London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Peter Bone Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) for his great patience and unfailing courtesy in facilitating the progress of this Bill, albeit progress at a speed that must appear to many people to be that of a particularly sluggish glacier.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

Is this not what Parliament should be doing, including with Government business, too? Should we not be properly scrutinising things?

[Mr Nuttall]

I entirely agree. The quality of the legislation that passes through this House would be enormously improved if it was subjected to the sort of Report stage that this Bill is enjoying, when we have the time to examine each clause and, to be fair, the promoters listen to the argument and, where necessary, make amendments, accepting amendments that they find agreeable in this place rather than in the other place. Such amendments improve the quality of the legislation, so I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green for his patience in this matter.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on his comprehensive and detailed analysis of the merits of the various amendments in this third debate. He built on and developed the excellent critique offered by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who continued where he left off on 25 January, with his customary erudite evaluation and critical assessment of street trading. It is a matter of regret that on this occasion we are not able to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), who always speaks with such common sense on these matters. We hope that even in his absence our deliberations will not leave any stone unturned.

I agreed with all the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for North East Somerset, but one or two further areas of concern and perhaps unease need additional examination this evening. As you will have seen, Madam Deputy Speaker, this group is very large, comprising no fewer than 53 amendments, and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset managed to deal with each one in slightly more than a minute, and my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch dealt with each of them in less than one minute. I shall try to be as quick.

The lead amendment relates to clause 9. My concern is not primarily on my own account. My principal concern is that the provisions may have an effect on my constituents living in Bury, Ramsbottom and Tottington. When many people hear the word “London”, particularly those living outside the capital, they concentrate their minds on the centre of London, where the principal tourist attractions are located. Of course it is much more than that; it is home to millions of people.

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[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend makes a very interesting point. As we shall see in some of the later provisions—if time permits—the Bill seems to be trying to establish local authorities as judge and jury in their own case.

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I realise that he is going through his speech rapidly so that we have a chance to get to Third Reading this evening, but I wish he would slow down a little and think about the point in a bit more detail. Surely, there is only one institution that decides whether a person is trading—Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

[Mr Nuttall]

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs may well have reached a conclusion about the activities of an individual who is engaged in what might in another sphere be called hobby trading, in the way that many people engage in what is known as hobby farming by keeping a few hens, a couple of sheep or some cattle. But someone who sells two or three vehicles a year, having repaired them as a hobby, would probably not be regarded and ought not to be regarded as being engaged in a business.

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[Mr Bone]

My hon. Friend is talking about a new subject which has not been discussed tonight. I am glad we are exploring something new, but is it not the case that whether or not the person in the example pays tax, he will be regarded as trading? It is the Revenue that will make that decision.

[Mr Nuttall]

Even if that were the case and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs decided that trading had taken place, it might well be too late. HMRC may not consider the matter until some time after the event. It could be as much as 10 months after the end of the tax year before that taxpayer was required to file an income tax return. The local authority official would be trying to make up their own mind on a fairly random basis, which might differ from borough to borough, whether trading had taken place.

I shall touch briefly on another way in which the Bill would impinge on traders at the other end of the scale who take the plunge and open their own large or medium-sized lot, selling cars as a genuine business. They are quite open about it and have established their business with a trade name, they advertise in the newspaper and they have all their cars together on a car lot. It is often the case with such businesses that from time to time their stock overflows the land that they have, and they must temporarily resort to placing vehicles outside their premises—on the street, perhaps. They would be caught by the provision, even though for the rest of the time they were good, law-abiding citizens. It is very much a case of the law of unintended consequences when we pass such legislation, because the regulations might catch people who were perhaps not at the forefront of our minds when we considered these clauses.

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[Mr Nuttall]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. There is a risk that an over-zealous tatterdemalion—I have finally used the word—who was keen to impress his local authority superiors might be driving down that road and could photograph the vehicle and take action under this provision, should it pass into law.

The other, more fundamental, point about the clause is that it might prevent young entrepreneurs from setting out to make a living. I see car salesmen not as street traders but as entrepreneurs. One of the reasons I came into politics was that I wanted to encourage people to become entrepreneurs, to believe in the free market and to sell their goods and be buyers and sellers. We do not want a situation in which local government sticks its nose into every aspect of people’s lives.

[Mr Bone]

We now get to the nub of the matter. What we are seeing tonight is regulation being brought in for apparently good reasons, but that is what happens all the time. Parliament continually brings in regulation, but then we say that there is too much of it. We should be looking at entrepreneurs and saying that what they are doing is right, not adding regulation. That is what is wrong.

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the dangers of these provisions, and one of the ills that the amendments seek to address, is that they send out a very negative message about entrepreneurship. It sends out the message that if someone tries to use their initiative and start off in the motor trade we will jump on them, try to put an end to it and stop them starting out in life.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Regrettably, I suspect that our hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) has misled our hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall).

[Mr Bone]

Outrageous!

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Unintentionally. If the entrepreneur were selling soap from a stall with four wheels on the public highway, with or without the use of the internet, that would normally be caught by local government regulations. The fact is that selling a car with four wheels on the highway, using the internet, is not the same as selling soap. One can either ignore the fact that the internet has been developed since previous local authority powers over selling cars on the highway were introduced, or say that the internet needs to be taken into account. If a local authority is saying, “We would like to have the same power to deal with trading on the public highway using the internet for advertising as we have for trading using the local newspaper,” I am not absolutely certain that a single sentence of the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North is directed at what the power in clause 9, or clause 10, are aiming to do.

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[Mr Chope]

Everybody seems to be rather reluctant to engage in this Third Reading debate—admittedly, we probably have only two minutes for it. By the time we are able to debate Third Reading properly, I hope that the promoters will have ensured that the Bill is reprinted, because a large number of amendments have been made to the Bill in this House.

[Mr Bone]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is probably why the promoter of the Bill was reluctant to start this Third Reading debate, as he wanted the House to have the printed material so that we could discuss it properly?

[Mr Chope]

I think that may well be so. Indeed, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because in the course of this Bill’s progress the promoters have accepted a lot of the ideas and criticism put forward by me and my parliamentary colleagues. That vindicates the whole process of giving such Bills detailed scrutiny.

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[Mr Chope]

That was an unnecessarily impertinent and provocative intervention by my hon. Friend.

As we were deprived of a speech from the Minister on the last group of amendments on Report and because the Government abstained from the vote on clause 9, everybody is gagging to hear from the Minister what the Government’s approach is to the full contents of the Bill, now that it has been amended. When we reflect on what has happened this evening, we will inevitably regret that we did not hear from the Minister, who has been sitting in his place for the best part of three hours and who, from my recollection, has not uttered a word.

[Mr Bone]

One of the advantages in the House is that after Report, Members such as me who did not have a chance to speak have a chance to speak on Third Reading. There are so many more Members who are now interested in the Bill that I am sure they will turn up when we next debate the Bill on Third Reading.

[Mr Chope]

Again, my hon. Friend makes a good point. I hope that he will be able to make a significant contribution to the Third Reading of this Bill.

I give notice that although the Bill is significantly amended compared with what it was at the outset, in my view it still contains a lot that is pernicious and detrimental to the freedom of the citizens of this country. Visitors to London will be taken by surprise when they find themselves on the wrong side of the law. One of the Bill’s biggest problems is that it legislates partially for a particular area of the country. If there is a mischief, that mischief applies across the whole of the country and should be dealt with in a public Bill, if necessary on the basis of enabling legislation so that local authorities could opt in—