Local Democracy, Economic Developmentand Construction Bill [Lords]


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Dan Rogerson: Casting your eye over these amendments, Mr. Amess, it should strike you that they cover, at least in part, the same issue. Although they are related, amendment 41 goes slightly further. My hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne and I tabled these amendments to seek clarification from the Minister about the intention of the Bill, particularly in relation to petitions submitted concerning contentious planning or licensing issues.
Planning and licensing are covered by other legislation. I feel, and many of our constituents feel, that their views are not always taken thoroughly into consideration. The planning system needs reform further to recent Acts in order to reassure people that their views are being taken into account on issues that affect the development of their local area. The system needs some change to engage them with that process. As my hon. Friend said earlier, people are beginning to believe that what they say has no effect—planning is a prominent example of that. That is not to say that local authority members should not be free to make decisions based on the information available to them—information that might not be available to petitioners, who may bring forward other issues. Objectors feel that they do not have enough say when considering the possibility of a third-party right of appeal—an issue that I debated with the Minister’s colleagues during the passage of the Planning and Energy Act 2008. Such changes would reassure people that their views were being taken into account and that the planning system was more democratic than it currently is.
There are issues pertaining to planning and licensing that could necessitate a different approach. When we move on to discuss what local authorities should do when dealing with petitions, we ought to consider that certain issues, notably planning and licensing, are different from function and need to be handled differently.
Amendment 41 relates to how petitions on proposals that are already being considered by a principal local authority should be dealt with. Should they trigger the procedure that a principal local authority would have to follow under the Bill or could they simply be accepted and responded to as part of the existing consultation process? When such things are put on a statutory basis, I, like my hon. Friend, fear that they will become the main route for interaction with the local community. People on both sides of the process might try to slow the planning or licensing process by triggering lots of petitions that would all have to be considered in the same way.
My contention is that we ought to be cautious in imposing standardised ways of dealing with petitions because particular factors pertain to planning and licensing. It is possible that existing consultation processes will be cut across. Sadly, as my hon. Friend pointed out, consultation has become a devalued concept. However, it does go on. I would hope that local authorities take more account of consultations than central Government and there is evidence that they do. In places where that is happening properly, it would be a shame to do something that cuts across the good work.
The amendments prod the Minister to defend the use of a standardised petition for considering petitions right across the functions of a council, even what some would call the quasi-judicial functions such as planning and licensing.
Mr. Jackson: The hon. Gentleman has made a good case and has explained the rationale behind the Liberal Democrat amendments. I would fight shy of anything that reduces the validity of petitions in the remit of quasi-judicial bodies. As a London borough councillor, I served on the licensing panel and the planning and regulatory committee in the good old days when we had a proper committee system and did not have first and second-class councillors, as we do now. I was always mindful of the importance of a petition in informing the debate, even when further judicial determinations were necessary.
A practical ramification of the Licensing Act 2003 and the secondary legislation attached to it is that the consultation procedures on matters such as varying the opening times of licensed premises and restaurants are very prescriptive. It is important that we have—to use a ghastly term because I cannot think of a better one—an holistic approach. To give a simple example, the McDonald’s in Peterborough city centre sought to open virtually 24 hours a day. As the constituency MP, I did not think that that should happen. I was told that as a result of case law and regulations, I was not permitted—even as the MP for Peterborough—to comment on that because I was not a local resident. However, had I organised a petition it might have been a different matter. If there were local residents on the petition, it would have been a valid objection to those proposals.
I am in sympathy with the idea that petitions need to be complementary to quasi-judicial processes, and the Minister should take that into account when responding.
Ms Winterton: Amendments 40 and 41 relate to the Government’s public commitment to use the order-making power under clause 14 to exclude planning and licensing applications from the scope of the duty to respond to petitions. I want to make it clear that the list of issues excluded from the duty to respond to petitions should be very limited. We believe that building petitions into council decision-making processes will empower people, so we want to minimise the issues that are excluded and keep the scope of the duty as broad as possible. Obviously, there are some issues that it makes sense to exclude, such as licensing and planning applications, because we do not want to set up parallel routes for considering local people’s concerns in such circumstances. There are already extensive processes for public involvement in planning and licensing applications.
I have a technical reservation about amendments 40 and 41, although they capture the broad aims of our intention. For instance, we want to ensure that, in addition to planning applications, planning enforcement decisions and the decision not to enforce would be excluded. To explain the sort of extra detail that we need to look at, it might be helpful to refer the Committee to Statutory Instrument No. 3261, the Overview and Scrutiny (Reference by Councillors) (Excluded Matters) (England) Order 2008. That order took the same approach for the councillor call for action, as we intend to take for petitions. However, it is quite long—30 lines—and adding such provisions to the Bill would not be the right approach.
Amendment 41 contains one additional exclusion. It provides that issues on which the authority is currently carrying out a formal public consultation should be excluded. That is an interesting idea. The rationale is the same for excluding planning and licensing applications. However, it would be important to reflect further on such matters and particular discussions with local government on how an exclusion might work in practice. The issues need to be thought through in detail, and using secondary legislation allows us to do that. We intend to consult on which issues should be excluded from the duty to respond to petitions after the Bill has received Royal Assent.
As I have said, we want to keep exclusions to a minimum, but it is also important that, in drawing up further legislation, we consult local authorities. I therefore cannot support amendments 40 and 41, and ask that they be withdrawn.
Dan Rogerson: I am pleased that the Minister is considering such issues in detail. I confess that I would not have expected her to have accepted them straight into the Bill. I wish to clarify that it is not my intention to imply that councils should not respond to petitions on planning or licensing issues. I am sure that the hon. Member for Peterborough was not implying that it was. It merely is that matters might be done differently from more standardised petitions on a matter of policy for a principal council.
Following the hon. Gentleman’s McDonald’s reference, a particularly contentious issue in part of my constituency is a lap-dancing club. I know that a number of hon. Members from all parties have contended with that issue in their constituencies. There is some dissatisfaction among local residents about how the petitions may have been submitted on that and whether current licensing powers mean that their local authority is able to respond to the wishes of the local community. The Government will now hopefully look at that through the recent Act put through by the Home Office.
Taking into account that the Minister said she would take on board the fact that there are differences between planning, licensing and more general matters of policy, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 12 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 13 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 14

Requirement to take steps
6.15 pm
Dan Rogerson: I beg to move amendment 43, in clause 14, page 8, line 43, at end insert—
‘(4A) A principal local authority’s petition scheme must secure that where a petition is made to the authority that relates to matters set out by the appropriate national authority under section 14(4)(a) or by the Secretary of State under section 14(4)(b), the authority must within the specified period—
(a) forward the petition to the relevant department of state it considers responsible for the matters,
(b) notify the petition organiser in writing of this and of the authority’s reasons for doing so, and
(c) publish a notification on the authority’s website.’.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 42, in clause 14, page 9, line 23, after ‘to’, insert
‘the appropriate cabinet member or leader of’.
Dan Rogerson: The amendments in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne relate to a couple of issues on which we, again, seek clarification about the Government’s intention.
Through amendment 42, we are seeking to explore what the appropriate route would be for a petition to be considered. We have a system in which executive members are responsible for the functions of an authority and who have a particular role in setting out those functions and presiding over the delivery of them, as was alluded to by the hon. Member for Peterborough with regard to the old committee situation. The way that we do things now in local authorities means that particular members have responsibility for the delivery of functions and so, through amendment 42, we seek to explore whether it is appropriate for petitions to be directed to those responsible members and for them to respond as to what the council’s policy is and what the response is.
Amendment 43 covers an issue that is certainly missing. If we accept—as we seem to have done following a vote on an earlier clause—that provisions will set out what the response to a petition should be, under the clause we are now considering, the local authority is committed to deciding whether the petition is a matter for that local authority or for a local partner body. So, if a petition on an issue is submitted to a council, it can say, “This is for us and is something to which we must respond” or, “This is something for another local body and it must be passed on to them.”
The omission there seems to be in relation to matters for central Government—a Department or an agency of a Department—and therefore amendment 43 would provide the extra option of passing the petition on to the responsible Department. That is important. If we are in the business of encouraging people to understand what the different levels of government do, what their functions are and how they interact, it would be rather strange for a local authority to be forced in some way to consider a policy matter that is clearly determined by a central Government Department. The amendment would be a sensible way of resolving that situation.
Mr. Jackson: I shall make a brief general point; I hope that you do not rule me out of order, Mr. Amess. In respect of clause 14, I think that hon. Members across the House might be concerned about the loose definition of subsection (1)(b) in respect of petitions that are vexatious, abusive or otherwise inappropriate. In practical terms, we have seen the recent controversy in Mid Bedfordshire district council—as it then was—over a petition concerning Gypsies and Travellers. I understand that a value judgment was made by council officers without recourse to elected members—or, at least, elected members were sent the letters but did not read them—that branded petitioners potentially racist. I know this is rather tangential, but perhaps the Minister will dwell on the value judgments that are made about what is inappropriate or vexatious.
I shall come back to order, Mr. Amess, and return to the point of the hon. Member for North Cornwall point concerning the appropriate cabinet member or leader. If we are to be consistent in our philosophical approach to the Bill, we are not predisposed to support this point simply because there is a practical issue with it. I should like to quote the good Lord Greaves again on that. If a small cul-de-sac wants its pavements to be looked at by the local authority or highways maintenance and has 15 signatures, or if there is a petition against the third runway that has 75,000 or 100,000 signatures, it might not be practical to remit that petition or all petitions, through the Bill, to one named individual or office holder. That would set a dangerous precedent and it would not be consistent with our ideological and philosophical approach to accept that.
We are minded to look favourably on amendment 43, which was tabled by the hon. Member for North Cornwall. I think that he seeks, by a circuitous sleight of hand, to do what we pressed the Minister and the Government to do earlier and practise what they preach. If local authorities are to have responsibilities cascaded down to them, they should not be responsible for discharging duties in relation to people for whom they have no democratic influence or accountability. On that basis, if the hon. Gentleman presses the amendment to a vote, we will support it.
Ms Winterton: I shall deal first with amendment 42. I am sure that the hon. Member for North Cornwall did not intend it to create a barrier, but I fear that what has already been said is correct and that it would make things difficult for people who are petitioning. Local people do not always know who their local councillor is, let alone who the cabinet member is, so the amendment would create a problem and I do not want to accept it.
On amendment 43, I understand that the hon. Gentleman is trying to increase the transparency of the way that petitions are dealt with, and I am in favour of that, but the amendment is not necessary because in many ways its aims have already been achieved. Members of the public can already ask the Secretary of State to call in planning applications. Recently published direction on that prioritises the cases that we think most appropriate for the Secretary of State to consider, such as those affecting green belt land, but the Secretary of State can call in any application.
 
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