Localism Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

The third thing that we question is whether a council ought to be able to regard a petition for a referendum as being valid even if it does not have the right number of signatures on it. It is a very odd provision which says if you want a referendum, you have to go through these hoops—you have to submit it according to the rules and have a certain number of people on it—but that if you do not manage to get that number of people, we can think, “It’s on a good thing, after all, so we'll have the referendum anyway”. If you are having rules on referenda, it is our view that they need to be pretty rigorous and not be open to continued political argument on whether the petitions fit those rules. We have some doubts whether it is possible to set out a sufficient number of rigorous rules to make the system foolproof against the kind of populist and perhaps extremist manipulation that I have been talking about, and we will be scrutinising the rest of this chapter of the Bill very strongly indeed.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 122 and briefly make the case for a 10 per cent trigger. There seems to be general agreement in your Lordships’ House that 5 per cent is too low. That is for two reasons. First, when you have an actual referendum—as opposed to simply a petition on an issue—you ought to have a clear demonstration that there is significant public support for the question. Secondly, referendums cost money and if there is going to be a substantial cost to holding the referendum, it is legitimate to expect that a higher threshold than 5 per cent is generated to merit the cost of holding the referendum.

Seeing this now from the perspective of those who are gathering the petition, is it reasonable, given that there could be a referendum, to ask people to collect more than 10 per cent of the relevant area? That would be quite hard to do. First, I believe that 10 per cent is a reasonable figure in all the circumstances. If it was 20 per cent and all the people signing it were in favour of the referendum question, a turnout of 40 per cent would mean that in effect the 20 per cent was almost a majority. Presumably some people would sign for a referendum even if they were unsure which way they might vote, but I think 10 per cent is a reasonable trigger.

Perhaps more importantly, it strikes me that if people can gather 10 per cent it is actually not that difficult for them to gather 20 per cent. You might just as well accept the fact that at 10 per cent the trigger has been achieved. That is my view and that of some other noble Lords.

The other method of triggering a referendum is through members, then a petition and potentially a percentage threshold. I do not understand why members are treated differently from the general public. We should have a single system and as a rule of thumb the best and most reasonable figure that I could think of is that 10 per cent would be publicly understood as a reasonable number in all the circumstances, whether or not members are involved.