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

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord St John of Fawsley]

My noble friend the Chairman of Committees is quite right. I was following the bad example of the Leader of the Opposition. One should never talk about oneself. It is a subject that is of interest only to oneself and no one else. I merely wanted to congratulate my noble friend on his persistence in proceeding with the Bill. Here, I make just one point; it is very important that Select Committee reports are speedily implemented. I heard the Select Committee being attacked because of its report. I answered on the millions of pounds spent by the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, on the urban nonsense of turning us all into Dutch flat dwellers in five words that are all that needs to be said on that issue—and I shall then sit down. Those words are: “English people love their gardens”. That is it.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, perhaps I may take the House back to the amendment moved ably by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding. I thank him for his kind words about my chairmanship of the Select Committee and other noble Lords who took part in those deliberations.

The issue we are discussing in Amendment 1 is whether it is correct to remove Clauses 16 and 17 —formerly Clauses 26 and 27—that deal with the recovery of costs arising from the holding of major sporting events. The Select Committee took a great deal of time to consider this issue. We received a report from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said, there was no petition or evidence of any sort from the sporting bodies indicating that they were unhappy with what was proposed.

We took evidence from the Assistant Director for Public Protection and Safety of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. He stated:

“The large scale of events of the nature that we talked about cause littering over a widespread area, much of it in our residential streets, not just on the frontage of where the individual streets are. It requires additional street cleansing resources, much greater, over and above what we would normally put on the streets to deliver the cleansing that is required by our residents in the community to return the streets to a satisfactory standard after an event has taken place. The resources and costs specifically relate to the number of events, the scale of the event and the scheduling of when these events take place”.

We cross-examined Mr Austin and the witness from the DCMS. We heard from no witness or petitioner from sporting bodies. We had no knowledge that they were unhappy with what was being proposed. The committee, after considering the evidence very carefully, came to the conclusion that the promoters had made their case. In fact, they presented an exemplary case on the Bill as a whole; but, on this particular issue that required us to go against the advice of the DCMS, we concluded that it would be appropriate, in certain circumstances, for local authorities to recover from those organising large sporting and entertainment events additional costs for exceptional traffic management and waste clearance.

I am concerned to hear that the negotiations effectively took place after we had taken the evidence and considered the issue in detail in the committee. I put it to the House that the time for those deliberations was before the Select Committee considered these matters and that, if it was necessary for petitioners to come forward with objections, that was when those objections should be taken. It is not satisfactory, as a rule of procedure, for negotiations to take place subsequently, and for such pressure to be put on the promoters of the Bill that, in order to get it through, they must take out something which at the time was very important to them.

I do not wish to see the Bill delayed any further, but I am concerned at the way in which these amendments have been brought forward, and by the fact that it has been done not on the basis of our being able to cross-examine the people who do not like what is being proposed, but on the basis of a back-stairs deal.

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, on bringing forward a Bill that has taken so long to get to this stage. As a newcomer to the House, I find it astonishing that the time of this House has to be spent on issues such as the lighting and guarding of builders’ skips. If ever there was an illustration of the need for the Localism Bill, and a more general grant of powers to assemblies and local authorities, this Bill is it.

I will set that aside and make a couple of comments on the provisions. My hope is that as the Bill proceeds to the other House, there will be an element of balance in the way that it is reviewed. For example, returning to the contentious issue of skips, I, like many others, have been in a situation as a resident where I have become frustrated with people who have clearly abused their right to have a skip in the street. On the other hand, I have also done repairs and changes to my home and know that the cost of a skip is an important part of the building budget—so no one would wish that to increase unnecessarily. I hope that that constant balance will remain in the thinking of the House.

I welcome the move to a memorandum of understanding between sports clubs and local authorities. This is a sensible way to proceed on these issues, which are better negotiated between the parties than set out in statute and regulation. It will be less costly and more flexible, with more capacity to adapt to the needs of situations, if we move to a negotiated arrangement rather than always looking for a regulation to sort out the mechanisms. I wish that we could see some of that around pedicabs. Some people regard them as pests and some as positive attractions in the West End of London. I do not understand how one can enforce parking rules against them if the requirement for licensing is not statutory but merely voluntary—presumably that is something that the other House must cope with.

I, too, as I read through the legislation, congratulate everyone on persisting with this through a change of government. I was in the other place when this started. It has taken nearly three years, which is extraordinary. I suggest that local councils and assemblies ought to have the qualifications to deal with these issues, and that this illustrates a matter that we can now pass to those authorities in future legislation.

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[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.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

Does the noble Lord agree that it would have been courteous to this House if the detail of that memorandum of understanding had been made available to your Lordships before we had this debate today? Can he at least give an assurance that it will be published and will be considered in proper detail when the Bill reaches another place so that it can at last be given proper scrutiny?