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9.45 am

Revealingly, the briefing goes on to say:

"This definition will not form part of the Bill but the Bill will provide the backdrop for such a statement to be agreed between BCC and Companies House."

That may or may not be the case, because the Bill says that the Secretary of State will have the final word.

I should like to home in on the BCC's definition that a chamber should represent a specific territory. Surely there must be an obligation to consult adjoining chambers. If we are talking about representation or ownership of a territory, the possibility of disputes emerges. The Bill is all about disputes and their resolution. It is immediately clear that adjoining chambers with a specific interest should be consulted, not an umbrella body.

Mr. David Maclean (Penrith and The Border): My right hon. Friend will be aware that one of the purposes of the Bill is to deal with chambers that take a grandiose geographical title such as the worldwide chamber of commerce of Penrith. If a geographical title could be in dispute, surely consulting a neighbouring chamber is essential.

Mr. Forth: I am glad that my right hon. Friend agrees with me. He has given a good example. He will be familiar with the idea that Penrith bestrides the world, but we might not all agree. That is the point.

The training and enterprise councils should commend themselves to the Secretary of State as bodies that can lay claim to having a representative role for the business community. They are not perfect--I am in correspondence with the Department of Trade and Industry about a brouhaha that has developed with my local TEC--but they have developed a key participatory role in the local business community. At best they perform a vital role in bringing together all the elements

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of training and enterprise in their area. They should also commend themselves strongly to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire.

I pass rather more quickly over the Confederation of British Industry. I would not want anyone to consult the national CBI, but some of the excellent regional CBI offices, which are real bodies rather than something floating half way between here and the stratosphere, should be consulted.

Mr. Lansley: I shall seek not to interrupt my right hon. Friend on every point. It might be helpful to remind him that I referred on Second Reading to training and enterprise councils and to the TEC National Council. Clause 4 allows the Secretary of State to add a relevant representative body and might be used to add the TEC National Council to the list of relevant representative bodies, because it plays an important role when chambers of commerce and TECs come together.

Mr. Forth: Of course I accept what my hon. Friend says, but even in that typically helpful intervention he has given the game away. He is being restrictive. The Bill says one body and he says helpfully that clause 4 might allow us to add another. That is not the spirit of what I am talking about. We must open the process up and ensure that when the Secretary of State makes his important decisions he can demonstrate to the world that he has been inclusive and has asked a proper range of people so that his decision is firmly based and is less vulnerable to challenge and judicial review. My worry about the process is that if it rests solely on the existing words of the Bill, it might be vulnerable to judicial review.

Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) rose--

Mr. Forth: Talking about the law, my hon. Friend is about to help me.

Mr. Heald: I was not going to ask a legal question. Does my right hon. Friend think that the Bill restricts the Secretary of State in his consultations? Surely he may consult with local bodies if there are complaints. The point is that he must consult the British Chambers of Commerce. Does my right hon. Friend not feel that that is the right balance?

Mr. Forth: No. In some senses, they are the last people who should be consulted because they have an interest. They are an inward-looking, inclusive group who want to defend the status quo, as does the Bill. Once again, we have an interesting dilemma in that the Conservatives--or some of us--are the new thrusting, dynamic radicals, whereas the old fuddy-duddies who want to defend the status quo are the British Chambers of Commerce and, I regret to say, my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire.

Mr. Maclean: I do not want to follow my right hon. Friend down that route. Clause 4 defines the relevant representative bodies, limiting them to the British Chambers of Commerce and the Scottish Chambers of Commerce. Therefore, when clause 2 says:

"The Secretary of State must consult at least one relevant representative body",

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he is still limited to chambers of commerce. He cannot consult anyone else if he so wishes.

Mr. Forth: That is one reading of the clause, however it does say "at least". Having been a little cruel to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire a moment ago, I shall defend him now. The Bill says:

"The Secretary of State must consult at least one relevant body",

as I suspect my hon. Friend will say when he replies to this debate.

I am hardly a third of the way through my list. If I do not get on, the House will lose patience with me, and I cannot have that.

Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome): I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and I shall not delay him long. Does he agree that widening the sphere of consultation might establish that any ambiguity in the title was only in the mind of the single respondent to consultation in the first instance and that nobody else was confused by the geographical spread of a title?

Mr. Forth: That is a helpful but typically convoluted Liberal Democrat view. The hon. Gentleman has a good point, but let me press on with my list, Mr. Deputy Speaker, before I try your patience too far.

I deliberately skipped over CBI regional offices pretty quickly. Trade associations, which are an important part of modern business life, can often play a key role in a local community. I would also add significant employers. A catchment area of a chamber of commerce may well be dominated by a very small number of significant companies that should be involved in the process.

Mr. Keith Darvill (Upminster): Surely chambers of commerce are representative in the sense that in most areas companies can apply to join them quite openly. If large employers were to be consulted, the provision would impose an additional burden on them. Surely that is not the way to reduce the burden on business.

Mr. Forth: It is interesting to hear the hon. Gentleman saying from the inclusive Government Benches that he wants to reduce the process of consultation. I would be very interested to hear the Secretary of State's view on the balance between the onerous bureaucratic process of consultation and saving companies, especially large ones, from that burden. The hon. Gentleman has raised an interesting point and I should like to hear the Secretary of State's view on it.

Mr. Darvill: I am not trying to avoid consultation because the companies will be consulted through the various organisations that the right hon. Gentleman has described. The consultation will be open and on-going, but if the Secretary of State were obliged to consult large employers, for example, the detail of that consultation would be an administrative burden that I suspect large numbers of employers would oppose.

Mr. Forth: My amendment would not place them under an obligation as its wording is more flexible than that. It simply proposes that the consultation process could include the bodies to which I have referred. Of course the hon. Gentleman is right. If, as would probably be the case, large

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employers were already involved in the TEC, the regional CBI or a trade association, they probably would not want to go through the process again. I concede that. I do not want to press the point and irritate the hon. Gentleman as I am asking for his support for my amendment.

In the same spirit--and it is not often that I say it, but I shall whisper it--we might even consult the trade unions. I do not want to lose the support of my hon. Friends, but as we are all friends here together this morning I thought that I might mention the unions. In many cases, they will be a relevant factor in the process and therefore should not be ignored.

I now come to the last two organisations on my list. Local authorities must have a role to play in the process given that so many of them now have economic development departments and seek to involve themselves in economic regeneration and the like.

Last but not least--and I saved this in order to make my appeal to the Secretary of State--DTI regional offices should also be involved. Having some passing but now rather historical knowledge of such matters, I remember the key role that they sometimes play, often very effectively. I cannot imagine the Secretary of State neglecting to consult the regional offices, but one never knows. Again, it seems somewhat at odds with the wording of the Bill.

Without labouring it unduly, I hope that I have made the point as forcefully as I can. I believe that the present wording of the Bill is unduly restrictive and inspires little confidence that it is sufficiently open and consultative to reassure us that it has not been designed to shore up and reinforce a rather cosy monopoly that no doubt does splendid work but is now asking us by statute to protect its existing membership and, by implication, therefore, deny the process of challenge and renewal.

I shall return to the issue on Third Reading as my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire knows that I am worried about the non-reversibility of the process in the Bill and I should like to explore it just one more time to allow him to persuade me of its merits--as no doubt he will, given the power of his eloquence. The amendments are designed to open up the consultation process and make it more credible and more soundly based. Therefore, in my view they would make it a better Bill.

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