City of London (Various Powers) Bill [HL]

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, for introducing this Bill and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for adding so much detail to it. The Bill is produced by a distinguished former Member of Parliament for the City of London. My only connection with the City is that I spent the first seven years of my working life in Ironmonger Lane opposite the Guildhall working for a firm of chartered accountants, and I also spent many years on the City of London Corporation committee managing Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields.

I would like to deal with some of the detail in the Bill. Clause 10, on City walkways, calls for a crackdown on parking a vehicle on or over a footway. When the noble Baroness replies, I would like her to say whether this means, as in many other local authorities, that a vehicle can park with two wheels on the outer kerbstones. There is a difference and it would be very interesting to know whether the City of London Corporation has considered that, or whether it is over the whole of the footway. As both previous speakers have said, the City also consists of very narrow streets, and in certain circumstances it may be necessary to park on the footway, even with the parking restrictions that are there. This may harm many traders in that particular area. In outer London—I am not saying this is the right thing; in fact I do not like it—many of the boroughs have organised parking on the footway, with an official order allowing that. I think it is horrific, but it gets the cars off the streets when the street is narrow and the footway has some depth to it.

I would also like to talk about Clause 9, the item on ice cream which has excited so such interest in this Chamber. First, I would like to deal with the statistics—the noble Lord, Lord Myners, talks about why there is the threshold of 11 metres. The parliamentary writers of the Explanatory Notes obviously had difficulty with the number 11, because they have actually used the number 15 in the Explanatory Notes and refer to 15 metres rather than 11 metres. I rather suspect the 11 is something to do with 99, which I believe is an ice cream, and they go in those sort of numbers.

It says in the clause that it is not street trading if it is undertaken from a “receptacle”—wonderful word—located within 15 metres, or “11 metres” as the actual Bill says, of the trader’s premises. I worry about this because 11 metres—or 15 metres, whichever it may be—is a fair distance from the shop. It represents quite an element of street clutter and flies directly in the face of the Mayor of London—of Greater London, not the City of London—who is very much in favour of decluttering the streets. Indeed, if you go to outer London boroughs, where I am still a councillor, and to many other places, you will find that many local authorities charge a licence fee for putting items like boards on the street. That is not to help the customer, but to bring in income, and it is something that worries me.

Reverting back to the important matter of ice cream, we really need to watch the quality of the ice cream—and it really is a serious matter—sold by the shops and street traders, whether in vans or receptacles. Visitors to the City of London, and in Westminster as well, find the prices and the quality vary; people complain of ice creams containing 90 per cent water. This is an area where the tourists come to as part of the London experience; but the ice cream in London is not quite the experience of a gelato in other parts of Europe.

The fightback against rip-off Britain, whether it is ice creams or anything else, is missing from the Bill. It particularly should not happen in the City, which I see as the showcase for the nation. In this Bill, the City is actually leading in a fightback against restrictions in a very positive way. The Bill actually eases matters for a variety of reasons—probably a good thing—which is against what other local authorities are doing, as they are actually tightening up in many ways. With the loosening of the restrictions comes a responsibility for keeping the highways and the footways tidy and clean. Sadly, people who travel and who walk and drive around in our environment have a habit of throwing things down on the street; even more so when there is street trading. That must be looked at. I think the City, with its very narrow streets, should be careful about being too restrictive, as well as opening up matters.

Bridges were mentioned. I was disappointed not to see a mention in the Bill of what many developers are doing in developing town centres around the country. I had a meeting with a developer the other day, and the words used were “living bridges”. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, mentioned Southwark bridge. There is no reason why a bridge that is wide enough should not have small traders in small shops or cubicles across that bridge, making it into a living bridge, as happens in many cities, such as Florence and Rome.

As was said in a previous debate, this Bill may not make the headlines tomorrow, but it is an important move forward.