Local Government Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill

Mark Tami Excerpts

Friday 18th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman shakes his head. He obviously was not a conker-fighting champion, and it is clear that he carries the burden of that to this day. He should know, however, that conker fighting is a long-established sport in many schools. The notion that we can remove all danger—all possible injury or risk—from every circumstance is a concept whose time has past.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that health and safety is sometimes used as an excuse? For instance, schools banning conker fighting is probably more about staff not wanting to clear up all the broken conkers that litter the playground—I remember that from when I was child—than any particular health and safety issue. We must always be careful when conker fighting, however: a friend of mine had a stone that looked remarkably like a conker, and he won many fights using it.

[Grant Shapps]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out that conker fighting can sometimes be done in the wrong way. I well remember the many tricks, some of which have been mentioned in the debate, including baking the conker in advance.

[Mark Tami]

And using vinegar.

[Grant Shapps]

Yes, that is a chosen way to try to harden the conker, but I must bring the hon. Gentleman some bad news in that regard: I do not believe that vinegaring conkers does make them sturdy for the purposes of conker fighting.

To be fair and balanced, I must add that there are genuine reasons why activities—conker fighting or otherwise—can and may be banned. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) rightly pointed out that there are significant health and safety concerns about deaths that happen in the workplace and she cited a figure of 20,000 deaths each year. One death is too many, so health and safety has an important role to play.

However, this debate is about whether health and safety is used as an excuse to prevent perfectly legitimate activities taking place—my hon. Friend suggests that it is—and whether people are overcompensating for the possibility of danger in almost every activity. I am familiar with the stories we hear each year of local authorities choosing to be overly prescriptive and cautious whenever any festival is celebrated—one thinks of the royal wedding that is coming up next month. A woman was recently in the news as she had been told that she could not put bunting up outside her house because it attached to a lamp post across the way. She was told that even though she had been doing this for decades—suddenly this was deemed to be dangerous. I had heard the stories of the Christmas lights that are not put up. I had not heard about the Devon rock festival and the UFO spaceship prop, but those examples sounded bizarre.

An issue has arisen through health and safety being used as a backdrop in order to ban things. Lord Young of Graffham published his report in October, rightly pointing out that more needs to be done to rein back the overzealous use of health and safety laws to ban things. This brings us to the nub of my hon. Friend’s argument, which is that the local government ombudsman could be provided with powers, through this amendment to the way in which he operates, so that he could pare back the more extreme health and safety excesses. The Government are sympathetic to that idea, and I have indicated privately to my hon. Friend that we would like this to be done in time.

However, I now have to inform my hon. Friend that we do not think the Bill goes far enough. Lord Young’s recommendations were clear on this matter. He made a number of recommendations about the compensation culture; the low-hazard workplace; raising standards; insurance; education; health and safety legislation; and local authorities. In particular, he recommended that when local authorities ban or curtail events on health and safety grounds, the official banning the event should write about those reasons and allow them to be presented to the organiser of the proposed event. The hon. Lady rightly pointed out that hearing a decision only on the day may not provide sufficient notice if a meeting takes place in the evening. That well made point demonstrates at least one of the things that needs a little further thought and investigation.

Lord Young says that his approach would allow citizens to have a route for redress when they want to challenge local officials’ decisions. He said that local authorities should conduct an internal review of all refusals on the grounds of health and safety. In other words, he proposes that we go even further in order to provide redress, saying not only that councils should provide a written statement, which would not put the event back on and which would not make any difference at all, but that there should be some kind of process whereby citizens can see what has happened and why, and have the opportunity therefore to challenge it, perhaps through the local media.

Lord Young also says that citizens should be able to refer unfair decisions to the ombudsman and have a fast-track process to ensure that decisions can be overturned within two weeks. Again, this all depends very much on timing. The hon. Lady made the important point that some events are set up months, if not years, in advance, so putting in place some kind of fast-track process, perhaps taking no more than a couple of weeks, to examine and potentially overturn a bad decision would be a very good idea. Again, it would need to be incorporated in this legislation.

[Mark Tami]

The point that I was trying to make earlier was that councils use health and safety as an excuse. If it is not that, they will find some other reason to say that they cannot do it, because they did not want to do it in the first place.

[Grant Shapps]

That is a wise and well made point. Far too often, that is precisely what happens. As the hon. Gentleman said in his first intervention, there is an attempt to hide behind health and safety legislation in wanting to ban something while in fact having a completely different agenda. It is important that there are some powers of redress that go beyond the local authority merely explaining in writing that it has banned it, because it will trot out the usual reasons for the ban—it thought the event was dangerous for traffic, and so on—but will not give the proper and full redress that is required.

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Indeed, there are often reports of precisely that, and I have seen it happen. It joins up with what the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said about how it is possible to hide behind the health and safety legislation in a variety of ways. When a local authority does not want an event to happen—perhaps it feels that it is in competition with something that it is doing—one way of avoiding it is to describe the problem as one of health and safety, but the other way is to price people out of the market. That goes completely against the spirit of localism, which I will talk about in a moment. There is an idea that local communities do not know best and that only a local authority can make these decisions, and they can hide behind excessive sums of money, making it almost impossible for organisers to put on the event. That is completely wrong, and it is something else that we are keen to address that is not yet encapsulated in the terms of the Bill.

[Mark Tami]

I know from my own experience of a case where the council said that the police had raised objections, for a whole host of reasons. People often then say, “Well, okay, the police have a problem, so we won’t do it.” When one follows it through and contacts the police to find out what is going on, they say they do not know anything about it. That goes back to the fundamental point that the council will try to price it out of existence or say that it is somebody else’s fault, whereas the bottom line is that they simply do not want it to happen.

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Too often apparently insurmountable blockages are placed in the way of organisers who, rightly, want to get out there and represent their communities. Perhaps they want to have a street party to celebrate the royal wedding or another festival, or just to bring the community together on their estate or in their neighbourhood through a community day, yet they are constantly blocked. At every turn there is a cul-de-sac—a reason why it cannot be done.

Often those reasons are entirely spurious and trumped up. The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside mentioned the interesting situation in which the police apparently did not even know that they were being used as the excuse, or alibi, and cited as the fundamental blockage. Of course, that sounds very convincing. When a local authority officer tells someone that the police have banned the event, it is very hard to challenge that. It has an air of realism or likelihood about it—it sounds official—and of course that puts off all but the most tenacious citizens. Again, that is wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Grant Shapps]

I do not want to try your patience by taking us too far off the subject of the local government ombudsman, Mr Deputy Speaker, but the simple answer is that we will have a national planning framework. It will be consulted on by the summer, and it will be put in place as precisely what Members are arguing for this afternoon—a framework within which everyone can operate fairly.

There is certainly a lot that is good about the Bill that we are discussing today. The intentions behind it are certainly in the right direction, but my concern is that we have not yet gone far enough for it. We have not had the opportunity to work out how the local government ombudsman would make the decisions set out in the Bill, particularly if it had a quasi-adjudicatory role, which I think it almost certainly would.

[Mark Tami]

Does the Minister agree that when people go to the ombudsman, they perhaps do not realise that, as the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) pointed out, it is about process? It is not about outcomes, it is about whether people have been treated fairly and whether the correct steps have been taken. People who have come to me have often thought that it is more about the outcome than the process.