London Local Authorities and Transport for London (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, on the fortitude and tenacity he has shown on the Bill. I shall make only one or two points. As the noble Lord said, the Bill had its far-from-lengthy Second Reading—I think that it amounted to five lines in Hansard—more than three years ago, following which it was committed to a Select Committee. The committee reported in April 2009 and approved the Bill with a small number of amendments. It now stands as it was following the committee’s consideration. As my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester said, there were no petitions against the clauses that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, now seeks to remove. There was opposition to those clauses from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The question is: what has been going on behind the scenes over the past 23 months?

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, threw a little light on the issue, but we should be told more. Apparently, representations were made against these clauses by organisations and businesses in the sport and entertainment industries—organisations and businesses that did not petition the Select Committee which would then almost certainly have called them to give evidence in public so that everyone could have heard their arguments. These organisations and businesses have instead been lobbying in private. We have not been told that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has single-handedly got the Bill changed in the face of the wishes of the promoters and the report of the Select Committee.

The Select Committee heard evidence from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham which said that the additional cost of clearing up outside the ground after a Chelsea football match was an average of £1,000 a game. It gave evidence of the amount that Chelsea paid in business rates and contrasted it with organisations that paid much more but which did not generate the same traffic management and waste clearance costs. Chelsea is a club with a certain amount of money. At the end of January it spent more than £70 million on two new players. At a cost of £1,000 on average a game for the additional cost of clearing up outside the ground, £70 million would pay for that to be done for around the next 2,000 years.

At a time when local government is having to tighten its belt, services are being cut and closed down and staff are receiving redundancy notices, why is it still felt appropriate, as the deletion of these clauses suggests, for local government and the council tax payer—of which I am one—to have to continue to pay the additional clearing up costs in the streets around a sporting and entertainment event that is put on for commercial gain? Surely organisations and businesses pay business rates just as individual householders pay council tax for the removal of waste from their own premises, not for the removal of waste that they have caused to be generated in the public streets outside as a result of the promotion of an event for that organisation’s commercial gain. Clearly that was the view of the promoters of the Bill and of the Select Committee. So what has happened to cause the promoters to change their mind under pressure over these clauses being in the Bill, as revealed by the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, at this late stage? Who has been making representations in private that they were not prepared to make publicly in front of the Select Committee? I hope that either the Minister or the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, will enlighten your Lordships’ House on that point.

We have no intention of seeking to stop the Bill. There is much that is non-controversial within it, which clearly the local authorities concerned wish to see implemented. However, a little more information about the lobbying that has—or has not—been going on in private over the past two years to achieve a change in a Bill with which the promoters and the Select Committee were happy, and against which there had been no petitions is surely not too much to ask from either the Minister when he responds, or perhaps more appropriately, from the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, when he replies.

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, referred to understandings or to a memorandum of understanding. I hope he will say just how strong and meaningful are the understandings that have apparently been reached and in what circumstances local authorities’ costs will be reimbursed, at what level and by whom. Are they written understandings? Are they legally binding? I hope the noble Lord will provide the answers because there must be some concern, subject to the noble Lord’s response, that they will prove worthless and meaningless in the light of the removal of these clauses from the Bill.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, it is more than two years since Parliament last considered this private Bill, so it is the first time that it has been considered by the coalition Government. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding for his explanation of the Bill. I should point out to the House that my noble friend is leading on the Bill—not me. The noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Faulkner of Worcester, have made some points about procedure. I want to make it clear that it is not a matter for me but a matter for the Procedure Committee of your Lordships’ House, as I am sure all noble Lords would agree. However, this is not the first time that the London local authorities and Transport for London have promoted a private Bill together. The Bill would confer a variety of powers on its promoters to improve streetscape and the local public realm. My noble friend has explained how that will work with the Bill so well that it is unnecessary for me to repeat his work there.

The Bill's provisions would also enable the promoters to enforce sanctions against anybody giving traffic unauthorised access to gated roads and enforce moving traffic and parking contraventions against pedicab owners and operators where the owner or operator has entered into a voluntary registration scheme. Again, my noble friend has given a comprehensive explanation. The Bill would also put in place a comprehensive system to allow the installation and use of charging points for electric vehicles on the highway in locations across the capital.

I acknowledge the amendments that my noble friend Lord Jenkin has proposed and explained so well. Although I very much doubt that we will be voting on the Bill this evening, I should like on behalf of the Government to comment on a few points of note for the record. The Bill creates various new civil and criminal offences in relation to improper conduct when depositing a builder's skip on the highway; the unlawful opening of a gated road to unauthorised traffic; the improper use of a charging point for electric vehicles; and moving traffic and parking contraventions by pedicabs.

The Government are committed not to create new offences unless it is truly necessary to do so. My noble friend Lady Kramer made some pertinent points about that. As such, I should state now that before the Bill reaches its Committee stage in the other place, the promoters will need to have submitted to the Ministry of Justice their assessment of the impact of creating these offences. This will allow the Government to come to an informed view on whether their creation is appropriate. Other clauses have the potential to impose burdens on business, particularly the construction industry. I am referring to the clauses relating to the placement of skips on the highway and to recovering the cost of remedial work on the highway from a developer after a development has taken place.

The Government's position on increasing the burden on business is very clear and we will be considering whether, in our view, the Bill would create an unacceptable burden on business in order to make our views known before the Bill reaches Committee stage in the other place. The Government have already notified the promoters of some clauses which we feel could be improved or altered by some minor amendments, particularly with regard to the affixing of street furniture to buildings, where we would like the owner of the building which is to have street furniture affixed served a notice stating the exact date on which the work will begin and the terms of usage of electric vehicle charging points installed and operated using the powers conferred by the Bill.

We will be seeking to reach agreement on amendments with the promoters before Committee stage in the other place as it is then that the Bill can next be substantially amended. Aside from the specific points I have raised this evening, the Government are content that the Bill passes to the other place, where it can be further scrutinised to ensure that the points I have raised—most notably in relation to the creation of new offences and the imposition of new burdens on business—can be addressed to the Government’s full satisfaction. I conclude by thanking my noble friend for putting forward the Bill.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and for the important comments that have been made. I was amused by my noble friend Lord St John of Fawsley, who congratulated me on my persistence. I have to say that that is wholly undeserved. I did not move Second Reading. The people who can be congratulated are the promoters, the London boroughs and Transport for London. I shall take his kind words about that and simply comment that at a very early stage in my career, someone said to me, exactly as my noble friend has said, “Patrick, if you want to achieve anything, keep pegging away”. In my life I have tried to follow that nostrum. However, I am grateful to my noble friend.

I turn to my noble friend Lady Kramer. I have a lot of sympathy with her on her suggestion that much of this ought not to come to the Floor of the House in a Private Bill in this form. All I can say to her, in some comfort, is that before 1992 a great many more Private Bills came on to the Floor of the House. However, in that year the Transport and Works Act was passed and all the railway Bills, all the major road Bills and all the rest of it have now disappeared, and what is left are the occasional local authority measures, such as we have here and we had earlier in the previous Parliament from Manchester and others; and, of course, occasionally the universities need to have legislation to amend their statutes. However, I am sure that my noble friend on the Front Bench will have heard her plea for something on more general powers.

I have to say in relation to London—and I have lived in London almost the whole of my working life—that it has conditions and circumstances that are very different from any other city in the country, and I am not surprised that both the City of London and the London local authorities have felt the need from time to time to introduce legislation to deal with the problems which they face. My noble friend also welcomed the negotiated agreement—I will come to the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Faulkner and Lord Rosser, in a moment. All I can say at this stage is that I was grateful for my noble friend Lady Kramer’s support on that.

As for the deal done with the Football League and the Premier League, I understand the indignation that noble Lords may have felt that this was done outwith the consideration of the Select Committee. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said, the Select Committee examined the authorities from Hammersmith and Fulham. It heard the evidence and felt that the promoters had made a good case for their clauses, and here we are with an agreement having been reached outside the committee. Whether or not it was a smoke-filled room, I do not know; but, nevertheless, it was reached without the full scrutiny that it would have had if it had gone before the Select Committee. I have some sympathy with that point. I asked a number of questions myself about whether there was any reason why the sporting authorities were not aware of what was in the Bill. It is their job to make sure that they do. They are very wealthy organisations; they spend billions of pounds, as one noble Lord said, on buying footballers and so on. I do not see why they could not have done this before, but the fact remains that they did not. They did not put up a petition. The committee therefore could not hear the petition and reach a conclusion on it.

So what have we got? As I explained in my opening speech, after very prolonged discussions a memorandum of understanding has been reached. In each case the club that falls within the definition, which has a reasonably substantial attendance at its events, has to enter into agreement with the local authority to cover the costs that would have been covered by these two clauses. If someone says to me, “An agreement to agree is not worth the paper that it is written on”, I would have to say that I was brought up in my legal studies entirely to accept that. However, there rests behind this the fact—and the sporting authorities are in no doubt about this at all—that if they do not reach agreements of the sort envisaged in this memorandum of understanding within a clear time limit which is spelt out here, then future legislation will be brought forward to reinstate these clauses.