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1.30 pm
What should we being doing about the difficulty? It is up to the House to give very clear guidance to the courts, through Hansard, in as much time as is necessary, as to our exact intentions in this legislation. I take the point that the House is very keen for this legislation to be passed. We are stuck with an amendment that seems to be very dodgy, but we must try to ensure that, in questioning it, we do not endanger the legislation.
The issue of associated costs has been mentioned by one or two colleagues. I have a residual worry that they have not dealt with. We are told that the amendment is designed to limit to a very small number--a matter of hundreds--the houseboats that come within the purview of the Act. However, when we pass the duty to local authorities to define which houseboats come within the Act, we are also trying to pass to those local authorities the duty of defining which houseboats do not come within the Act.
Every local authority will be obliged to produce a report. A local authority such as South Gloucestershire--part of which I represent--which is unlikely to have that many houseboats because it does not have that many
permanent moorings, will still have to go through the expense of establishing that the houseboats in that authority area do not come within the Act.
The problem will be very much greater in Bristol. I have already mentioned that such definitional problems as what is registerable under the Act are not problems that Bristol has shown itself capable of handling in the past. By choosing the wrong definition for a houseboat, I fear that we are in great danger of producing additional costs, legislative uncertainty and, by and large, of over-complicating legislation that hon. Members very much want to pass.
I shall give an example from Bristol of the type of problem that this clause will create. Bristol is very proud of the fact that, by a combination of public and private finance, it is constructing in its city harbour a re-creation of the Matthew, the ship in which John Cabot sailed in 1497. In the opinion of Bristolians and others, he sailed to discover the American continent and to name it after a Mr. Emmerick, the Bristol customs collector who provided a great deal of finance for the voyage.
The Matthew is being constructed as a long-term project in Bristol harbour. I believe that people are already living on it, while it is being built. It is currently not capable of self-propulsion because it is still only a hull to which much still needs to be added. Is it a houseboat under this definition? Will it cease to be a houseboat when the first engine is added?
Mr. Thomason:
I am concerned about other aspects of this provision, but it seems that the definition in the clause, which refers back to local government taxation provisions in the Local Government Finance Act 1992, is sufficient to identify whether it is a houseboat to determine whether council tax is payable on it. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) have any views on that matter and its relevance to the point that he is making?
Mr. Stern:
As my hon. Friend will have heard me say before, one difficultly in using a council tax definition in the context of authorities such as that in Bristol is that they were never very good at collecting the poll tax, and they still do not have a brilliant record on the council tax either. So to rely on such a definition is to put responsibility into a department in the local authority that itself has a somewhat dodgy record.
I am not sure that the comment by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) has answered my query in the context of the project that I was referring to. The argument could go either way of whether the Matthew, sitting in Bristol harbour with people living on it, should be subject to council tax. Everybody in Bristol hopes that it will not be. What concerns me is that an historic project of loving restoration, which is designed to re-create Cabot's historic voyage, is in danger of being unnecessarily complicated because, under the Lords amendment, work would have to stop while energy conservation measures were planned. I would find that wholly regrettable.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to deal with the doubts that many of us have expressed about the Lords amendment. We all wish the Bill well and we hope that the Minister will be able to encourage us to support the amendment, but those doubts will still exist.
Mr. Merchant:
I am not happy with the Lords amendments. I do not blame the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson), because he is, I am sure, entirely well motivated in promoting the Bill. However, I believe that we are in danger of seeing the fairly worthless Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 taken to the point of absurdity. My hon. Friends the Members for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) and for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern), in their somewhat erudite debate on the definition of a houseboat, have illustrated that point.
Frankly, the Bill is legislation for the sake of legislation and will create bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. The problem with legislation that regulates and defines is that one never comes to an end because there are always subjects that have not been thought of and that need to be included at some point in the definition. That is precisely what has happened here. Some of us felt that that was the case when we took part in various debates on the 1995 Act, which the Bill would amend. We felt then that, if legislation was really necessary--we had considerable doubts about that--the lightest possible touch should be applied in carrying out the rather pointless energy audit.
The Bill would take away the light touch and make the approach heavier and heavier. Houseboats are a separate issue from homes and houses in multiple occupation. There is a good point there, because the provisions will cover many homes as a result. The Lords amendment goes into detail on houseboats. Where on earth are we going to end up? Next year, will we include narrowboats? No clear line can be drawn between houseboats and narrowboats, as my hon. Friends have explained. What about ocean-going yachts?
I have a constituent, a man whom I know, who lives in my constituency for only six months of the year. He spends the rest of the year on board his no doubt pleasant yacht, travelling around the world. It is all right for some. However, no doubt he is burning up energy, and if we take the amendment to its logical conclusion, ocean-going yachts should be assessed in terms of energy loss.
Some truckers, often one-man companies, live in lorries. I know such a man as well; he spends his working week sleeping and living in his truck. Will we add trucks to the Bill next year? I even know somebody who, for a period, lived in the back of a van--not a very pleasant place to live. Some bright spark will say that we ought to audit vans as well to see how much energy is lost through the roof and the back, and to see what we can do to prevent energy loss. No. The Lords amendment would take the Bill to ridiculous levels.
Why not houseboats? The answer is simple: the amendment would achieve nothing. We shall gain nothing by including houseboats in the Bill. I said that the 1995 Act was fairly worthless, because--some hon. Members seem to have missed this point--it does not actually do anything. It does not improve energy conservation and energy use one iota. All it does is require local authorities to produce a report. That is the end of the story--except that the report is sent to the Secretary of State and then, no doubt, gathers dust in a huge pile of reports.
I believe strongly in energy conservation and want measures to be taken to improve the efficiency of energy use. I do not want long reports that tell us what we already know. We know what measures need to be taken to prevent energy loss and improve its use. I want action, Bills and Acts of Parliament rather than turgid reports that tell us nothing new.
I had great sympathy with what my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin)--unfortunately, he has had to leave the Chamber--said about market mechanisms, because they achieve much in this respect. If energy prices are expensive and there are obvious, often cheap, means of saving costs by insulation, we should be following such things.
Publicity is of the essence, too. If we were proposing to publicise to people who live in a variety of places, including houseboats, the means by which they could improve energy use, I would object far less, but we are not; instead, we are encouraging the indulgence of bureaucrats in a pointless exercise of petty information gathering.
As I said in an intervention, if we really feel that it is necessary to have some sort of report drawn up to tell us what measures can be specifically applied to houseboats to improve energy use--I have no objection to that--the answer is to ask one official in the Department of the Environment to spend a couple of weeks investigating the issue and to write a report. I have no doubt that the report would conclude that the measures that needed to be applied were little different from those that needed to be applied elsewhere, except, of course, they would have to be skewed to take account of particular materials used in the construction of houseboats. That would solve the problem. We do not have to ask every local authority in Britain to search for houseboats in their area and recommend what should be done. If that is not making work and reinventing the wheel a hundredfold, I do not know what is.
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