Canterbury City Council Bill

Lord Glasman Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glasman]

My Lords, I also pay tribute to the committee, and particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, who gave me incredible instruction on how to chair. It was a genuinely excellent experience. There are two things I should like to share with the House. First, the balance between kindness and severity was very well judged. The pedlars and their representatives were occasionally speechless and sometimes cried in the committee. They were scared and I thought that the noble Baroness dealt with them beautifully. Towards the legal counsel, the proposers and the pedlars’ legal representative, who tended to go on a little, I thought that she showed the appropriate degree of, let us say, sternness. Secondly, I should like to share with the House what the noble Baroness said to me. When I asked her a question, she said, “Being in committee is as much about the work you do between the meetings as the work you do in them”. That was taken on board. It was a very good experience indeed and I think we came to the right judgments.

There are two concerns that I should like to share with the House. First, I asked the representative from Leeds council whether she could name one world-class institution that came out of Leeds. It was obviously not the football club. She could not quite put her finger on it. I tried to prod her, telling her that Marks & Spencer was the institution and that Simon Marks started off as a pedlar. The idea that pedlars—poor people coming to this country, moving around and showing some enterprise—would be stamped on here was astonishing to me. I completely echo what the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, said about the desire to homogenise the shopping experience and shopping centres. There was quite a whiff of local enforcement going on against the pedlars that came through from the witnesses, and I found that quite unpleasant and disturbing.

My second concern is a constitutional one. “Pedlar” is from the Latin for feet—as we said in the committee—as in pedalo. It is true that pedlars were pushing their bags rather than walking them in some cases, due the size of the things that they had, and we originally based it on Simon Marks’ bag, which we looked at in the Marks & Spencer museum. That was an appropriate size for a pedlar’s bag, we thought. There has to be enforcement in bringing that down to size and getting it correct.

One finds references to pedlars even before Chaucer, going back to accounts from Roman times. There have been pedlars taking their wares from town to town and from city to city for as long as there have been records in the country, so it is a status that has existed from time immemorial. There were references to pedlars before 1191. It is not customary practice; it is practice from time immemorial. It was recognised in the 1871 Act; it was not created in the 1871 Act—that is a very important distinction. In other words, it is not clear that the status of the pedlar can be abolished. It seems to me that it is an ancient status in the realm and that there have been very ill thought out and incoherent attempts to limit that freedom of movement, as was manifest in the Bills that came before.

I looked at the BIS consultation document. BIS’s legal evidence seemed to suggest a lack of historical awareness about pedlars. It was taking EU directives and applying them in a very flat and straightforward way. I asked BIS how it could account for the fact that Germany has enormous differences in craft status that are still consistent with the EU. Its reply was, “We take a different view of enforcement”. BIS is taking a very straightforward, unhistorical view that pedlars will interfere with new services. We have to resist that, refute it and absolutely assert that pedlars have been part of our kingdom and part of the realm for many thousands of years. They play a role in taking things from town to town and in bringing people together in many ways, disrupting stable, corporate markets. We really should defend them. I commend the report and I commend the committee.