Localism Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Lucas

Monday 10th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, I must intervene. Obviously the noble Lord has not developed his arguments at the same length as in Committee but I am afraid I am as unconvinced by them now as I was then. It is certainly a worthy thing to pay lip service to freedom of information but one has to think about the practical impact of what is proposed. Although the noble Lord says that in Amendment 199 he places a limit on the extent of the burden by specifying contracts for any sum over £1 million, this is vitiated by the fact that his amendment goes on to say:

“Where such a contract is to any extent performed by means of a sub-contract, that sub-contract shall be deemed to include a freedom of information provision”,

and so on. It is like unwrapping a Russian doll. As we discussed in Committee, many of these large contracts may relate to construction, for example, where many small businesses will be involved. This may be onerous for small businesses and those businesses may well find themselves caught by the way that this amendment is drafted. The only people exempted are legal advisers to those bodies. Indeed, any other person acting on behalf of a sub-contractor, such as the bookkeeper of a small business, may be brought in to the scope of that amendment, as I read it. I should like the Minister to reflect carefully before going in that direction.

I argued that the new clause proposed by Amendment 201 could be absurdly onerous on local authorities. The noble Lord’s amendment uses “relevant authority”, which means that any parish council or community council in this country would have to publish annual reports on the Freedom of Information Act, environmental regulations and information on the number of requests that it had received. All the provisions here would apply to every authority in the country. My own council is very willing to comply with the Act—anybody can ask a question about it at council; we had a question on it answered two council meetings ago and this information was given—but the cost of doing so is already more than £100,000 a year. With the greatest respect, I do not think that extending this degree of reporting responsibility down to the level of the merest parish council and community council in this country, let alone larger authorities, is appropriate or necessary.

While respecting the enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Wills, I hope that my noble friend will resist his amendment for the reasons that I and others have given and that we can proceed with the rest of the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wills, is quite right that enthusiasm for freedom of information seems to wane the longer a party is in power. He is perhaps sitting there, safely in the far corner of the Back Benches, so that he does not get too heavily stamped on by his own Front Bench. The Labour Party quite clearly lost enthusiasm for the Freedom of Information Bill in the course of taking it through Parliament. It was by the narrowest of squeaks that it survived at all, and that was only six months into government. If it has developed a new affection for it now, I am delighted, but I do not expect it to last.

However, on our Front Bench, we have Mr Freedom of Information himself. My noble friend has been dedicated to this cause for a long time, so I hope that he will take a constructive view of what we might do. I share many of the concerns of my noble friend Lord True and do not think that this amendment does the trick. However, more openness in local government and more consideration of which of the larger contracts in local government should be open to freedom of information would be consistent with the way in which the Government are going; for instance, in considering whether examination boards should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act or putting UCAS on the list of bodies subject to it, as we have a draft regulation to do at the moment. If the processes of the Health and Social Care Bill lead to a substantial transfer of what is currently public activity away from the public gaze, I shall propose that we make sure that it is brought back swiftly through the Freedom of Information Act. I do not see this Bill as leading to large-scale transfers of activity away from the public gaze into obscurity, but there should be some protection in case there is. I hope that we get a constructive answer from my noble friend.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I wish to speak briefly to Amendment 153. I would be very grateful if my noble friend could enlarge a little on the relevant strengths of “having regard to” and “in general conformity with”. To take a particular illustration, Hampshire has a policy that there should be no new development in the countryside. Does that mean that there is no point in neighbourhood planning in Hampshire?

[Lord True]

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. On Amendment 153ZC, which relates to the weight given to emerging documents, I think that that has been discussed and I will not pursue it at this point. I have been reassured that emerging documents are given weight. Amendment 153ZD is relevant to the short debate we have just had about design, which strikes me as being a rather pleasant and agreeable way of spending an afternoon in the Moses Room when the Education Bill is not being discussed there. I do not want to detain the Committee on that, but I am absolutely certain that what my noble friend Lord Hodgson, the noble Lord, Lord Best, and others have said must be right because if this Bill is about localism the vernacular should matter. Local people like their vernacular and they like building that is in keeping, whatever the design is, if that design is good. Local authorities as well as national housebuilders have failed in that respect over the years. I do not mind a little cajoling to them in the Bill, but we have to be careful because design, as I think Lewis Carroll said, is probably “what I say it is”. There is a problem there.

Amendment 153ZD is related to that because it is about how the examiner deals with neighbourhood planning orders. A case in our authority involved the Government intervening on our existing core strategy to say that it must include high-rise building. Notwithstanding that there was cross-party agreement against it and that hundreds of people protested against it, a planning inspector imposed an extension of the ugliest building in our borough on the basis that the existing core strategy provided for such buildings. The local authority, with the strong support of local people, is trying to revise its plans. It takes a long time to revise a local development framework and my right honourable friend Secretary of State has said that he hopes to accelerate it.

There will be circumstances in neighbourhood planning where local communities say, for example, “We do not want any more high-rise”. However, if an examiner looks, as that examiner did, at the previous building and says, “Your existing plan says let’s have some high-rise”, then unless we include a provision such as my Amendment 153ZD to allow a local authority to assent to an order that is not in compliance, we may find that neighbourhood planning is defeated. Perhaps I am being oversuspicious, but there might be circumstances where the will of the local community is clear and the examiner should be able to give weight to that informal opinion.

I will deal with Amendment 153ZE very briefly. It refers to the situation in London and the definition of localism. I am simply saying that if an emerging policy is not necessarily in compliance with the higher-authority policy and there is tension between the policies of the mayor and the borough as regards its neighbourhood plans, then the examiner should, in circumstances where those matters are being considered, give greater weight to the more local of the two emerging policies. I do not expect an answer from my noble friend on that or the other amendment to which I referred, but both are significant.