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

Debate between Jim Fitzpatrick and David Nuttall

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

The hon. Gentleman says that he is not convinced by the arguments of his hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who I think said that many of the decluttering proposals were being supported, indeed perhaps even sponsored, by English Heritage. Is the hon. Gentleman thus not only unconvinced, but confused that English Heritage is putting forward these proposals that are about trying to declutter our streets?

[Mr Nuttall]

What I cannot understand is why we would need legislation to remove a sign. I understand why legislation is needed to put a sign up, but I am not aware that once a sign is up legislation is required to remove it; someone could just go and take it down. I would be interested to know from others whether I am right. Perhaps after a certain period, a sign acquires some sort of importance. If it is attached to a listed building, it might become part of the listing. However, there is no evidence in the Bill that that is intended. There is merit in saying that special provisions should apply to the effect that clause 4 should not apply to any building in a conservation area.

Amendment 5 deals with a

“notice served under section 4(4), (8) or (11)(a).”

Such notices can be served in a number of ways. I leave aside the irrelevance of the whole clause; we will come to that in a moment. Clause 5(4) states that the notice could be left

“in the hands of a person who is…resident…employed on the land or leaving it conspicuously affixed to some building or object on or near the land”

or with someone who “appears to be resident”.

I have personal experience of doing the job. When I was first employed as a trainee legal executive, part of my role was to go to far-flung parts of Sheffield to serve such notices. I have done the job and know the problems of serving notices and trying to find somewhere suitable to fix them. I can imagine the situations that may arise when some poor council official is faced with being sent out on a rainy Friday morning to some distant part of London to try to serve a notice.

We need to consider the purpose of serving the notice. It is to ensure that a person affected by this legislation knows what is about to happen. The problem with clause 5(4) is that a notice can be given to someone who just “appears to be resident”. They might not be resident; they might be passing through or cleaning the windows. Some owners clean their own windows, while others employ people to do it. The person serving the notice might easily leave it with someone who they genuinely thought lived there, but that person might stuff it in their pocket without thinking twice.

I will not detain the House any further on this matter, but there is clearly scope for the four words in amendment 5 to be taken out of clause 5(4). The clause would be much better without them.

Amendment 6 would remove an even more bizarre subsection:

“This section shall not be taken to exclude the employment of any method of service not expressly provided for by it.”

In other words all the mentions of methods of serving a notice, such as by post, or sending it to an address that has been given or to a limited company, or, as I have just mentioned, of actually going and giving it to a person—an employee, perhaps—or putting it on an object nearby or on to the building, can be left aside and people can do whatever they like. They can just turn up, perhaps, or put it in a hot air balloon and hope it will drift by, and say, “Well, that was the method I thought of. It wasn’t a very good one, but this doesn’t exclude the employment of any method, so I thought of that. A colleague tried to convince me it should be a carrier pigeon, but I thought a balloon would be a good idea.” This is just nonsense.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) rightly brought up the question of e-mail. Subsection (5) may well be intended to provide for the use of e-mail, in which I case I would say that that is fine and in the modern world there is nothing wrong with serving notices by e-mail. Bearing in mind the long gestation of this Bill, however, I cannot understand why that is not expressly set out in it, if that is what the promoters had in mind.

Amendments 7 and 8 are best dealt with together. The issue in question is slightly confusing because it all revolves around the words “may” and “shall”. As we heard in the exchanges that took place a few moments ago, the interpretation of this clause is everything, really. The whole essence of the amendments of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is simply to make things clear. As the clause is drafted, the authority might make good the damage, but they might not. My hon. Friend’s amendment makes it the case that the highway “shall” be repaired. I appreciate the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East about that imposing an obligation on authorities, but I would have thought that they would want to see the highway properly maintained for a number of reasons, first from the point of view of their residents and secondly from the point of view of risk reduction. As we all know, it is a very costly exercise for local authorities not properly to maintain the highway, so I would have thought that they would in any event want to make good any damage caused by a contractor, and I see no problem with replacing “may” with “shall” or with moving the word “may” to before the word “recover” so that they may recover the expenses. It may well be that they will do that in every single case, so in 100% of cases they will have the right to go and recover the expenses from the contractor, but that does no more than the clause as drafted does. It already says that they may make good the damage and recover the expenses, so it implies that they may not. I cannot see why this amendment cannot be accepted.

Amendment 9 is very well thought out. I understand the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East made on behalf of the promoters, which was that they understandably want to recover the costs they have incurred, but I cannot understand why they should try to recover them from somebody who may have nothing to do with the damage caused. It makes sense to recover the costs from whoever has caused the damage, on the “polluter pays” principle—I entirely agree with that. However, simply saying that they should have the right to recover them from the owner of the land, without any explanation as to how the owner may be identified—without saying whether it is the freeholder, the leaseholder, the sub-lessee or the tenant—creates a lawyer’s paradise, a description I shall use in relation to amendment 20. I can just imagine the length of the litigation that might ensue from this provision were it allowed to remain in the Bill, so I strongly support amendment 9.