Lord Avebury
Main Page: Lord Avebury (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have one amendment in this group—Amendment 128EZA—that I will speak to. I will not speak to Amendment 128A in the group. I spent some time last night and this morning trying to liberate it from the group but failed miserably. I am now degrouping it, and it will come back in the group that starts with Amendment 126A. I hope that that does not cause the Minister too much difficulty.
I thank the Minister for dealing with such seriousness this morning with the question I asked at the very end of our proceedings on Tuesday. It was a cheeky question, but it is nevertheless one that people will ask because it is a fairly obvious cheeky question. I am grateful to him for dealing with it. It does, in many ways, underline some of the things that are wrong with the whole of this provision.
However, I welcome the main substantive amendment that the noble Lord has just introduced in this group—Amendment 128E, on what are known as “special-case petitions”, which are petitions where for various reasons the council will be able to decide not to have a referendum. I think that the phrase “special-case petition” is in some ways symptomatic of some of the things that are wrong with the Bill. What is a special-case petition? I can just imagine somebody spending a lot of time and effort getting a petition together and presenting it to the council for a referendum and one of the council officials ringing the organiser and saying that it had been classified as a special-case petition. The petition organiser will say, “Oh—thank you very much indeed. That sounds good”. The official will say, “No, it’s not. It means that you cannot have a referendum”. It is not a sensible name and I hope that the Government think of a name that actually describes the process and the fact that the petition will not be carried out. It could be called an invalid petition, for example, or something similar.
The proposed new clause on special-case petitions includes the provision:
“The petition is a special-case petition if the proper officer of the authority is of the opinion that the matter to which the referendum question relates has been, or has substantially been, the subject of at least one local or other referendum held—
(a) in the four years ending with the date on which the petition was received by the authority, and
(b) in the area to which the petition relates (whether or not in that area alone)”.
Therefore, there are two qualifying provisions for the authority to be able to say that it will not have the petition. One is that there has been one in the last four years and the other is that it took place in the area to which the petition relates.
I shall speak to an amendment on the second of those. Before I do, however, I have another amendment, which is bound up with some other stuff, that proposes that the period during which there should be a moratorium on holding a new referendum on the same or similar issue should be 10 years, not four. I will not be pressing that heavily when we get to it because at least we have a four-year moratorium here. Nevertheless, it seems to me that four years is not long enough. It will still be quite easy for people to bring back the same thing every four years and it will become very repetitive and they could keep going until they get the right answer.
I speak now to Amendment 128EZA, which would insert the words,
“or part of the area”,
where it reads,
“in the area to which the petition relates”;
so it would read,
“in the area or part of the area to which the petition relates (whether or not in that area alone)”.
It is quite clear that what the Minister has moved means that if there has been a petition in an identical area it qualifies as a special case and if there has been a petition in a bigger area, which includes the area of the petition, it qualifies as a special case. It is not clear what will happen if the new petition is in area larger than the area that previously had the petition. For example, let us imagine that there is a town with four wards. If there was a petition in a ward, and then the petition came along for the county electoral division, which might include two of those wards, the area would be twice as big. All the Minister is proposing at the moment is that it should have been substantially in the same area. I do not know what “substantially” means, except that it is quite clear that if they managed to find an area for a petition that was 10 per cent greater, it would probably qualify as a special case. But does it qualify as a special case if the area is twice or three times as big? What is to prevent people coming back with a steadily larger area if they do not get the result that they want in the first place? They might have a petition for a referendum in a ward, then in two wards, then in a county division that includes three wards, and so on. They might have these petitions every year until they get the result they are after. That is the question underlying this amendment.
While we are on Amendment 128E on special-case petitions, I have two more points. One is about the council tax requirement. I am one of the few people in your Lordships' House who does not understand local government finance in great detail, but I know that there are great experts here. What is meant by the phrase “council tax requirement”? Exactly what that means has a bearing on the meaning of the proposal that the Minister is putting forward in subsection (2), which he explained when he moved the amendment. I will not say anything more on that until I have heard what a council tax requirement means and decide whether I want to pursue it further.
Subsection (4) of the new clause is about not having a referendum if there is a statutory process and that statutory process includes giving members of the public an opportunity to make representations on the matter as well as statutory rights of appeal or to instigate a review. This is extremely welcome. It clearly refers to the planning system. It obviously refers to planning applications. I assume that it applies to local plan making because that includes a whole series of public consultations. It almost certainly applies to all licensing matters, so we are not going to have petitions on whether Joe Bloggs should get a taxi licence or whether a particular shop should get an off-licence licence. Do the Government have any sort of definitive list, or a greater list, of the sort of things that might be caught by this provision, or have they got further than planning and licensing in their thoughts on the matter? It will be extremely helpful if they have an idea of more or less the full list. We can probably never have a completely full list.
I look forward to the Minister’s response to my amendment and to the questions that I have asked.
Lord Avebury
My noble friend remarked on new subsection (4) and the barrier against presenting any petition relating to planning matters. Knowing the strength of feeling against Gypsy sites in most localities in England, we can envisage that if people can conceivably find a way of lodging petitions against anything to do with a proposal for a Gypsy site, they will do so. I was quite relieved to hear what he said, but is it his opinion that new subsection (4) provides adequate safeguards against that kind of petition which would be unnecessary because the protection, if needed, is provided by the planning process?