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Mr. Merchant: That is a fair point. I shall come back to it when I deal with another amendment. My hon. Friend waxed philosophical about the ideas behind the Bill and what he described as centralised authority. I do not regard the Bill as a centralising measure. He seems to have forgotten, as do several of my hon. Friends, the significance of clause 2, which describes the process of designation by a local authority. The Bill is permissive legislation which gives local authorities extra rights. That is hardly centralisation. It does not compel them to exercise those rights. If a local authority, which is presumably close to the people in its area, and which is dependent on them for re-election, decides that it does not want to cover a specific area, it does not have to do so. In so doing, it reflects local people's views.
If anything, the onus is the other way. The onus is on people in the area to persuade the local authority to take a deliberate step to include land within the definitions in the Bill. Even then, local authorities will have specific powers to define generally or in more detail which land is included. I should have thought that that would entirely satisfy my hon. Friend.
Mr. Leigh:
I do not ask my hon. Friend to take my advice, but will he take the advice of a distinguished former Law Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale? He said:
He went on to make the point about the old dispensing power that I referred to in my speech.
Mr. Merchant:
The fact remains that the Bill primarily gives power to local authorities to designate, if they wish to do so. I do not define that as centralisation. Nor is it compulsion. The people of an area have considerable authority--I would say the ultimate authority--to decide whether any aspect of the Bill should apply.
The House will recall that amendment No. 20 refers to speed limits on roads. There has been some discussion on urban areas versus rural areas. Those definitions are misnomers. We should refer to residential and non-residential areas. Surely the objective of the Bill is to protect people who would otherwise be affected by nuisance as a result of the activity of dogs. Such nuisance impacts mostly where there is a high concentration of people and, therefore, of dogs.
Residential areas can be in rural as well as urban areas. I can think of no easier way of covering both types of residential area than reference to speed limits. Speed limits are almost universally chosen to match the concentration of population. A 30 mph limit is imposed in urban and rural areas where there are a lot of houses and a high-density population. It trails off to 40 mph where housing is more widely set apart and there are fewer people. The limit disappears entirely where there are no houses.
Mr. Hargreaves:
Does my hon. Friend accept that in many areas within the national parks speed limits are
Mr. Merchant:
I accept the first part of what my hon. Friend said, but not the second. I did not suggest that the 30 and 40 mph limits perfectly correlated with heavily residential areas and not so heavily residential areas. I merely suggested that there was a high correlation and that they were the easiest way of covering the problem that the Bill is trying to solve--distinguishing between areas with a lot of people and a lot of dogs and other areas.
It would be possible to substitute 30 mph for 40 mph in the Bill, but the result would not be particularly effective. The latter limit provides for a clear and effective division, and it does not need changing. It has been argued that some people walking their dogs will not know whether a road has a 40 mph limit, but that would apply just as much to a road with a 30 mph limit. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of people walking their dogs will know the roads they are using well and will know the speed limit. If they do not, they can easily find out, since they walk their dogs regularly in the same areas. And once they know, they will know for all time. It has been suggested that it is too onerous to expect dog owners to know speed limits. I regard that as wholly false.
It has been further suggested that it would be dangerous to require dog owners to clear up after their dogs in40 mph limit areas, because of the higher speed of the traffic. That, too, is fallacious. The danger in such areas is not much greater than it is in areas with the lower limit--the difference is quite small. In any case, dog owners presumably walk along the pavement, and are entitled to as much protection without their dogs as with them.
In a perfect world, we might stipulate such a requirement for the verges of all roads; in practical terms, however, it is right to distinguish between roads near heavily populated areas and roads in sparsely populated areas. The clearest, most logical distinction is between 40 mph limit areas and faster roads.
We must go back to fundamentals and ask ourselves what the purpose of the Bill is. It is very clear--to protect those who find this sort of problem a nuisance. It should therefore be aimed at where the nuisance is greatest and where the number of people likely to be affected is greatest. The Bill as it stands deals sensibly with that aim, without unnecessary or confusing amendments.
Amendment No. 19 would exclude bridlepaths from the provisions of the Bill. I am attracted by the amendment; I do not dismiss it as I did the other two. I believe, however, that the designation system under clause 2 would enable a local authority to exclude bridlepaths in any case, so it is perhaps not essential to refer to them specifically.
Bridlepaths should be generally excluded because they are quite different from footpaths. They are usually country roads, often muddy, and people walk along them because they want to be on a country road. They wear different clothes and take different precautions. They want to get back to nature while out walking with their dogs. Bridlepaths often run along the edge of agricultural land. Any excreta that a dog leaves behind only adds to all
the other detritus to be found on a bridlepath. Most is biodegradable anyway and can be left to nature to deal with.
Mr. John Carlisle:
It is precisely because bridlepaths are meant for horses that one can find all sorts of excreta on them. Unlike dogs' excreta, horses' excreta is extremely useful for those who want to promote the growth of their roses or rhubarb. My hon. Friend is therefore on to a sound point. Walking along a bridlepath, one expects to have to pick and choose one's way with care. I do not find it unpleasant to tread in horse excreta--the same cannot be said about what dogs leave behind. Perhaps we should introduce a Bill to say that the public should be careful where they walk. They should not worry about what horses do, but they should avoid what dogs do at all costs.
Mr. Merchant:
I hope that my hon. Friend never treads in anything unpleasant. I agree with his basic point, though. The purpose of the Bill is to protect people who might unexpectedly be affected by this problem, or who cannot avoid it in everyday circumstances--in parks, streets, and so on. Walking along a bridlepath is completely different: the onus is on the person using it to take care, stepping around puddles, mud and whatever else presents itself.
Mr. Hargreaves:
My hon. Friend was rather dismissive of the subject of footpaths, but many footpaths lead out of villages into country areas. They should surely be excluded for the same reasons, because they are not the sort of places where people might grovel around on the ground catching terrible diseases. People are likely to be wearing suitable footwear and stepping over and between puddles, mud and other things.
Mr. Merchant:
My hon. Friend misunderstood me. When I used the word "footpaths" I was referring to pavements, not to dedicated footpaths where there was no traffic. I would certainly bracket such footpaths with bridlepaths for these purposes.
I was perhaps a little unkind earlier to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle, but I should like to end with an illustration in which he features. Many years ago, my hon. Friend and I went for a walk--most of it on a bridlepath--along the Berkshire Ridgeway. We took with us his dog called Freddie. Had this Bill been in force, we would have had a serious problem. In the course of our three-day trek, Freddie was responsible for producing an extremely large quantity of excreta. What on earth would we have done if we had had to pick up all of it? It would have been absurd. There was nowhere to dispose of the stuff, and by the end of our three-day journey we would have been in a decidedly unhappy state.
"It centralises the offence in place of it being the subject of by-laws. Not only that, it creates a very wide offence, leaving it to the Minister, with exiguous parliamentary control to make exceptions."--[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 October 1995; Vol. 566, c. 1292.]
11.15 am
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