity prevailed in relation to health and safety issues.
The Beaulieu pancake race is only the most recent example. The examples that hit the headlines are inevitably the tip of the iceberg, as many other organisations are inhibited from even embarking on such activities because of fear of health and safety problems. I have various press cuttings, one of which, from Tameside, states:
“Town hall chiefs have denied being killjoys after they banned sparklers from Bonfire Night celebrations. Families going to the Richmond Street fair and firework display in Ashton have been told the children’s favourite is prohibited”,
because of
“health and safety considerations…A sparkler can reach temperatures of 1,000 degrees centigrade.”
I am surprised that we still allow sparklers even to be sold in the shops and that so many Members of the House have managed to get this far in life without being burned by a sparkler or having our children burned by sparklers.
There are many examples, including one in my constituency in Ferndown, where the erection of Christmas lights was banned not on the grounds of religion, fortunately, but on the grounds of health and safety. In another cutting, the BBC reported on 1 December that a west Wales town in Cardigan was told that it must go without Christmas lights in the main street because of health and safety concerns. Then, there is an example from the Virtual Festivals website, which reported that at a Devon rock festival last July a band was told that it would have to be without one of its props for an upcoming performance, because the use of a UFO—a fake spaceship—was banned on health and safety grounds,
“which deemed the elevated object a hazard to those in attendance.”
Sometimes, councils or organisers get around such bans by being imaginative. When a rugby club was told that it could not have a big bonfire on bonfire night, it showed its initiative by having a virtual bonfire. The club erected large screens so that people could see a picture of a big fire, and it had sound effects, giving people the impression that the fire was burning strongly. They had quite a lot of liquor to go with it, and I think that it was a very successful event. So it is not all bad news, but, because of the current ludicrous regime, people have had to use their initiative to try to get around such health and safety bans.
Other examples include sack races being banned because the children might fall over and hurt themselves and donkey derbies being banned because the children might hurt themselves. In May 2008, in the donkey derby at Llandudno in Wales, children were replaced as riders by inflatable animals because of health and safety laws, and there is the well-reported story of children not being allowed to wear swimming goggles in the pool on the basis that the goggles might snap and damage their faces. And so it goes on.
We have a killjoy atmosphere and a defensive approach to health and safety, and that is linked—this is obviously not part of my Bill, but part of the background to it—to Lord David Young’s concerns about the creation of an atmosphere in which people feel that they must not take risks because, if they do, they might open themselves up to significant compensation claims. Another of his recommendations is to try to deal with the so-called compensation culture, which I think lies behind many of these crazy examples.
In almost complete contrast with the first Bill today, which deals with reaffirming the sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament, this is very much a niche Bill designed to make our country a happier and more joyous place, to encourage more local participation and voluntary activity and to increase the range of activities in which children and adults can participate voluntarily, so that, when the history books come to be written, people do not find that all those traditional activities, which are held in villages and towns throughout the country each year, have been reduced to the lowest common denominator and can be exercised only virtually rather than in reality.
I propose that the Bill be read a Second time, and in so doing I thank the Minister for his indication that the Government are quite supportive of it. If it were ever to go into Committee, it would be some sort of record for myself, because, although I have spoken on numerous Bills in the Chamber on a Friday, I have yet to get a Bill into Committee, so I live in hope that this might be the one that breaks the mould.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I have a few points to make and questions to ask. The Minister may be able to respond to some of them.
One question is whether measures such as this are “localist” or “centralist”. While we have been dealing with the Localism Bill, what I have considered to be sensible amendments and suggestions have been rejected by Ministers on the grounds that they would impose burdens and extra costs on local authorities. We must be careful not to do that in this Bill. Has the Bill a centralist aspect, and should that be avoided? Perhaps the Minister will tell me what he thinks.
Another question is whether the proposed measures could be contained in guidance rather than a Bill which, potentially, imposes burdens on local authorities. Given that the Localism Bill confers 142 order-making powers on the Secretary of State, it would be surprising if there were not some way of incorporating this Bill’s provisions in them.
Clause 2(1) requires a local authority to
“provide the event organiser with written notification of the decision”
to ban or impose restrictions on an event
“on the day on which the decision is taken.”
I find that rather peculiar. In my experience of local government, we hold our meetings in the evenings. It does not strike me as feasible to require a local authority to give written notification on the day on which a decision is taken. It is just a question of wording. I think that some reasonably short time should be specified instead.
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Too often apparently insurmountable blockages are placed in the way of organisers who, rightly, want to get out there and represent their communities. Perhaps they want to have a street party to celebrate the royal wedding or another festival, or just to bring the community together on their estate or in their neighbourhood through a community day, yet they are constantly blocked. At every turn there is a cul-de-sac—a reason why it cannot be done.
Often those reasons are entirely spurious and trumped up. The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside mentioned the interesting situation in which the police apparently did not even know that they were being used as the excuse, or alibi, and cited as the fundamental blockage. Of course, that sounds very convincing. When a local authority officer tells someone that the police have banned the event, it is very hard to challenge that. It has an air of realism or likelihood about it—it sounds official—and of course that puts off all but the most tenacious citizens. Again, that is wrong.
Mr Chope
The Minister says, and I am grateful to him for it, that there is much in the Bill that he is content with, and that he wants it to go further. Will he explain how the Government propose to deal with the legislation arising from Lord Young’s recommendations? I have proposed a number of private Members’ Bills on individual items from that list of recommendations. How will the Government proceed with the overall implementation of the recommendations?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend should be under no illusion that we are a fundamentally deregulatory coalition Government who are keen to sweep away burdens. We want to allow people to break free, particularly in their own communities, in order to put on street parties or to change their communities through things such as neighbourhood plans. The direct answer is that we will implement the recommendations in a variety of ways, including through the Localism Bill, which has been referred to. The Bill takes forward many of Lord Young’s ideas and concepts, including through neighbourhood plans, which will allow neighbourhoods to come together and describe the kind of place that they want to be. That cannot necessarily be blocked by the town hall. Suddenly, we will find that there is the flexibility to do many more things.
Grant Shapps
I think that the whole House is grateful to my hon. Friend for his experience not only as a local authority leader, but of the residents who made up his local authority.
One reason I feel it is necessary to look further at this Bill, rather than rush into it, is that it raises some interesting points, such as those made by my hon. Friend just now and the shadow Minister. The question is, when is a decision reasonable and when is it not reasonable? Does the local government ombudsman have the position, knowledge or expertise to make such judgments? This is a serious point. The point of having the local government ombudsman is to provide redress for a problem that has happened, just as with the parliamentary ombudsman. Like other ombudsmen, the local government ombudsman does not usually judge whether something is within health and safety rules. To ask the ombudsman to do that would, I fear, be to ask it to create a new structure or back-office function. After all, knowing what is health and safety and what is not is usually the product of experience. It comes from the development of procedures and from an awful lot of work by the Health and Safety Executive, local authorities, safety officers and so on. If the ombudsman were suddenly plucked out to make that judgment, that would go much further than its usual role of redress. For that reason and several others, I do not feel we have our ducks in a row as far as the Bill goes.
Mr Chope
On that point, I think my right hon. Friend misreads the Bill. I want the ombudsman to adjudicate and to intervene where the process has not been complied with. I rely on the transparency of the process to bring to public attention the reasons for banning something, in the hope that there would not be any need for further adjudication.
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend again. His intervention demonstrates that there is quite a bit more work to be done before we all feel that sufficient procedures are in place and that the ombudsman would not overstep into a role of judgment on health and safety grounds, which I think would be taking things too far.
In the few minutes remaining, I wish to address some of the other comments that have been made. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South was interested to discover how we thought the Bill fitted with the idea of localism. I know that she has gained good experience—or at least experience—from the Localism Bill Committee, and that she has examined the matter carefully. We believe that localism can flourish only if we put a framework in place. If we say to people, “Just go and do whatever you want”, but there are no rules, no framework and no guidance—nothing in place at all, not even a skeleton—that is not a route to localism. The natural order would regain control and local authorities and central Government would revert to type.
We need to put limitations in place, and the Bill is in that spirit and is intended to do exactly that. It is intended to put in place a degree of control, with the possibility that citizens will have power over their local authorities rather than the other way around.