Local Government (Review of Decisions) Bill

David Heath Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Penny Mordaunt)]

I, too, put on record my congratulations and thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) for the sterling work he has done on introducing this important Bill. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) for his interest in the Bill and for giving me the opportunity to explain the Government’s position.

Local authorities should act in a reasonable, accountable and transparent manner. The Government have already taken action to make local authorities more accountable by improving town hall transparency in decision making—for instance, by allowing the public to report on town hall meetings by tweeting, blogging, and even, in some cases, filming those proceedings. This Bill adds to that transparency. It requires local authorities to put their health and safety related decisions about events in writing. We would already expect them to do that anyway. It is reasonable to expect that if an authority is advising someone of something, it does so in an e-mail or a letter.

This Bill adds to the accountability of local authorities. It gives the person who received the decision or the event organiser, if that is a different person, the right to request a review that the local authority must complete in no more than 15 days.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

One potential omission is that, I believe, the Bill applies to local authorities but not to the police. Local authorities will often take the advice of the police. Surely it cannot be sufficient, for a local authority merely to give the reason that it was following police advice without giving the substance of that advice.

[Penny Mordaunt]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Bill strengthens accountability. All the considerations that needed to be taken into account when making these decisions should be put in writing as opposed to not being so; that is where concerns have arisen. It is right that the event organiser should be able to challenge decisions. As we have heard, many local authorities and individuals working within them operate in a very pragmatic and common-sense way and have good transparency. However, we want these assurances to be provided because, fundamentally, we all want our communities to be able to put on these events without being worried about the bureaucracy or any other concerns.

We consider that this is a proportionate approach. It puts in place a sensible structure—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Heath]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot). I think the most remarkable thing he said was that he read the Daily Mail expecting to find an article that was not pure jibberish. As he says, that is the sort of thing we can say with impunity knowing that we are about to leave the House.

I welcome the Bill. It is good, if modest, as the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) recognised. I particularly congratulate him on having taken it to this stage. As I said last Friday, that is something that has escaped me in the 18 years of my parliamentary career. I have never taken a private Member’s Bill to this level of completion and he has done very well to do so.

The Bill deals with some of the excesses of what is described as the “health and safety culture”. Let me say from the start that an awful lot of what we read about things being stopped on health and safety grounds is in fact apocryphal. It is largely not the consequence of local authorities taking decisions on the basis of Health and Safety Executive advice, but of people at a much lower level of responsibility deciding for themselves what the law might say and overreacting to it. I am afraid that the Bill will not help with the over-zealous head teacher or the extraordinarily risk-averse scout leader who prevent people from doing perfectly sensible things, but I hope that it will provide a level of consistency through transparency, in that local authorities will be required to give their reasons, and through the review process. I hope that that requirement will mean that when an authority is clearly out of line with authorities elsewhere in its interpretation of the rules that will be brought to light and will, perhaps, result in a change of decision.

I want to raise one specific issue, to which I alluded in my intervention on the Minister, and that is police advice. An awful lot of what a local authority does in its licensing of public events is based on police advice and the Bill does not apply to the police. The police can therefore say whatever they like. They will of course act responsibly, because the police do that, but the advice might be wildly inconsistent. I hope that when local authorities are giving reasons they will not hide behind the fact that they have received advice from the police to a particular effect, but will set out what that advice is so that we have transparency and the ability to see whether the advice is consistent across the country.

I say that with a particular example in mind, from my own constituency and my own county. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) talked about the galas in County Durham. In Somerset we have one of the largest series of public events in the country, of which no one has ever heard: the Somerset illuminated carnivals. They have been going for 400 years, and they are the biggest illuminated carnivals in the world. They attract a large number of people—the Bridgwater carnival attracts up to 100,000, and sometimes more—and they probably bring about £40 million into the local economy each year. They have also raised about £2 million in charitable street collections, so they are very, very big.

Over the years, I have had to come back to the House repeatedly to draw attention to regulatory challenges to the Somerset carnivals—not because anyone has deliberately set out to harm them, but simply because no one has thought of how certain regulations apply to them. I had to do that during the passage of the Bill that became the Licensing Act 2003, for instance. One of the key factors is the intervention of the police, in the form of road closure orders, vehicle special orders, and the interpretation of rules governing who may drive a tractor pulling a large float, which changes periodically. All those factors are fed into the licensing process.

Over the years, I have observed huge differences in interpretation between neighbouring forces. Again, no one is intentionally being difficult—often the police could not be more helpful when they are consulted about these matters, and the same applies to the local authorities—but the fact is that Avon and Somerset may make a decision based on its interpretation of the requirements, while Dorset’s interpretation may be entirely different.

My plea is this. I should like the Bill—along with, perhaps, departmental guidance for local authorities—to provide a level of transparency that will enable those who manage events to say to the police, “You have made your decision on the basis of your interpretation of the law, but your neighbouring force has come up with a completely different interpretation, and that is having an effect on the licensing costs that we incur,” in respect of, for instance, additional drivers. Although such decisions will not prevent an event from taking place, they may make it less viable, and may eventually cause its extinction. I, for one, do not want to see the extinction of an event which has been taking place for 400 years, which is a lively part of the culture in our part of the world, and which, I think, adds to the gaiety of the nation.

Having said that, I welcome the Bill, but I hope that it can be built on to improve still further the licensing environment in which we must deal with public events.