Royal Assent
Mr Speaker: I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that Her Majesty has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:
Trusts (Capital and Income) Act 2013
Statute Law (Repeals) Act 2013
Prevention of Social Housing Fraud Act 2013
Disabled Persons’ Parking Badges Act 2013.
European Union (Croatian Accession and Irish Protocol) Act 2013
Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013.
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South London Healthcare NHS Trust
11.33 am
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the future of South London Healthcare NHS Trust.
The NHS exists to provide patients with the highest levels of care and compassion, and it does so in a way that is more equitable than the system in any other country in the world—it provides comprehensive care, free at the point of need. But to be true to those values, different parts of the NHS need to be financially sustainable. Financial problems left unaddressed become clinical problems, not least because money used to fund deficits cannot be used for patient care. The South London Healthcare NHS Trust is the most financially challenged in the country, with a deficit of £65 million per annum.
It currently spends some £60 million a year, or 16% of its annual income, to service two private finance initiative contracts signed in 1998. For this and other reasons, repeated local attempts to resolve the financial crisis at the trust have failed. As a result, the trust is losing more than £1 million every week. In the three years since it was formed in 2009, it has generated a deficit of £153 million. That figure will rise to more than £200 million by the end of this financial year, a huge amount of money that has to be diverted away from front-line patient care.
After consulting with the trust, its commissioners and the London strategic health authority, my predecessor as Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, instituted the special administration process, which includes a period of intense local engagement. Matthew Kershaw, former chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, was appointed as the trust special administrator in July 2012. I would like to put on record my thanks to him and his team for his exceptionally detailed and thorough work.
Mr Kershaw had the extremely difficult task of finding a clinically and financially sustainable way forward for the South London Healthcare NHS Trust. Reluctantly, he concluded that only by looking beyond the boundaries of the trust to the wider health community could he put forward a viable solution. I support that analysis.
I received his recommendations on 7 January. Six of his seven recommendations were as follows: first, that over the next three years, all three hospitals within the trust, Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, Queen Mary’s in Sidcup and the Princess Royal in Bromley, should make the full £74.9 million of efficiencies he has identified; secondly, that Queen Mary’s in Sidcup be transferred to Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and developed into a hub for the provision of health and social care in Bexley; thirdly, that all vacant or poorly utilised premises be vacated, and sold where possible; fourthly, that the Department of Health pay the additional annual funds to cover the excess costs of the PFI buildings at the Queen Elizabeth and Princess Royal hospitals; fifthly, that the South London Healthcare NHS Trust be dissolved, with each of its hospitals taken over by neighbouring NHS and foundation trusts; and sixthly, to aid implementation, that the Department of Health write off the accumulated debt of the trust so as not to set the new trusts up to fail, that the Department of Health
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provide additional funds to cover the implementation of his recommendations and that a programme board be appointed under an independent chair, reporting to Sir David Nicholson as chief executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, to ensure the changes are effectively delivered. I have accepted each of these recommendations in full.
As a consequence of what he found, Mr Kershaw also recommended that services be reconfigured beyond the confines of South London Healthcare NHS Trust across all of south-east London. This part of his recommendation included reducing the number of accident and emergency departments across the area from five to four, replacing the A and E department at University Hospital Lewisham with a non-admitting urgent care centre, reducing the number of obstetrician-led maternity units from five to four and downgrading the current obstetrician-led maternity unit at University Hospital Lewisham to a stand alone midwife-led birthing centre. Each obstetrician-led maternity units would also have a midwife-led birthing centre. The recommendation also included co-locating paediatric emergency and in-patient services with the four A and E units, with paediatric urgent care provided at Lewisham, Guy’s and Queen Mary’s hospitals. Finally, he recommended that University Hospital Lewisham should become a centre for non-complex elective procedures, such as hip and knee replacements, to serve the entire population of south-east London.
The public campaign surrounding services at Lewisham hospital has highlighted just how important it is to the local community. I respect and recognise the sense of unfairness that people feel because their hospital has been caught up in the financial problems of its neighbour. However, solving the financial crisis next door is also in the interests of the people of Lewisham because they too depend on the services that are currently part of the South London Healthcare NHS Trust. None the less, I understand their real concerns about how any changes could affect their access to vital health services. Those concerns are echoed by Lewisham clinical commissioning group and many clinicians at Lewisham hospital. I have had in-depth discussions with the hon. Members representing those affected who have reflected those concerns to me.
As a result of those concerns, I asked the NHS medical director, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, to review the recommendations and to consider three things: whether there was sufficient clinical input into the development of the recommendations; whether there is a strong case that the recommendations will lead to improved patient care in the local area; and whether they are underpinned by a clear clinical evidence base, as set out in the third of the four tests for reconfigurations.
On the matter of clinical input, a highly experienced clinical advisory group, led by local GP, Dr Jane Fryer, and including eight trust medical directors, six clinically qualified clinical commissioning group chairs, the London ambulance service medical director, the local director for trauma and three directors of nursing, supported the trust special administrator. Further scrutiny and challenge was provided by an external clinical panel, which included representatives from the Royal Colleges of Midwives and of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The panel was chaired by Professor Chris Welsh, the
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strategic health authority medical director for the midlands and the east of England. Both groups included respected national and local clinicians. They built on years of previous work in this area and held a series of clinical workshops in August and September last year. Sir Bruce was satisfied that there had indeed been sufficient clinical input.
On the issue of better care and clinical evidence, the recommendations provide for the adoption, for the first time in south-east London, of the 2012 pan-London standards for acute care, which are the standards that all six local CCGs have said that they want to commission for emergency and maternity care. They define the best available clinical practice and set the bar higher than that provided by most other acute providers in England.
Sir Bruce agreed that the adoption of these standards could not be achieved without a reduction in the number of sites delivering acute in-patient care. Such a reduction will enable the necessary concentration of resources and senior clinical staff. A similar approach has already led to significant improvements in stroke, major trauma and cardiovascular disease services throughout London, saving hundreds of lives.
For both emergency and maternity care, Sir Bruce found no evidence that patients would be put at risk through increased journey times. The whole population of south-east London will continue to be within 30 minutes of a blue light transfer to an A and E department, with the typical journey time being on average only one minute longer. Accessing consultant-led maternity services will involve an increase in journey times on average of two to three minutes by private or public transport. Sir Bruce therefore concluded that there should be no impact on the quality of care due to the small increase in travel time.
On the issue of maternity services, the expert clinical panel advising the TSA was not willing to support the increased risk to patients of having an obstetrician-led unit at Lewisham without intensive care services. As achieving the London-wide clinical standards will be possible only with the consolidation of the number of sites with these facilities, Sir Bruce supports the proposal for this unit to be replaced with a free-standing, midwife-led unit at Lewisham hospital. This will continue to deal with at least 10% of existing activity and potentially up to 60%, and £36 million of additional investment has been earmarked to ensure that there is sufficient capacity at other sites.
Turning to the emergency care proposals, Sir Bruce was concerned that the recommendation for a non-admitting urgent care centre at Lewisham may not lead, in all cases, to improved patient care. While those with serious injury or illness would be better served by a concentration of specialist A and E services, this would not be the case for those patients requiring short, relatively uncomplicated treatments, or a temporary period of supervision. To better serve those patients, who will often be frail and elderly, and would arrive by non-blue light ambulances, Sir Bruce recommends that Lewisham hospital should retain a smaller A and E service with 24/7 senior emergency medical cover. With these additional clinical safeguards and the impact that this is likely to have on patient and clinician behaviour, Sir Bruce estimates that the new service could continue to see up to three quarters of those currently attending Lewisham A and E.
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Allowing Lewisham to retain its A and E would help to reduce the level of increased demand at hospitals with larger A and E services, while an additional £37 million of investment will further expand services at these hospitals for more serious conditions. Sir Bruce advised that patients with those more serious conditions should now be taken to King’s, QE, Bromley or St Thomas’s—not for financial reasons, but to increase their chances of survival.
On the issue of paediatric care, Sir Bruce recognised the high-quality paediatric services at Lewisham and that any replacement would have to offer even better clinical outcomes and patient experience. His opinion is that this is possible, but dependent on very clear protocols for primary ambulance conveyance, a walk-in paediatric urgent care service at Lewisham, and rapid transfer protocols for any sick children who would be better treated elsewhere. He is clear that this will require careful pathway planning and will need to be a key focus of implementation.
With these caveats, Sir Bruce was content to assert that there is a strong case that the recommendations are likely to lead to improved care for the residents of south-east London and that they are underpinned by clear clinical evidence. He believes that overall these proposals, as amended, could save up to 100 lives every year through higher clinical standards.
Yesterday, 30 January, as no viable alternative plan had been put forward, and in light of Sir Bruce’s opinion, I decided to accept the recommendations of the trust special administrator, subject to the amendments suggested by Sir Bruce. It is important to be clear that my acceptance of these recommendations is conditional on Monitor approving the proposals relating to foundation trusts, and on my Department negotiating an appropriate level of transitional funding with organisations such as King’s Partners.
Owing to the size of the task, there is a significant level of risk associated with achieving the identified savings. I recognise that the additional clinical safeguards that I have put in place will marginally increase these financial risks, but on balance I have made the judgment that this is worth it if it means that local patients are reassured that they will gain from an additional better service, rather than losing their A and E.
I believe the amended proposals meet the four tests required for local reconfigurations and I am therefore content for the process now to proceed to implementation. I expect the South London Healthcare NHS Trust to be dissolved by no later than 1 October 2013. The implementation of these proposals will be challenging and complex. It needs to be planned for carefully and will not happen overnight. I call on all organisations, hospitals and commissioners to offer their full support during the coming years to achieve the ambition of these proposals for the benefit of the people of south-east London, and I commend this statement to the House.
11.46 am
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab):
Just when we thought this Government’s mismanagement of the national health service could not get any worse, it just has. Let us be clear about what the Secretary of State has announced today. He has at last accepted recommendations that were agreed by the previous Government but then delayed
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by his predecessor’s moratorium, thereby deepening the financial problems of South London Healthcare NHS Trust. And he has rejected an outrageous proposal that Lewisham hospital should lose its accident and emergency department—a proposal that never should have been made in the first place, but which has cost more than £5 million of precious NHS cash on accountants in the process, enough to give some of the 5,000 nurses who were sacked their jobs back.
But the Secretary of State has accepted the principle that a successful local hospital can have its services downgraded to pay for the failures of another trust. That takes the NHS into new territory. The Secretary of State has just crossed a line and set dangerous precedents—namely, that in his new market-driven NHS, finance takes precedence and any hospital, no matter how successful, is vulnerable to changes through backdoor reconfiguration, that success can be punished and failure rewarded, and that a community can see its A and E and maternity services downgraded without proper consultation and without clinical justification.
There will be no cheers for the statement in Lewisham and it will send a chill wind through any community worried about its hospital services. There is now utter confusion about the Government’s policy on hospital reconfiguration. In three years, they have gone from moratorium to pandemonium. Across the country, half-baked cost-driven proposals to close A and Es and maternity units are being foisted on local communities without evidence of how that can be done safely and without putting lives at risk, yet at the same time, A and Es everywhere are under severe pressure. Thousands more patients are waiting for more than four hours to be seen and there are queues of ambulances lined up outside.
In that context, it is simply not tenable to downgrade any A and E department without first establishing a clear clinical case for how it can be done without compromising patient safety, but that is what the Government are doing here. They have set up a financially driven process and thrown together a clinical justification that is not independent but drawn up in his own Department, leaving the Secretary of State’s so-called four tests in tatters. Let me remind him that the fourth test is that any proposal for change must have “demonstrable support from commissioners”. Let me quote to him the chair of the Lewisham clinical commissioning group, Dr Helen Tattersfield, who has said:
“If the TSA proceeds as currently planned it is my belief that not only will this result in a reduction of quality and provision of health services for Lewisham residents with huge risks to health outcomes but also the effective end of clinical commissioning in Lewisham.”
It is clearly the case that the proposals that the Secretary of State has announced today will lead, in Dr Tattersfield’s words, to a reduction of quality and provision in Lewisham. These changes are opposed by the doctors he promised to put in charge of the NHS, and therefore clearly fail the fourth test that he has set out.
Furthermore, is the Secretary of State confident that what he has announced today is legal? We warned him that he was going beyond the powers in the Health Act 2009. He said that he would commission fresh legal advice. Will he publish it today so that there can be a proper debate on the legal position? He mentioned PFI, but is it not the case that the schemes he mentioned
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were initiated and negotiated under the Major Government? He said that he had consulted South London Healthcare NHS Trust, but is it not a fact that it found out about this process from the media?
This decision will damage fragile trust in the way that the NHS manages changes to hospitals. The Government need to get back to first principles. Will the Secretary of State confirm, learning from this debacle, that in future no proposal to downgrade or close A and E and maternity services will ever get out of the starting blocks if it does not have a proper clinical case to support it?
Will the Secretary of State today issue an apology to the people of Lewisham? How on earth are they expected to have confidence in the figures he has announced from a clinical review thrown together—cobbled together —in his Department in a matter of days? He has caused huge distress to them but he has also failed to listen to them. Thousands of people have put their lives on hold to fundraise, to lobby, to campaign: 52,000 names on a petition; 25,000 people on a march. This community have rallied together to defend their local hospital, led by the fantastic efforts of the local MPs, but more than that, they have fought valiantly for every community worried about this Government’s cavalier approach to our country’s most valued institution. This community have stood up to an out-of-touch Government who think they can treat some of more deprived parts of our country with utter disdain. This community have achieved something today, but I am certain that they will continue the fight—and let me say that they will have our support. Will the Secretary of State confirm that what he has just announced takes away their right of appeal to the Independent Reconfiguration Panel? If that is the case, are they not justified in continuing the fight to stop this Government riding roughshod over the people of Lewisham and south London?
What we have seen here today is the first glimpse of the new market-driven NHS that the Government have created, where the moneymen and not the medics are calling the shots. We have seen another chapter in the unfolding omnishambles that is this Government—this one, sadly, could be entitled the Lewishambles. We have seen a scandalous waste of money on a solution that will not be acceptable to people in Lewisham—and it is not acceptable to people anywhere. The Secretary of State is asking this House to accept the unacceptable. We will not do that for Lewisham and we will not do it for anywhere else.
Mr Hunt: I am afraid that the shadow Health Secretary clearly wrote his response before he read my statement. Listening to him this morning, he has never sounded further away from being part of the Government-in-waiting that he aspires to be.
Let me say this to the right hon. Gentleman: the apology over what is happening in South London Healthcare NHS Trust needs to come from Labour Members, because they were the people who failed to resolve this problem over very many years. It was their party that set up two PFI deals, signed in 1998, which have been incredibly dangerous. It was their party that created a financial situation that means that £1 million every week is being bled from front-line patient care in
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order to fund a deficit, and that 100 lives every year are not being saved that could be saved in Lewisham and the whole of south-east London.
What I did not hear from the right hon. Gentleman was any contrition about the fact that this incredibly difficult problem was something that his Government and, indeed, he as Health Secretary totally failed to resolve. Let me remind him that the legislation that I followed actually came from the Labour party, which passed it when it was in government. He asked me to confirm that the people of Lewisham have no right of appeal to the IRP against this decision, but who was it who stripped them of that right to appeal? It was him when his Government passed the legislation. Nothing that he has said has contained a single alternative proposal to deal with this problem. If he was being responsible as shadow Health Secretary, he would have come up with just one proposal, but he did not come up with a single one or tell the House about any of his ideas.
The right hon. Gentleman talked about the pressure on A and E, but we will take no lessons from him. We met our A and E targets last year, whereas in Wales, where the Labour party is cutting the NHS budget by 8%, the A and E targets have not been met since 2009.
I am afraid that what we have heard—I hope that other contributors will strike a different tone—is a very disappointing response from the Labour party. The shadow Health Minister, the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who is not on the Opposition Front Bench today—perhaps this will explain why—has said that Labour would not do what she called the “easy politics” of opposing every single reconfiguration, but what we have heard this morning is easy politics from a party that closed at least 12 A and Es and at least nine maternity units while it was in office. The right hon. Gentleman needs to recognise that the responsible thing for a Health Secretary to do is that which will save the most lives, and that is what I have announced this morning.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): My hon. Friends the Members for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire) and for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett) are on duty on a Public Bill Committee, but they wish to associate their views with my question. We thank the Health Secretary and congratulate him on taking a tough but necessary decision to deal with a mess that was not of his making and that was inherited from the Labour party. Does he accept that, thanks to the intervention of Sir Bruce Keogh’s review, more care has been taken, with both an evidence base and a consultation, than under the previous Government with regard to the reduction of A and E services at Queen Mary’s, Sidcup? Will he also help me by explaining the likely time frame for the conclusion of discussions with King’s Partners on transitional funding, which is particularly important for those of us whose constituents are predominantly served by the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough?
Mr Hunt:
I thank my hon. Friend for his constructive involvement in all the discussions we have been having to resolve this difficult issue, particularly with respect to his own constituents. He is absolutely right, because in the end the things that matter most are the clinical
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considerations. I thought it was extremely important to take advice from the NHS medical director, Sir Bruce Keogh, and I have taken that advice. He is absolutely clear that this will save lives, which is my biggest responsibility.
My hon. Friend is also right to say that the success of these proposals depends on negotiations with King’s Partners about the potential merger that it is involved in, and we want to conclude those as quickly as possible. They are a very important part of this issue. It is our ambition to proceed as quickly as possible for the sake of the people of south London, who need certainty about the future provision of their health services, but we have some difficult negotiations to conclude in order to make that happen.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab): The only reason the proposals to close the A and E at Lewisham and downgrade the maternity services have not gone ahead in full is, of course, because of the enormous protests of over 50,000 local people and the almost total opposition of all consultants and GPs, including the GP commissioning group. Today’s proposals are an absolute sham and a shambles and utterly unacceptable to all of us who represent people in Lewisham.
Does the Health Secretary agree that, instead of allowing this rushed TSA process, which is completely unsuitable for the reconfiguration that he now proposes, he should allow the GP commissioning group to do the job for which he set it up, namely to lead a consultation process, properly, in order to understand the clinical needs of local people, whether the merger between Lewisham and Woolwich hospitals should go ahead, and to meet the real clinical needs of the local people? Will he also acknowledge that no due diligence was done in respect of the proposals, and that Lewisham hospital will need the strongest guarantees that it will not be led into a new, unsustainable trust by his proposals?
Mr Hunt: May I say to the right hon. Lady that a “sham and a shambles” are what I inherited and what I am dealing with, not what I am bequeathing through my announcement this morning. With respect to the GP-led clinical commissioning group in Lewisham, of course I understand its opposition to the proposals put forward by the trust special administrator, but it supports the principle that complex procedures should be done from fewer sites. That is an important point. Inevitably, when we are reducing the number of sites for complex medical procedures, the people in the areas where those procedures will no longer happen will often be opposed to the changes. That is what has happened here, but the group supports the principles behind what the trust special administrator has said.
The right hon. Lady’s concern that we are setting up a new trust that will not be sustainable is precisely why I am taking this extremely difficult decision today. Lewisham hospital has proposed that it and Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich should be allowed to work out their own way of dealing with the deficit, but that was precisely the problem that happened when the South London Healthcare Trust was set up. Trusts with deficits were put together in a marriage that, in the end, failed to address those difficult decisions. My responsibility to her constituents is to address those issues and to give them certainty about the provision of their health services.
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Already, her constituents who have a stroke or a heart attack do not go to Lewisham hospital. They go to Tommy’s or Guy’s or other places where those specialist services can be delivered, and they get better treatment. We are expanding that principle through what I am announcing today, and it will save around 100 lives a year. That is something that she should welcome.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con): I find it rather strange that a successful hospital is being slashed when others are being saved. I am particularly concerned about some of the figures on which these decisions have been made, and I really require my right hon. Friend to justify the financial figures that support this case. I am personally very worried about where babies will be born in Lewisham, and about the loss of the full A and E services there. I am not very happy about this, and I clearly do not support the closure.
Mr Hunt: There is not a closure. Let us talk about maternity deaths. London has a higher rate of maternity deaths than most other parts of the country, and that is something that any responsible Health Secretary should try to tackle. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives agree that the way to reduce the number of maternal deaths, in which London does not score well, is to centralise the facilities that deal with the more complex births in fewer sites, where surgeons can get more experience and deliver better clinical outcomes. That is what this proposal is doing. It will lead to fewer maternal deaths in Lewisham and south-east London. It will also mean that, for the first time, south-east London will do something that it does not do at the moment, which is to meet the London-wide clinical quality standards. That must be the most important thing for the people of south-east London.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab): The Secretary of State’s announcement today might appear to offer something of a lifeline to Lewisham’s A and E, but it is far from the emergency and maternity services that my constituents and the people of south-east London deserve. I remain concerned about maternity services in south-east London. Between April 2011 and November 2012, maternity services were suspended 37 times in south-east London. There are 4,000 babies a year born at Lewisham. Can the Secretary of State give me an assurance that the money spent on increasing capacity for maternity services at other hospitals will be spent in the hospitals where Lewisham mums will actually go?
Mr Hunt:
The hon. Lady is absolutely right that any change such as this has to be done extremely carefully, and we are investing an extra £36 million to expand the capacity of neighbouring consultant-led maternity services to make sure that they can cope with the extra demand, but may I urge the hon. Lady to understand the clinical rationale behind what is happening? London has halved its stroke mortality rate, because it reduced the number of hospitals treating people with strokes from 32 to eight. As a result, her constituents in Lewisham now go for their stroke treatment to the Princess Royal and King’s. That has led to fewer deaths in Lewisham and many other places. We need to do the same for high-risk pregnancies, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has established that women with
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high-risk pregnancies would prefer to travel a little further if that means they will get better clinical outcomes, which is what this is all about.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD): I appreciate the thoughtful way in which the Secretary of State has tried to deal with a problem that is absolutely not of his making, and I appreciate the fact that he has changed key recommendations and that there will be a continuing A and E service at Lewisham, dealing with up to 75% of the work. However, like other colleagues, I do not therefore understand why there cannot be continuing maternity care there as well, because the key point is that there should be intensive care provision on the site and maternity care services should be provided. I also say to him honestly that I have not heard of any evidence that the key fourth test—support from GP commissioners—has been passed, and I ask him to give me an assurance that no plans will go ahead until and unless the GP commissioning body in Lewisham agrees.
Mr Hunt: Let me take those two points in reverse order. First, on GP commissioners, all six local commissioning groups support the principles upon which these proposals were developed. To meet the London-wide clinical quality standards, which are not being met in south-east London at present, it is necessary to centralise the provision of more complex services in the same way that we have already successfully done for heart attacks and strokes. That principle applies as much to complex births and complex pregnancies as it does to strokes and heart attacks, and it will now apply for the people of Lewisham to conditions including pneumonia, meningitis and if someone breaks a hip. People will get better clinical care as a result of these changes. That is the most difficult project in all the work of the trust special administrator. The project has been to try to resolve an unsustainable financial situation while improving clinical care for the people of south-east London, and I think that, in the end, we have got a set of proposals that does that.
Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab): The Secretary of State will be aware of the dismay with which this statement will be heard across south London. Whatever eloquent argument he advances, the people of south London will take from what he said that the maternity and A and E services at Lewisham have been downgraded.
I have had the opportunity to look briefly at the wording of his statement, and I am alarmed by the degree of risk that Sir Bruce Keogh identifies, particularly in relation to the relocation of the paediatric service. The clinical outcomes to which he refers are dependent on extremely difficult interconnections among ambulance services, receiving staff and inpatient beds, and rely on them all working effectively. He rightly recognises the knock-on effect for other hospitals, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) and I, together with all south London MPs, also recognise those knock-on effects. Given that King’s college hospital has seen a fourfold increase in cancelled operations since 2009-10, we are therefore very concerned about the consequences
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for the care of the constituents whom we represent. We are also concerned that the responsibility for the PRU, which King’s is prepared to welcome, will be properly and adequately financed.
Mr Hunt: The right hon. Lady talks about the risks that Sir Bruce alludes to in his analysis of the trust special administrator’s proposals. Those risks are precisely why I have not accepted the proposals in their entirety and have put in place a series of additional safeguards.
Not resolving this issue, which is effectively what the Labour party is calling for because it has put forward no alternative proposals, would carry a high degree of risk. It would mean that south London would not meet the London-wide clinical quality standards. It would mean that £1 million a week would continue to be diverted from front-line patient care into funding an unsustainable deficit. That would be bad for her constituents and those in neighbouring constituencies.
We must look at the south-east London health care economy as a whole, but the objective must be to improve the services that people receive. That is a difficult balance to get right, but I think that we have the right balance in the proposals that I have outlined this morning.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con): Does my right hon. Friend agree that the very difficult decisions that he has announced to the House reflect the application in south London of something that is needed across the health service—a willingness to address difficult issues, but led always by clinical evidence on how to deliver the best possible outcomes for the patients who rely on the service?
Mr Hunt: I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend. It would be totally irresponsible for me as Health Secretary to fail to take a decision that could save as many lives as I believe this decision will save. If we are to save more lives in A and E and reduce the number of maternity deaths in London, it involves taking difficult decisions. The disappointment for me is that the Labour party has chosen to jump on an Opposition bandwagon, rather than putting forward its own solution to deal with the clinical issues in south-east London. Unfortunately, the Opposition are playing to the gallery. That is not what a Government-in-waiting should be doing.
Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab): I start by congratulating the Secretary of State on admitting in his statement something that has been denied from the outset: that this is a reconfiguration. Indeed, it is a back-door reconfiguration.
I do not think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) and I can adequately represent the outrage and anger of the people of Lewisham at the sheer unfairness of this proposal. The Secretary of State is wrong to say that Matthew Kershaw concluded that his review needed to go wider than South London Healthcare NHS Trust; he started from that premise and said so openly at the meeting in July at the office of the Secretary of State’s predecessor.
Is the Secretary of State aware that even the maternity proposal will mean that a double rota is necessary at King’s College hospital and Queen Elizabeth hospital
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Woolwich, because it will increase the expected annual number of births at both units to more than 8,000? That will lead to worse services and less choice for patients. The fact that it does not have the support of local commissioners does not seem to register with the Secretary of State.
Will the Secretary of State say whether it was really necessary to spend £5.5 million of taxpayers’ money to demonstrate that his four tests are meaningless and that the guarantees and undertakings of this Tory-Liberal Government are worthless?
Mr Hunt: First, let me say to the hon. Gentleman that this is a reconfiguration. However, the normal processes for reconfigurations have been suspended because of legislation that was passed by the Government who were in power until 2010 and whom he supported.
The trust special administrator, Matthew Kershaw, looked extensively at whether there was an option within South London Healthcare NHS Trust to solve the problem. He invited expressions of interest from other people who might run the hospitals in the group, but nobody was able to come forward with a proposal that would solve the problem within the geographical confines of the trust. Indeed, nobody—not the Labour party, nor any of the people who oppose these changes—has come forward with a proposal that would not impact on neighbouring health care economies.
The hon. Gentleman spoke about choice. Choice is not just about the number of hospitals that one could go to, but about the number of good hospitals that one could go to. Nowhere in south London currently meets the London-wide clinical quality standards. As a result of my decision today, the whole of south-east London will meet those standards and it will have some of the highest quality care in London for people who use A and E and maternity services.
On the cost of the process, £5.5 million is the cost of failure—the total failure of the last Government to address this issue when they could have done, rather than bequeath the highest deficit anywhere in the NHS.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con): The Secretary of State recognises that Lewisham is the victim of an unfair decision as a result of failed PFI and failed finance, which were not of his making. He will recognise the striking similarities with Chase Farm hospital, which has also been downgraded because of the appalling PFI arrangements at neighbouring hospitals. He knows that I utterly oppose that decision. Given the present concerns, particularly with regard to implementation, will he meet me and a cross-party delegation to look closely at these matters?
Mr Hunt: I recognise how hard my hon. Friend has campaigned on behalf of his constituents and how deeply they feel about these issues. He knows that the decision has been made. We want to get the safe implementation of that decision absolutely right and I would be more than happy to meet him to discuss how we can best ensure that that happens.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab):
The Secretary of State inherited a mess that was created by his Conservative predecessor, who abandoned the “A picture of health” process. That led to the betrayal of my constituents in
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respect of what they expected to come out of that process, particularly at Queen Mary’s hospital Sidcup. When he opposed “A picture of health”, the former Secretary of State said that he would decide on that closure based on what local clinicians said. In this process, it is clear that local clinicians are opposed to the closure of the A and E. Will the Secretary of State therefore say what value he places on the views of the local commissioners, who are completely opposed to what he proposes?
Mr Hunt: Of the six local clinical commissioning groups, five support these proposals. One group is against the proposals, but it accepts the principles behind them, including the idea that to deliver higher quality care, we must perform complex surgery at fewer sites. That will mean that more of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents have better care outcomes. I remind him that if his Government had resolved this problem when they were in office before 2010, none of us would be having this discussion today.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab): The Secretary of State has accepted all Matthew Kershaw’s recommendations. He will know that the trust special administrator recommended a substantial investment package to support the changes that he recommended, including £161 million of capital funding and £55 million of transitional funding over three years. In his statement, the Secretary of State referred to just £36 million of capital spending for maternity and £37 million for A and E. That is £73 million lower than Mr Kershaw’s recommendation. There was no reference in the statement to the transitional funding of £55 million. Will the Secretary of State confirm whether Mr Kershaw’s funding recommendations have been accepted?
Mr Hunt: We accept that very detailed analysis was used by Matthew Kershaw to come up with those numbers. We will look at them very carefully. However, we need to have sensitive negotiations with the new partners who will be part of making this solution happen before the final numbers are agreed on.
Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab): When modelling future need, what account did the administrator or the Secretary of State take of the fact that there will be increased health needs due to the increases in child poverty and homelessness in my constituency, as is predicted by every expert on these matters? The efficiency proposals rely to a large extent on keeping vulnerable elderly people out of hospital and caring for them in the community. Given the local authority budget cuts and the fact that some private companies that deliver those services in Bexley in my area are slashing the wages and conditions of staff, how does the Secretary of State think those services will be improved? Will he urgently review the services for elderly people to ensure that they stack up with the proposals that he has outlined today? This morning, the Secretary of State has said a number of times that these plans will save lives. I sincerely hope that he is right. If time shows that he is not right, will he resign?
Mr Hunt:
In such matters, what a Minister does is take very seriously the medical advice they are given—I am sure the hon. Lady’s party was exactly the same
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when it was in power. Medical advice suggests that the way forward I am deciding on and announcing this morning will save 100 lives, and I am taking the decision on that basis. The hon. Lady would do no differently in my shoes.
For child poverty, changes in demography are taken into account in the modelling used, but the overriding priority has been to improve clinical services. That will make the biggest difference to the most socially disadvantaged people, including the frail elderly who—I agree with the hon. Lady—are often the least well served by our current NHS structures and the silos between what is done by local authorities and the NHS. I and my ministerial colleagues in government are currently doing a lot of work to break down those barriers and offer a more integrated service to the frail elderly, so as to avoid some of the problems mentioned by the hon. Lady.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab): Surely the Secretary of State understands—even if Sir Bruce Keogh does not seem to do so—the huge effect that downgrading the maternity unit at Lewisham will have on King’s college and St Thomas’ hospitals. They are full to the seams and will not be able to cater easily for increased numbers of women. What exactly is the Secretary of State offering hospitals such as mine in terms of finance? Will he lay out clearly that this kind of merger of King’s college hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’ and the mental health trust is not the way forward when it has been brought in from the top by those same experts who get it wrong so often, and when local people have had absolutely no involvement? In view of the disruption taking place, will he say that it is absolute nonsense for millions of pounds to be spent on consultants and business plans to bring together a huge organisation that will not be in the interests of local people?
Mr Hunt:
On the merger, may I gently point out that I want to follow the hon. Lady’s advice if she is against people deciding things from the top down. It is for local trusts to negotiate such things, and they must do so on
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the basis of what is in the clinical interest of the population they serve. I will not be a Secretary of State who steps in and stops those things happening, unless they amount to a reconfiguration, in which case procedures are in place that require proper democratic support for any changes.
On the changes to maternity provision in Lewisham, we have allocated £36 million to expanding the capacity at those other hospitals that will take on more complex and high-risk births as a result of the proposals, and we will work closely with those trusts to ensure that that capacity is in place. I agree with the hon. Lady that it is extremely important for such work to be done in a meticulous way so that we get the better clinical outcomes we want as a result of what I am announcing today.
Mr Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab): I sat on the Health and Social Care Bill Committee. The principle in that Bill, which became an Act last year, was that clinicians will be in charge. The lead clinical commissioner has said that this downgrading would pose a huge risk to health outcomes in Lewisham. How does that square with the provisions of that Act passed in this House last year?
Mr Hunt: Clinicians and commissioners have been closely involved in these proposals which, as the right hon. Gentleman will know from reading my statement, affect the broader south-east London area covering six clinical commissioning groups. Five of those groups support the proposals. One does not, but it supports the principles behind them, which is that more complex procedures must be carried out on fewer sites. We have had the benefit of the clinical input of senior people such as Sir Bruce Keogh, and many of the royal colleges have been involved in the external clinical advisory group, which had significant input on the proposals. One question I asked Sir Bruce was whether there had been sufficient clinical input, and his conclusion was that yes, there had been.
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Points of Order
12.24 pm
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Departments of State have varied records as to the quality and timeliness of answering questions. The Department of Health is very good, but the Department for Education has been particularly bad—so bad, in fact, that an evidence session with a Minister of State in December at the Procedure Committee, and an evidence session with the Secretary of State last week, considered why that Department was so woefully bad. Last week at the Procedure Committee there was a list of 36 questions that had been asked in 2012 to which answers had not yet been given. As of yesterday, 31 of those questions remain unanswered. Would it be in order for me to apply for an urgent question to ask the Secretary of State for an explanation of the departmental failure if urgent progress is not made?
Mr Speaker: The matter that the hon. Gentleman raises is, I believe, the subject of a current investigation by the Procedure Committee, of which he is himself a distinguished member. I think the House should await the outcome of the Committee’s deliberations before considering the matter on the Floor. The hon. Gentleman has made his point and it will have been heard in the appropriate quarters.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On 12 December, I wrote to the Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), asking him to desist from accepting an invitation to open a relocated business premises in my constituency on 1 February, which is of course tomorrow. Only today I received a response in which the right hon. Gentleman asserts that he will be attending the event in his capacity as a local MP, having been invited by the company due to a personal connection. May I ask for your guidance, Mr Speaker, on what appears to me an arrogant and blatant disregard of the protocol governing relationships between MPs and their constituencies?
Mr Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. The short answer is that what is required in these circumstances is notification. It is not the case that under our procedures a Member is prohibited from visiting and making a public appearance in another hon. Member’s constituency. I do not seek in any sense to duck the issue, but ultimately it is not one for the Chair. It is a matter for resolution, if possible, but certainly for discussion between neighbouring Members. It is clear that the hon. Lady is extremely dissatisfied, and she may wish to raise the matter further with the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg). I must say, however, that on the specific matter of order, there has been no breach thereof. I think we will have to leave it there for today.
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Canterbury City Council Bill
Consideration of Lords amendments
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle): I must draw the House’s attention to the fact that we are debating Lords amendments to four different private Bills simultaneously today. This is because the four Bills are close to identical, and so are the amendments made in another place.
While we will debate the amendments together, the Questions to dispose of the Lords amendments will be put on each Bill in turn. That means that all Questions on the Canterbury City Council Bill will be disposed of before I put any Questions on the Leeds City Council Bill. I will then put the Questions necessary to dispose of all the Lords amendments to the Leeds City Council Bill before I proceed to the Questions relating to the Nottingham City Council Bill, and so forth.
On the amendment paper, the Lords amendments are printed for each Bill sequentially, starting with all the Lords amendments to the Canterbury City Council Bill. Each Lords amendment has a letter against its number—C for Canterbury, L for Leeds—and guess what?—N for Nottingham and R for Reading.
Interpretation
12.29 pm
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con): I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment C3.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle): With this it will be convenient to take the following:
Lords amendments C4, C5, C10 to C14, C18, C20 to C26, C27 and amendments (a) to (g) thereto, C29 and C30 to the Canterbury City Council Bill.
Lords amendments L1, L2 and L6 to L18, and L19 and amendments (a) to (f) thereto to the Leeds City Council Bill.
Lords amendments N1, N2 and N7 to N19, and N20 and amendments (a) to (f) thereto to the Nottingham City Council Bill.
Lords amendments R1 to R3 and R9 to R21, and R22 and amendments (a) to (g) thereto, and amendment R23 to the Reading Borough City Council.
Stuart Andrew: May I first pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier)? He has spent considerable time on the Bill and I thank him. His duties on the Select Committee on Justice will prevent him from being in the Chamber for the duration of the debate. My only hope is that he does not regret asking me to help with the Bill today.
12.30 pm
As I have said, considerable time has been spent debating these issues, and it is therefore not my intention to speak for too long. The first group of amendments made in the other place relates to enforcement. When the Bill was introduced to the Lords, the Bill provided that council officers could seize articles, receptacles or
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equipment when a person was reasonably suspected of committing a street-trading offence or of helping another to commit the offence. The Bill also stated that a court before which a person is convicted of a street-trading offence could order the forfeiture of seized items, and that an authorised council officer could serve a fixed penalty notice on a person who he reasonably believed had committed a street-trading offence, or an offence of aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of such offences.
The Lords Committee was concerned that some of those enforcement powers were disproportionate, and that they could be used to prevent pedlars from lawfully carrying out their business. It therefore removed the power of seizure, but left the power to issue fixed penalty notices. It inserted a provision requiring councils to train all officials charged with exercising the remaining powers, and to publicise on their websites information about street trading and street trading enforcement in their areas.
I am aware that amendments to Lords amendments have been tabled. The amendments proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) are, as I understand it, concerned with the publicity provisions. They would specifically require the details to include information on the streets contained in the designated areas within which special provision on pedlars will apply. The amendments would mean that the publicity must describe the boundaries of designated areas and require the councils to display the information prominently in a designated area.
The councils believe that the amendments are unnecessary. The information that they publish will be comprehensive and it would be neither practicable nor desirable to display all the information in a designated area. These days, most people have access to the internet, where all the information would be found. The prudent street trader would check the rules in advance of trading.
There are also concerns about the proliferation of signs and unnecessary street clutter. I hope the House supports the amendments I have tabled.
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for taking this on. I will not be able to be in the Chamber for most of the debate because of the duties he mentioned. The matter has been running for some years and has cost Canterbury city council a great deal of money—no doubt, it has cost the other councils a great deal of money too. We made concessions on the original Bill in the Commons and further concessions were made in the Lords. I very much hope we can get this business finished this afternoon.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills (Matthew Hancock): Given the first two speeches, it might be advantageous for the House if I set out the Government’s position. We do not normally seek to intervene on private business, but we have in this case—not on the substance, but to ensure that it is consistent with the EU services directive. We are content for the business to go forward. As it happens, I am a great personal fan of all four cities concerned not least because one is the city of my forefathers—that is my personal position. The Government’s position is that we are content for the Bill to go forward.
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Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con): I have listened with interest to the three contributions to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), with typical understatement, said that their lordships had some concerns about the Bill—the disproportionate powers, the power of seizure and so on. We will discuss the pedlars aspect of the Bill under the second group of Lords amendments, but essentially, their lordships have filleted the Bill. The Bill originally extended to some 18 clauses, but it now has only 13. The clauses that have been taken out are the subject of the Lords amendments we are discussing under this group—clause 6, on seizure; clause 7, on the seizure of perishable items; clause 8, on the return and disposal of seized items; clause 9, on the forfeiture of seized items; and clause 10, on compensation when seizure is unlawful.
You, Mr Deputy Speaker, may recall that the concerns expressed by their lordships were also expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and I, and by other hon. Members, during the passage of the Canterbury City Council Bill and the three other Bills we are considering.
Let us briefly remind ourselves of the history. The Canterbury City Council Bill was presented to Parliament as a private Bill on 27 November 2007. I do not know whether the fact that we are still considering it is some sort of record. The Bill was read the First time on 22 January 2008. Second Reading began on 12 June 2008 and continued on 29 October 2008. The Canterbury City Council Bill was completed, but the need to keep the four Bills together meant there was a third day on Second Reading on 3 June 2009. Significantly—this is one of the important messages that should go out from this exercise—because there were no Commons petitions against the Bills, the matter went to a Committee on Unopposed Bills, which rubber-stamped the provisions on 8 July 2009. The fact that the Bill came straight back from a Committee on Unopposed Bills meant we were unable to debate the Bill on Report. We were therefore able to express our concerns further only on Third Reading on 14 January 2010, just over three years ago.
Fortunately, Members of the other place took the Bills seriously—we owe them a great debt of gratitude. My noble Friend Lord Lucas, who took an interest in earlier Bills, did not serve in Committee in the other place, but he has been instrumental in working closely with pedlars and their representatives to ensure that the importance of the Bill was raised in the other place. As a result of that and Lords petitions against the Canterbury City Council Bill and the other Bills, the House of Lords Opposed Bill Committee sat for three days in November 2011. The other place debated the Bill in Committee on 24 November 2011, which was followed by a debate on Third Reading on 3 December 2012.
I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to the Front Bench. I was hoping that my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), who was in his place earlier in the Bill’s passage, would continue his interest in today’s subject matter, but unfortunately he is unable to do so. What the Minister failed to tell us about in his short contribution was that between the Committee stage on 24 November 2011 and Third Reading on 3 December 2012 in the other place, the Government issued yet another consultation paper on the subject of pedlars. I will refer in more detail to some aspects of that consultation paper in relation to the
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second group of amendments, to which I think it has a greater relevance, but let us remind ourselves that the effect of the Government’s proposals is to abolish all existing legislation relating to pedlars and to replace it. They argue that the existing legislation is at odds with the European Union services directive. When I raised this matter in the House in 2010, people thought it was a device to try to prolong proceedings. However, it is apparent that this was an important issue of substance and, although it seems to have taken a long time, the Government have realised that the EU services directive did and does impinge on the Bills.
One consequence of what the Minister said—if the Government are happy for the Bills, as amended by their lordships, to go on to the statute book—is that we will have several different regimes for dealing with the regulation of pedlars operating in this country: the regimes of councils that got their Bills through before now and that tend to have a tighter regulation than this one; the Bills before us today; and all councils continuing to operate under the existing law relating to pedlars. The Government have said that they do not think that that is satisfactory. I am therefore surprised that they seem to be relaxed about allowing to go on to the statute book four new local Bills that will be inconsistent with the Government’s intentions as set out in the consultation paper. My hon. Friend the Minister could argue that the closing date for contributions to the consultation paper is not until 15 February 2013, and that the Government will then listen to the representations received. In the light of that, I am surprised that the Government are not saying, “Hold on a moment, let us see whether what is proposed by their lordships as a result of these amendments is consistent with what we have in mind.”
In the Third Reading debate on the Canterbury City Council Bill in the other place—
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): Before my hon. Friend moves on, given that a number of the amendments relate to the amount of training that would need to be given to people by local authorities, would it not be a spectacular waste of money for local authorities to spend an awful lot of money on training people, only for a Government Bill to make all that training completely redundant?
Mr Chope: I could not agree more with my hon. Friend on that point. He refers to the money that has been wasted. Councils and council tax payers will need to ask questions about how they got themselves into this mess. They have each probably spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to try to promote legislation that was ill-conceived from the outset and was certainly ill-conceived following the implementation and introduction of the EU services directive. It has also been much criticised at all stages in this House and in the other place.
12.45 pm
It would be wrong not to pay tribute to the work that was done in the other place to examine the Bills in detail. The Committee was set up and chaired with enormous aplomb by Baroness Knight of Collingtree, whom we all remember as a formidable Member of this House. Its members included Lord Blair of Boughton,
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Viscount Eccles, Lord Glasman and Lord Strasburger, who took a detailed interest. If any hon. Member wishes to have a handy summary of its conclusions, they are set out in the House of Lords Third Reading debate on 3 December in
Hansard
. I will not quote extensively from it, but in the context of this group of Lords amendments let me say that Lord Bilston, who introduced Third Reading in the other place, said on the issue of enforcement:
“All four Bills would have allowed the councils to seize items from unlawful street traders. The committee thought that this was a step too far and removed the seizure provisions. The councils were naturally disappointed, but were pleased that the committee was content to leave in the fixed-penalty provisions.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 December 2012; Vol. 741, c. 444.]
Philip Davies: Given the extent to which the Lords amendments fillet the Bill, as my hon. Friend described, where do they leave its substance? He will recall that when we were debating these matters in the previous Parliament, we were told that all the clauses relating to seizure were essential for local authorities, and that without them the Bill would be pointless and worthless. Does my hon. Friend have any comment on where it would leave the Bill if we were to accept the Lords amendments?
Mr Chope: It would leave the Bill exactly as it is now, but with those aspects removed. The point needs to be made—my hon. Friend is probably making it—that there are going to be a lot of words to be eaten as a result of this. Some of my hon. Friends and Opposition Members were saying how essential these powers were, and that the Bill would be wholly unworkable without them. Now that these powers have been removed and they are carrying on quite contentedly. Either their bluff has been called, or they do not want to face up to the new reality. I cannot ascribe motives to my hon. Friends or to Opposition Members; all I can say is that the councils will need to think carefully about whether they took the right line in promoting the Bills. Apart from anything else, Baroness Knight said that
“the four Bills presented would undoubtedly have given councils a disproportionate power in relation to suspected street trading offences.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 December 2012; Vol. 741, c. 446.]
That is why they reduced those powers significantly and, in relation to the issuing of fixed penalty notices, introduced a requirement that councils trained all officials. Viscount Eccles was even more robust, saying:
“I want to talk briefly about fixed penalties. I think that in principle fixed penalties are undesirable. They may be necessary but, when they are, they are a necessary evil. The problem is that many people acquire the power to impose fixed penalties. We try to offset that by training and I hope that that works, but”—
“all power corrupts.”
He could see the dangers in the Bill as originally drafted, and that there is still potential danger in the Bill as amended by their lordships in relation to training. Then the noble Lord Strasburger explained:
“We added a requirement for better training of council officials on trading laws and”—
my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey did not make this point—
“constrained the value of fixed penalties.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 December 2012; Vol. 741, c. 452.]
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That differentiated, for example, the fixed penalties imposed for failing to give a name and address from those imposed for giving a false name and address. That was a sensible amendment from their lordships’ House.
The amendments on enforcement are steps in the right direction, but I have tabled amendments to amendment C27 on information and training, which inserts a new clause after clause 17, but leaves rather a lot of loopholes. For instance, amendment (a) would leave out “on its internet website”, so that subsection (1) would read:
“The council shall publish information about—“
Why tell a council that it only needs to publish such information on its internet website?
It might have been a slip of the tongue, but my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey said that all street traders could access the internet and find out what was going on, but the Bill is primarily concerned with pedlars, and pedlars and street traders are very different animals. Pedlars are on their own and normally travelling from town to town and from street to street. It is important, therefore, that a pedlar registered with the police in, say, Liverpool, when visiting Canterbury can find out what the rules are. A pedlar who has travelled to Canterbury from, say, Gravesend, might not have had access to the internet—perhaps because the local library was shut over the weekend, or whatever.
Philip Davies: I have much sympathy with my hon. Friend’s point, but were we to remove “on its internet website”, how does he imagine that the information either would or should be published?
Mr Chope: I imagine it would be published in a form that people could read, without having to access the internet—in other words, in a document or notice that could be obtained from local council offices or sent in advance.
Philip Davies: I am presuming that, in essence, my hon. Friend’s amendment would actually help local authorities. Under their lordships’ amendment, the information would have to be published on the council’s internet website, whereas if his amendment was accepted, presumably the council could publish it in any form it liked. It could still be on the website, but the council would have a choice.
Mr Chope: I accept that. If my hon. Friend is saying that my amendment is ill-conceived because it would not achieve the objective of enabling pedlars in a city such as Canterbury to find out what was happening, I am beginning to understand his point. That, however, is why I tabled amendment (e), stating that the information
“shall also be displayed prominently in any designated area”.
That would mean that when a pedlar arrived in a street on which he was not allowed to operate as a pedlar unimpeded, there would be notices in the street telling him so.
Philip Davies: I certainly agree with that, but I was merely making the point that my hon. Friend’s initial amendment seemed to help the local authority by being less prescriptive and bureaucratic, and that perhaps it was an indication that he was going soft in his old age.
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Mr Chope: I take those sorts of allegations very seriously, particularly if one is talking about going soft in the head. I think my hon. Friend was referring to the Local Government Association. It is worth pointing out, therefore, the disparaging remarks made in the other place about how the LGA responded to the Government’s consultation in November. The noble Lord Lucas said:
“It would have been nice, too, to be able to praise the Local Government Association, but its reaction to the consultation was immediate, negative and silly.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 December 2012; Vol. 741, c. 450.]
Even if I am going soft on the LGA, my hon. Friend will be pleased to know that the noble Lord Lucas is not pulling his punches.
Amendment (b), which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Shipley and for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), would insert a new paragraph after paragraph (a). The clause would then read:
“The council shall publish on its internet website information about the provision of this Act and of the 1982 Act as amended by this Act; and any street comprised in any area designated in section 5.”
If particular streets are to be brought within the ambit of streets on which pedlars cannot carry on their business normally but have to comply with requirements set out in these Bills, it is essential that there be no doubt about the ambit of those streets and that pedlars be given proper notice of where they may operate. That is why I tabled amendment (b)—so that the council has to publish information about any street comprised in a designated area.
Amendment (c), which would insert a new paragraph after subsection (1)(b), deals with information about
“the boundaries of areas designated under section 5.”
It would require that the information provided cover not only the streets but the boundaries of those areas. At the moment, the Bill enables the council to designate an area either on health and safety grounds or because the highway might be obstructed. The Bill gives it those powers but without the requirement to specify exactly how they are being applied.
Philip Davies: I totally support my hon. Friend on these amendments. Does he agree that it is in the local authority’s interest to make this information clear, because if it wants to deal with an issue in a particular part of its city or district, it would be helpful for that information to be made clear? Given that my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey seemed to dismiss his amendments very quickly, are we not in danger of repeating the scenario where amendments are discarded but later shown to have been perfectly sensible?
Mr Chope: It is a significant danger, and that is the problem. Whenever anyone suggests we should deal with something on the nod, it means that the full implications of the proposal are not examined, but that is the whole purpose of scrutiny in this place. That is why I hope that in responding to this debate my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey will address the substance of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley and I are making.
Philip Davies: Has my hon. Friend had any discussions with the local authorities concerned to understand better why they seem to object to his sensible amendments?
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1 pm
Mr Chope: In all honesty, I had not expected that there would be objections, save perhaps on the basis of the “not invented here” formula, because people are not always generous in accepting other people’s ideas and suggestions.
However, I would like to put on record the fact that in considering these four Bills, I had a constructive meeting with a representative from Leeds city council, from which came the idea that the way forward would be to impose constraints on the size of the trolleys that pedlars can use in Leeds city centre. That theme has now been picked up in the other Bills and the Lords amendments, as well as in the suggestions in the Government’s consultation paper on where we go from here. That was a good example of constructive working between a Member of this House and an official from one of the councils seeking to promote this legislation. My hon. Friend might remember that when the question arose of whether any of the other councils would be prepared to accept similar constraints or amendments, they resolutely refused to engage. In a sense, they have now been forced to do so as a result of what happened in the other place, but there is always a lot more scope for those promoting these Bills and the officials behind them to speak with colleagues directly about issues such as the one my hon. Friend identifies.
Let me turn to my amendments to subsection (2) of the proposed new clause to be inserted after clause 17 by Lords amendment C27. Subsection (2) of the proposed new clause currently reads:
“The information published shall, in particular, be such as the council reasonably considers is sufficient to enable those wishing to trade in the city to understand the circumstances in which they may lawfully do so.”
That would be much stronger if, instead of saying that the information shall be such as “the council reasonably considers”, it said that the information shall, in particular, be “such as is sufficient”. The important thing is that the information should be sufficient to enable those wishing to trade in the city to understand the circumstances. Whether the council thinks that information is sufficient is of subsidiary importance.
Philip Davies: Is my hon. Friend contending that if the council reasonably considered that it did not need to provide any information at all, that would be fine under the current wording? He is much more skilled in the law than I am. What constraints would there be on the local authority before a court if the existing wording was not amended as he seeks?
Mr Chope: It would be open to a council to provide minimal information, on the basis that the council reasonably considered it to be sufficient. Somebody who felt that it was insufficient—a pedlar who was potentially suffering a fixed penalty—would not be able to argue that the information was not sufficient to enable him to understand the circumstances under which he could trade, because all the council had to do was provide information that the council itself reasonably considered sufficient. The council would therefore be introducing a subjective test, thereby removing the effectiveness of what, on the face of it, seems perfectly sensible—that the information provided should be sufficient. The notion that the information is sufficient if the council considers it to be sufficient effectively negates what would otherwise be a worthwhile amendment.
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Philip Davies: I would like to press my hon. Friend on the words “the council reasonably considers”. Would what the council reasonably considered sufficient be materially different from what anybody else reasonably considered to be sufficient?
Mr Chope: It may well be, and that is my concern. Let us look at what has happened in the past. Their lordships found a lot of evidence that councils were making assertions about the conduct of pedlars that they could not back up with evidence before their lordships’ Committee, so a council might consider something to be sufficient when it is not sufficient, because of that council or its officers having a particular prejudice or taking a cavalier approach.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con): My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the Bill would surely be clearer if it did not allow the council discretion. If the council were to err in its use of discretion, that could lead to judicial reviews and all sorts of expenses to the council, so the promoters of these Bills would benefit by accepting his amendments.
Mr Chope: I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that succinct and, I hope, persuasive—indeed, conclusive—argument in support of my amendments. I hope that our hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey has noted it—although sadly I do not see any messages being passed between him and the people sitting in the officials’ Box on behalf of the promoters of the Bills.
Let me turn to my amendment (e), which would add the following words at the end of subsection (2) of the proposed new clause inserted by Lords amendment C27:
“and shall also be displayed prominently in any designated area.”
It is obviously useful for a motorist visiting a town who is thinking of parking somewhere to know where the parking restrictions apply, and the way to find out is by looking at a notice close to where they intend to park. Similarly, it is quite useful for pedlars intending to peddle their goods in a city or town centre to be able to see on a notice whether a different regime operates there compared with the national regime. That is fundamental to ensuring fair play and justice for visitors to a designated area who are not quite sure whether it is indeed a designated area, and so on. What harm would there be in requiring signs on the circumference of a designated area to make it absolutely clear to any passer-by?
Jacob Rees-Mogg: I wonder whether my hon. Friend has given any consideration to the design of such signs and how it might be made clear to people that they are in a peddling or non-peddling zone.
Mr Chope: It would be useful if there were distinct signs. Indeed, an enterprising local authority might want to invite local schools to enter a competition to see who could produce the best design for such a sign. I do not think there should necessarily be uniform signs across the country, because that sounds rather bureaucratic and top-down. The most important thing is that the signs should be prominent and clear and not contain a lot of detail—unlike the conditions on the back of one’s new credit card, for example. There need to be relatively few words, prominently displayed.
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Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con): I urge my hon. Friend not to do down the communist route of centrally dictating things, because these are individual Bills. It would not be beyond the wit of man to have little signs, as we do with conservation areas, for instance. That would be useful. Will the promoters of the Bill accept these amendments?
Mr Chope: I thank my hon. Friend for supporting these amendments. I have yet to hear officially, although in introducing their lordships’ amendments and mine at the beginning of the debate—I know my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough was not in his place at that time—our hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey implied en passant that he did not want to accept any of these amendments. Perhaps in the light of the ensuing debate, he will change his mind.
Stuart Andrew indicated dissent.
Mr Chope: Colleagues elected in 2010 have discovered that when they are asked by promoters to sponsor a Bill in this House, it does not mean that they lose all their discretion over it. It is ultimately up to them as Members of Parliament to decide what to accept and what not to accept, and they do not need to be beholden to the officials.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as I was getting very worried about this constitutional principle. It is surely up to this House and not up to individual promoters or local councils, to decide what passes into law.
Mr Chope: Absolutely, and I am sorry if I did not make that clear. There was an occasion—you may remember it, Mr Deputy Speaker—on a different private Bill earlier in this Parliament when one of my hon. Friends felt a certain reluctance to do anything other than what he had been told to do by the promoters. I explained to him that he would be doing the promoters, himself and the House a good service if he showed some flexibility. In fairness to him, he did show such flexibility. That is a good precedent, and I draw it to the attention of my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey in case he was not there at the time.
Philip Davies: Going back to the substantial issue of notices, as my hon. Friend knows, I am with him on virtually all of this and have been for a number of years. However, we are in danger of parting company, I fear, on the issue of the notices being different in every local authority. Surely the whole point of the objection is that people going from one place to another cannot be expected to know the exact regime in a particular place. Surely therefore it would be helpful if the same notice were in place in each local authority. Just as “no parking” notices are the same across the country, should not the same thing apply to pedlars’ notices?
Mr Chope:
Fortunately, if we disagree on this issue, it need not concern us because the amendment does not spell that out. It was only in response to an intervention from our hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) that I ventured to suggest that if any notices were produced, they need not be uniform across the country. That, of course, would be
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left to the discretion of the local authority, so I think my hon. Friend and I can probably live together on that particular interpretation.
Philip Davies: That is next Tuesday’s business.
Mr Chope: Sorry, I should not anticipate next Tuesday’s debate. I can see that my hon. Friend is going to be on really good form next week.
Amendment (f) to subsection (1) of the inserted new clause on training deals with the same theme of trying to remove the subjective test for the council so that there is some objectivity about it. Instead of saying:
“The council shall not authorise an officer to act for the purposes of this Act unless they are satisfied that the officer has received adequate training”,
subsection (1) of the inserted new clause on training would say:
“The council shall not authorise an officer to act for the purposes of this Act unless the officer has received adequate training”.
It would no longer be an issue of whether or not the council was satisfied, but a more objective test of whether the officer had received adequate training. Obviously, if the council is doing the training and it is by any objective test inadequate, that would not be a problem under the current wording. Only when the council has to satisfy an objective test in relation to training will we ensure that the right quality of training, to which our noble Friends in the other place referred, will be implemented. My amendment would strengthen this part of clause 17.
1.15 pm
Philip Davies: I am sympathetic to what my hon. Friend says, as he is making a good point. Does he know how this compares with what is required for other officers employed by local authorities—whether it be parking attendants or even perhaps the police force? Are my hon. Friend’s proposals the norm or is what is in the Bill the norm in that respect?
Mr Chope: In all honesty, I do not have the comparable statutory provisions before me to be able to answer my hon. Friend’s point. I am sure, however, that with the resources that have gone into the budgets of the promoters’ advisers, that sort of information should be available. Perhaps we will hear in due course from our hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey and find out whether similar provisions apply anywhere else.
This issue should not be treated lightly. Their lordships were quite concerned that, if we are going to allow people who are not constables or police community support officers to intervene in these areas, and we are going to allow “authorised persons” to intervene, it is essential that those authorised people are properly trained.
Philip Davies: In many respects, this amendment is more important than my hon. Friend’s previous amendment. The provisions on information at least ask the council “reasonably” to consider whether they are sufficient, whereas without my hon. Friend’s amendment, the wording on the training provisions is that the council needs only to be “satisfied”—not that it “has reason” to be satisfied or is “reasonably” satisfied. It is literally as blanket as that. Surely my hon. Friend would agree that his amendment on the training aspect is even more important than the one on information.
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Mr Chope: I am grateful for what my hon. Friend has said. If we cannot vote on all my amendments and have to select one—
Mr Chope: Yes, it would be a shame if we could not vote on all of them—perhaps some of them will be accepted. I must not be downhearted at this stage, as they might all be accepted. However, in the event that this one is not accepted, I can understand my hon. Friend’s point that it would be a useful amendment on which to test the opinion of the House. The essence of my amendment (f) is that it is designed to prevent the officers of the local authority from being judges in their own courts. That is a pretty fundamental principle, and I would have thought that all Members would like to sign up to it and apply it in practice.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con): I am sorry that I was not in my place to hear the beginning of my hon. Friend’s exposition of his various amendments. On this particular amendment and even allowing for it, it will still be up to the council to determine what is and what is not “adequate”. Does my hon. Friend think that it is right for the council to decide rather than some independent body?
Mr Chope: I would have hoped that we could trust councils to provide adequate training. The purpose of my amendment is to try to ensure that that happens. If the training is not adequate, it will be open to somebody to make a complaint to the council or the councillors; ultimately, it could be used as a defence to a fixed penalty notice or something like that—although I would not want to speculate on that. The test is that the officers must be properly trained: that is what the provisions would require—rather than that the council thought the training was adequate. I hope it would not be necessary to set up a new bureaucracy—an appeals panel or something like that—to deal with the situation, as we are already overburdened with bureaucracy and officialdom in this country, and we do not want even more of it.
My amendment (g) to Lords amendment C27 proposes the deletion of subsection (2), which makes training provided by the council mandatory. It states:
“The council shall make the training referred to in subsection (1) available also to constables and community support officers empowered by section 5(1) to give a fixed penalty notice.”
That is redundant, because constables and community support officers receive training that enables them to perform this function outside the ambit of any particular local Act relating to pedlars, and it is therefore unnecessary to require the council to become involved in training them. Obviously, if the chief constable asks the local council whether it will provide training for constables and community support officers, the council will probably be happy to oblige and to explain the procedure.
Mr Bone: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way—he is being exceptionally generous—but did he mean to refer to the police and crime commissioner just now, rather than the chief constable?
Mr Chope:
I think that it would be the chief constable in this instance. My understanding is that police and crime commissioners are there to decide whether to hire and fire, and to set out the budget for the police authorities,
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1100
whereas operational issues are dealt with by the chief constables. I would regard the question of whether constables or community support officers on the beat are capable or knowledgeable enough to introduce or apply a fixed penalty notice regime as an operational issue.
Mr Bone: I would understand my hon. Friend’s logic if this were national legislation, but given that it is local legislation, by virtue of being a private Bill, surely it should be up to the police and crime commissioner to decide whether he wants to get involved with this nonsense at all.
Mr Chope: I take my hon. Friend’s point, but I trust that police and crime commissioners have bigger fish to fry.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey will support my amendments. As was made clear earlier, they also apply to the other Bills with which we are dealing today. We are not picking on Canterbury in particular, but it is the first Bill on the Order Paper.
Philip Davies: I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) not just for his speech, although it was of the customary calibre, but for his dedication in ensuring that, if the Bill ever leaves this place, it will leave in a much better state than the state in which it arrived. Without my hon. Friend’s personal dedication to this issue, and his determination that we should do what we ought to do in this place—that is, defend people’s freedoms and defend enterprise—the Bill would have passed through Parliament in a much less satisfactory manner.
Like my hon. Friend, I am grateful for the work that was done by their lordships. I do not know whether my hon. Friend felt the same, but I feared that the Bill would go through on the nod in the House of Lords. Their lordships should be commended for going through it in great detail and considering the arguments properly, and, consequently, tabling some amendments with which I think we can be particularly pleased.
I agree with what my hon. Friend said about many of the amendments. He focused on the subject of seizures, and on the Lords amendments that proposed the omission of various clauses relating to it. He may recall that the issue caused great controversy when it was debated for the first time in this place. It struck me as unacceptable that local authorities should employ authorised officers to go around seizing people’s goods willy-nilly. As my hon. Friend will recall, we argued the case vehemently for many months. We were told that the clauses were essential to the Bill, and that without them it would be unworkable and meaningless. We were also told that the proposals in the amendments would be unenforceable, and that they were in effect wrecking amendments: that, if I remember rightly, is what my hon. Friend was accused of when he tried to persuade the promoters that what they were saying was over the top.
I should be interested to know why the promoters thought that removing those clauses then would wreck the Bill, whereas removing them today apparently does not wreck it all. It seems that it will still be fit to proceed into law. It is difficult for us to consider the merits of the
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1101
amendments until we are given some satisfactory answers to the question of how important the clauses are to the Bill as a whole.
I have the impression that we have reached a stage at which the promoters are determined to produce an Act of Parliament, irrespective of what is in it and whether anything that is in it will ever be applied. This seems to have become a war of attrition, a battle of wills. The promoters seem merely to want an Act of Parliament to hang their hat on. I certainly support the removal of all these clauses—page after page of them—and I think we should be grateful for the fact that the promoters may have come round to my hon. Friend’s way of thinking.
Mr Bone: My hon. Friend has made a good point. Is there not a chance that because so much council tax payers’ money has been wasted on Bills that were not thought through thoroughly to start with, the promoters are determined to drive through a Bill to justify that waste?
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is right. A similar attitude was taken by the previous Government. The idea is to waste a lot of money on something that is clearly not working, and then, instead of drawing stumps and cutting your losses, to keep spending more and more, just so that there is something to show for all the money spent. All that happens, though, is that even more money is wasted.
Mr Bone: Is that not what the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) said in his autobiography about the Dome? The last Labour Government were affected by exactly the same syndrome.
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is far better read than I am. The right hon. Gentleman’s book is gathering dust on my shelf, and I have not got round to reading it. However, I will look out for that section when I do get round to it. I agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch had to say about seizures, and our comments about seized items are on the record from the previous debates. I stand by what I said then and I am sure that he also stands by what he said, and I am delighted that their lordships have agreed.
1.30 pm
Mr Chope: Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that other promoters preparing private Bills take into account the verdict of their lordships on these seizure powers? We have seen a lot of attempts to introduce or smuggle equivalent powers in other private Bills.
Philip Davies: I absolutely agree. I hope that, in many respects, what their lordships have done will set a precedent and that we will not have to worry so much about some of the worst consequences of such legislation.
A notable omission from my hon. Friend’s speech was the issue of touting, although I appreciate that he was trying to be as brief as possible. If he did mention that and I missed it, I apologise to him. One amendment before us today deals with touting. He did not mention it—[Interruption.] I think it comes later on in our
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1102
proceedings. It is in the third group, so I will save up my expertise on touting until that time; I apologise for mentioning it now.
The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch were focused mainly on training. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) is my parliamentary neighbour and an excellent Member of Parliament. The only bad thing about having him as my neighbour is that he puts me to shame. He has already successfully steered a private Member’s Bill through Parliament in his short time in the House. He did so with an awful lot of panache and charm, and by being practical and reasonable about what it was sensible to do in order to get that legislation through. I very much hope he will adopt the same strategy now, because he saw how well it worked with his Bill; I hope he will use that experience when considering this legislation, too.
Let us consider the debate we have had so far from a layman’s perspective—from the point of view of people who have no vested interest in the legislation and who have not been going through battles which started six years ago, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said. People who do not have that baggage and who listened to the argument that my hon. Friend made for his amendments to Lords amendment C27 could not fail to have been persuaded by his case. We started from the position that these Bills were designed to give local authorities far too much power—that was the whole point for us when we started out. As a result of my hon. Friend’s work and what happened in their lordships’ House, gradually, bit by bit, the excessive powers have been whittled down. We hope to end up with legislation that, although perhaps not ideal—it may not be something we particularly agree with—will certainly be an awful lot better than it was when we started out. We have an opportunity to carry on the theme that my hon. Friend started, and that their lordships continued, by removing some of the remaining parts that put far too much power in the hands of local authorities and give far too little protection, literally, to the man on the street.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: Is it not very reassuring that the upper House has carried out its traditional role of defending the liberty of the subject from the seizure of goods? Such seizure has been unknown and unwelcome in this country since Magna Carta.
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. It is why some of us felt so strongly about these Bills and, in particular, about the issues relating to seizure. It is to be commended that their lordships have done what they have historically done—defend people’s freedoms—but we should not have to rely on their lordships for that; we should be doing that in this place, too. We have a great opportunity to demonstrate how important that is to us through my hon. Friend’s amendments.
The promoters of the Canterbury City Council Bill chose well when they selected my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey as the person to steer it through the House. I am sure that it would be in everybody’s interests if the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch were accepted. I am a signatory to them, so I would say that, but their genesis lies with my hon. Friend and I do not want to take the credit away from him.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1103
I am not so bothered about amendment (a) to Lords amendment C27. Lords amendment C27 seeks to provide that:
“The council shall publish on its internet website information”.
My hon. Friend wishes to remove the words “on its internet website” from that provision. I am not so bothered about that one, not because I disagree with it, but because I am not sure it would achieve what he intends. It would not preclude the council from simply putting the information on its website; the council would still be able to do exactly the same thing, so we would be no further forward. I think my hon. Friend intended that the council should not simply be allowed to leave it at that and that other forms of communications should be used, particularly for people who do not have access to the internet and the relevant website. I agree with his approach, but the amendment would not achieve its purpose and we could end up with a bizarre situation where the unintended consequence was that the local authority published even less information than was available for pedlars. Amendment (a) certainly does not require the local authority to publish more information, so I think we can leave it to one side—I hope my hon. Friend will agree.
There is far more merit in my hon. Friend’s other amendments to Lords amendment C27, and I very much hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey will give them serious thought. None of us wishes unnecessarily to delay further the proceedings on this legislation, and I am sure that the Bill’s promoters do not wish it to be delayed further, so my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey has a great opportunity here. I cannot speak for my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch but I think that if my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey were to give way on these amendments, the progress of this legislation could be much speedier. That would be a small price for the Bill’s promoters to pay, because not only are these amendments designed to make things better for the pedlar, but, as far as I can see, they are better for the local authority.
Amendments (b) and (c) would mean that the council would make things abundantly clear by publishing details of the streets covered by the legislation. That is not catered for in the Bill at the moment. If that is such a big issue for these local authorities and something that needs all this time and expense to deal with it, surely it is in the best interests of these councils that everybody knows which streets are affected and which are not, and the boundaries of these rules. With the best will in the world, I am sure that even my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey would not suggest—I hope he will not—that council officials will be on every corner of every street waiting for pedlars to appear in order to turn them around at the first opportunity and issue them with a fixed penalty notice. I would like to think that council resources do not stretch that far. On those days when there is no council official waiting to move a pedlar on or to issue them with a fixed penalty notice, surely it is in the interests of the local residents and the local area that people are following the rules because things are clear and that they are not mistakenly in a place where they should not be. Through his amendments my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is striking a blow not only for freedom but for the efficiency of the local authority in carrying out its wishes.
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Mr Chope: Is not one of the problems the fact that local authorities have form on this issue? On Third Reading in the other place, the noble Lord Strasburger said that the Select Committee spent a lot of time trying to find out why the four local authorities wanted the powers to seize and introduce fixed penalties. It was told that pedlars sell substandard goods, but as he said
“no evidence whatever was offered to prove this allegation”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 December 2012; Vol. 741, c. 451.]
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is right. In many respects, the attitude that some local authorities have adopted has been sad—
Stuart Andrew claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
The House divided:
Ayes 155, Noes 7.
Division No. 147]
[
1.41 pm
AYES
Allen, Mr Graham
Arbuthnot, rh Mr James
Bacon, Mr Richard
Bain, Mr William
Barker, rh Gregory
Barwell, Gavin
Bebb, Guto
Beith, rh Sir Alan
Benn, rh Hilary
Berger, Luciana
Blackman, Bob
Blackman-Woods, Roberta
Blackwood, Nicola
Blenkinsop, Tom
Bradley, Karen
Bradshaw, rh Mr Ben
Brazier, Mr Julian
Brennan, Kevin
Brokenshire, James
Brown, Lyn
Brown, rh Mr Nicholas
Brown, Mr Russell
Buck, Ms Karen
Buckland, Mr Robert
Cairns, Alun
Campbell, Mr Alan
Carmichael, Neil
Caton, Martin
Chapman, Jenny
Clark, rh Greg
Coaker, Vernon
Coffey, Dr Thérèse
Corbyn, Jeremy
Crabb, Stephen
Crausby, Mr David
David, Wayne
Davidson, Mr Ian
Davies, Glyn
Denham, rh Mr John
Djanogly, Mr Jonathan
Doyle, Gemma
Eagle, Ms Angela
Edwards, Jonathan
Elliott, Julie
Ellis, Michael
Engel, Natascha
Eustice, George
Evennett, Mr David
Fabricant, Michael
Field, Mark
Fitzpatrick, Jim
Fox, rh Dr Liam
Francis, Dr Hywel
Gardiner, Barry
Gilmore, Sheila
Graham, Richard
Greatrex, Tom
Green, rh Damian
Green, Kate
Griffith, Nia
Hamilton, Mr David
Hancock, Matthew
Hands, Greg
Hanson, rh Mr David
Hayes, Mr John
Heald, Oliver
Heaton-Harris, Chris
Hendry, Charles
Herbert, rh Nick
Hillier, Meg
Hilling, Julie
Hodge, rh Margaret
Howarth, rh Mr George
Howell, John
Hughes, rh Simon
Jamieson, Cathy
Johnson, Diana
Johnson, Joseph
Jones, Graham
Jones, Susan Elan
Kawczynski, Daniel
Khan, rh Sadiq
Kirby, Simon
Knight, rh Mr Greg
Lansley, rh Mr Andrew
Leadsom, Andrea
Leslie, Chris
Lewis, Dr Julian
Love, Mr Andrew
Lucas, Ian
Luff, Peter
Macleod, Mary
Mactaggart, Fiona
Malhotra, Seema
Marsden, Mr Gordon
McCabe, Steve
McCarthy, Kerry
McClymont, Gregg
McDonnell, Dr Alasdair
McFadden, rh Mr Pat
Meale, Sir Alan
Metcalfe, Stephen
Milton, Anne
Moon, Mrs Madeleine
Morgan, Nicky
Morris, Grahame M.
(Easington)
Neill, Robert
Nokes, Caroline
Parish, Neil
Pearce, Teresa
Penrose, John
Phillipson, Bridget
Poulter, Dr Daniel
Randall, rh Mr John
Raynsford, rh Mr Nick
Robertson, John
Rudd, Amber
Ruddock, rh Dame Joan
Rutley, David
Scott, Mr Lee
Selous, Andrew
Skidmore, Chris
Skinner, Mr Dennis
Slaughter, Mr Andy
Smith, Sir Robert
Soames, rh Nicholas
Spencer, Mr Mark
Straw, rh Mr Jack
Stride, Mel
Stuart, Mr Graham
Stunell, rh Andrew
Swales, Ian
Swayne, rh Mr Desmond
Swire, rh Mr Hugo
Syms, Mr Robert
Tami, Mark
Timpson, Mr Edward
Tomlinson, Justin
Turner, Karl
Twigg, Derek
Tyrie, Mr Andrew
Vaizey, Mr Edward
Vaz, Valerie
Walker, Mr Robin
Walley, Joan
Weatherley, Mike
Whitehead, Dr Alan
Williams, Hywel
Williams, Mr Mark
Williamson, Gavin
Wilson, Phil
Wright, David
Wright, Mr Iain
Wright, Jeremy
Young, rh Sir George
Tellers for the Ayes:
Stuart Andrew
and
Eric Ollerenshaw
NOES
Chope, Mr Christopher
Clappison, Mr James
Davies, Philip
Flynn, Paul
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Mills, Nigel
Rees-Mogg, Jacob
Tellers for the Noes:
Mr Peter Bone
and
Mr David Nuttall
Question accordingly agreed to.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1105
Question put accordingly, That this House agrees with Lords amendment C3.
The House divided:
Ayes 150, Noes 2.
Division No. 148]
[
1.56 pm
AYES
Aldous, Peter
Allen, Mr Graham
Bacon, Mr Richard
Bain, Mr William
Barker, rh Gregory
Barwell, Gavin
Bebb, Guto
Beith, rh Sir Alan
Benn, rh Hilary
Berger, Luciana
Blackman, Bob
Blackman-Woods, Roberta
Blenkinsop, Tom
Bradley, Karen
Brake, rh Tom
Brazier, Mr Julian
Brennan, Kevin
Brokenshire, James
Brown, Lyn
Brown, rh Mr Nicholas
Brown, Mr Russell
Bruce, Fiona
Buckland, Mr Robert
Byles, Dan
Cairns, Alun
Campbell, Mr Alan
Carmichael, Neil
Caton, Martin
Chapman, Jenny
Clappison, Mr James
Clark, rh Greg
Coaker, Vernon
Coffey, Dr Thérèse
Crabb, Stephen
Crausby, Mr David
Creasy, Stella
Davidson, Mr Ian
Davies, Glyn
Davies, Philip
Docherty, Thomas
Doyle, Gemma
Eagle, Ms Angela
Edwards, Jonathan
Elliott, Julie
Ellis, Michael
Engel, Natascha
Evans, Graham
Evennett, Mr David
Fabricant, Michael
Field, Mark
Fitzpatrick, Jim
Flynn, Paul
Fox, rh Dr Liam
Francis, Dr Hywel
Gardiner, Barry
Gilmore, Sheila
Greatrex, Tom
Green, rh Damian
Green, Kate
Greenwood, Lilian
Griffith, Nia
Gummer, Ben
Hamilton, Mr David
Hancock, Matthew
Hands, Greg
Hanson, rh Mr David
Hart, Simon
Hayes, Mr John
Heaton-Harris, Chris
Herbert, rh Nick
Hillier, Meg
Hilling, Julie
Hodge, rh Margaret
Howarth, rh Mr George
Howell, John
Hughes, rh Simon
Jamieson, Cathy
Johnson, Diana
Johnson, Joseph
Jones, Graham
Jones, Susan Elan
Kawczynski, Daniel
Kirby, Simon
Knight, rh Mr Greg
Lansley, rh Mr Andrew
Leadsom, Andrea
Leigh, Mr Edward
Leslie, Chris
Lewis, Dr Julian
Lucas, Ian
Luff, Peter
Malhotra, Seema
Marsden, Mr Gordon
McCabe, Steve
McCarthy, Kerry
McClymont, Gregg
McDonnell, Dr Alasdair
Meale, Sir Alan
Metcalfe, Stephen
Miller, rh Maria
Mills, Nigel
Moon, Mrs Madeleine
Morgan, Nicky
Morris, Grahame M.
(Easington)
Neill, Robert
Nokes, Caroline
Owen, Albert
Parish, Neil
Penrose, John
Phillipson, Bridget
Poulter, Dr Daniel
Randall, rh Mr John
Rees-Mogg, Jacob
Robertson, John
Rudd, Amber
Rutley, David
Scott, Mr Lee
Selous, Andrew
Skidmore, Chris
Skinner, Mr Dennis
Smith, Sir Robert
Soames, rh Nicholas
Spencer, Mr Mark
Straw, rh Mr Jack
Stunell, rh Andrew
Swales, Ian
Swayne, rh Mr Desmond
Swire, rh Mr Hugo
Syms, Mr Robert
Tami, Mark
Thomas, Mr Gareth
Timpson, Mr Edward
Tomlinson, Justin
Turner, Karl
Twigg, Derek
Tyrie, Mr Andrew
Vaizey, Mr Edward
Vaz, Valerie
Walker, Mr Robin
Walley, Joan
Weatherley, Mike
Whitehead, Dr Alan
Williams, Hywel
Williams, Mr Mark
Williamson, Gavin
Wilson, Phil
Wright, David
Wright, Mr Iain
Wright, Jeremy
Young, rh Sir George
Tellers for the Ayes:
Eric Ollerenshaw
and
Stuart Andrew
NOES
Chope, Mr Christopher
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Tellers for the Noes:
Mr Peter Bone
and
Mr David Nuttall
Question accordingly agreed to.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1106
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans): With the leave of the House, I will put the questions on Lords amendments C4 and C5 to the Canterbury City Council Bill together.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1107
Motion made, and Question put, That this House agrees with Lords amendment C4.—(Stuart Andrew.)
The House divided:
Ayes 153, Noes 2.
Division No. 149]
[
2.9 pm
AYES
Afriyie, Adam
Aldous, Peter
Alexander, Heidi
Allen, Mr Graham
Amess, Mr David
Bacon, Mr Richard
Bain, Mr William
Barker, rh Gregory
Barwell, Gavin
Bebb, Guto
Beith, rh Sir Alan
Bellingham, Mr Henry
Benn, rh Hilary
Berger, Luciana
Blackman, Bob
Blenkinsop, Tom
Bradley, Karen
Brake, rh Tom
Brazier, Mr Julian
Brennan, Kevin
Brokenshire, James
Brown, Lyn
Brown, rh Mr Nicholas
Brown, Mr Russell
Buckland, Mr Robert
Byles, Dan
Cairns, Alun
Campbell, Mr Alan
Carmichael, Neil
Caton, Martin
Chapman, Jenny
Clappison, Mr James
Coaker, Vernon
Coffey, Dr Thérèse
Crabb, Stephen
Crausby, Mr David
Creasy, Stella
Davidson, Mr Ian
Davies, Glyn
Davies, Philip
Djanogly, Mr Jonathan
Doyle, Gemma
Edwards, Jonathan
Elliott, Julie
Ellis, Michael
Ellwood, Mr Tobias
Engel, Natascha
Evans, Graham
Evennett, Mr David
Field, Mark
Fitzpatrick, Jim
Francis, Dr Hywel
Gardiner, Barry
Gilbert, Stephen
Gilmore, Sheila
Glen, John
Greatrex, Tom
Green, rh Damian
Green, Kate
Greenwood, Lilian
Gummer, Ben
Hamilton, Mr David
Hancock, Matthew
Hands, Greg
Hanson, rh Mr David
Hart, Simon
Hayes, Mr John
Heald, Oliver
Heaton-Harris, Chris
Herbert, rh Nick
Hillier, Meg
Hilling, Julie
Hodge, rh Margaret
Howell, John
Hughes, rh Simon
Jackson, Mr Stewart
Jamieson, Cathy
Johnson, Diana
Johnson, Joseph
Jones, Graham
Kawczynski, Daniel
Khan, rh Sadiq
Kirby, Simon
Kwarteng, Kwasi
Lansley, rh Mr Andrew
Leadsom, Andrea
Lee, Dr Phillip
Leigh, Mr Edward
Leslie, Chris
Lewis, Dr Julian
Lidington, rh Mr David
Loughton, Tim
Lucas, Ian
Luff, Peter
Malhotra, Seema
Marsden, Mr Gordon
McCabe, Steve
McCarthy, Kerry
McClymont, Gregg
McDonnell, Dr Alasdair
McFadden, rh Mr Pat
Meale, Sir Alan
Metcalfe, Stephen
Miller, rh Maria
Mills, Nigel
Moon, Mrs Madeleine
Mordaunt, Penny
Morgan, Nicky
Morris, Grahame M.
(Easington)
Neill, Robert
Nokes, Caroline
Owen, Albert
Penrose, John
Phillipson, Bridget
Randall, rh Mr John
Raynsford, rh Mr Nick
Reckless, Mark
Rees-Mogg, Jacob
Rudd, Amber
Rutley, David
Scott, Mr Lee
Selous, Andrew
Sharma, Mr Virendra
Skidmore, Chris
Skinner, Mr Dennis
Smith, Sir Robert
Straw, rh Mr Jack
Stunell, rh Andrew
Swales, Ian
Swayne, rh Mr Desmond
Syms, Mr Robert
Thomas, Mr Gareth
Timpson, Mr Edward
Tomlinson, Justin
Turner, Karl
Twigg, Derek
Tyrie, Mr Andrew
Vaizey, Mr Edward
Vaz, Valerie
Walker, Mr Robin
Walley, Joan
Weatherley, Mike
Whitehead, Dr Alan
Whittingdale, Mr John
Wiggin, Bill
Williams, Hywel
Williams, Mr Mark
Williamson, Gavin
Wilson, Phil
Wright, David
Wright, Mr Iain
Wright, Jeremy
Young, rh Sir George
Tellers for the Ayes:
Stuart Andrew
and
Eric Ollerenshaw
NOES
Bone, Mr Peter
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Tellers for the Noes:
Mr David Nuttall
and
Mr Christopher Chope
Question accordingly agreed to.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1108
Lords amendment C4 agreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House agrees with Lords amendment C5.—(Stuart Andrew.)
The House divided:
Ayes 146, Noes 2.
Division No. 150]
[
2.21 pm
AYES
Aldous, Peter
Alexander, Heidi
Allen, Mr Graham
Amess, Mr David
Bain, Mr William
Barwell, Gavin
Bebb, Guto
Beith, rh Sir Alan
Benn, rh Hilary
Berger, Luciana
Blackman, Bob
Blenkinsop, Tom
Boles, Nick
Bradley, Karen
Brady, Mr Graham
Brazier, Mr Julian
Brokenshire, James
Brown, Lyn
Brown, rh Mr Nicholas
Brown, Mr Russell
Buckland, Mr Robert
Byles, Dan
Cairns, Alun
Campbell, Mr Alan
Chapman, Jenny
Coaker, Vernon
Coffey, Dr Thérèse
Crabb, Stephen
Crausby, Mr David
Creasy, Stella
Crockart, Mike
Davidson, Mr Ian
Davies, Glyn
Davies, Philip
Djanogly, Mr Jonathan
Docherty, Thomas
Eagle, Ms Angela
Edwards, Jonathan
Elliott, Julie
Ellis, Michael
Engel, Natascha
Evans, Graham
Evennett, Mr David
Fitzpatrick, Jim
Flynn, Paul
Francis, Dr Hywel
Fuller, Richard
Gardiner, Barry
Gilbert, Stephen
Gilmore, Sheila
Goggins, rh Paul
Greatrex, Tom
Green, rh Damian
Green, Kate
Greenwood, Lilian
Gummer, Ben
Hames, Duncan
Hamilton, Mr David
Hammond, Stephen
Hancock, Matthew
Hands, Greg
Hanson, rh Mr David
Hart, Simon
Hayes, Mr John
Heald, Oliver
Heaton-Harris, Chris
Herbert, rh Nick
Hillier, Meg
Hilling, Julie
Hodge, rh Margaret
Howell, John
Hughes, rh Simon
Huppert, Dr Julian
Jamieson, Cathy
Johnson, Diana
Johnson, Joseph
Jones, Graham
Kawczynski, Daniel
Kirby, Simon
Lansley, rh Mr Andrew
Lee, Dr Phillip
Leslie, Chris
Lidington, rh Mr David
Loughton, Tim
Lucas, Ian
Luff, Peter
Marsden, Mr Gordon
McCabe, Steve
McCann, Mr Michael
McCarthy, Kerry
Meale, Sir Alan
Metcalfe, Stephen
Miller, rh Maria
Moon, Mrs Madeleine
Mordaunt, Penny
Morgan, Nicky
Morris, Grahame M.
(Easington)
Neill, Robert
Nokes, Caroline
Ollerenshaw, Eric
Owen, Albert
Parish, Neil
Patel, Priti
Penrose, John
Phillipson, Bridget
Pound, Stephen
Randall, rh Mr John
Reckless, Mark
Rees-Mogg, Jacob
Robathan, rh Mr Andrew
Rudd, Amber
Rutley, David
Scott, Mr Lee
Selous, Andrew
Sharma, Mr Virendra
Skidmore, Chris
Skinner, Mr Dennis
Slaughter, Mr Andy
Smith, Sir Robert
Straw, rh Mr Jack
Stunell, rh Andrew
Swales, Ian
Swayne, rh Mr Desmond
Syms, Mr Robert
Thomas, Mr Gareth
Timpson, Mr Edward
Tomlinson, Justin
Turner, Karl
Twigg, Derek
Tyrie, Mr Andrew
Vaizey, Mr Edward
Vara, Mr Shailesh
Vaz, Valerie
Walker, Mr Robin
Walley, Joan
Weatherley, Mike
Whitehead, Dr Alan
Wiggin, Bill
Williams, Hywel
Williams, Mr Mark
Williamson, Gavin
Wilson, Phil
Wright, David
Wright, Jeremy
Wright, Simon
Young, rh Sir George
Tellers for the Ayes:
Stuart Andrew
and
Nigel Mills
NOES
Bone, Mr Peter
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Tellers for the Noes:
Mr David Nuttall
and
Mr Christopher Chope
Question accordingly agreed to.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1109
Stuart Andrew: I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment C6.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans): With this it will be convenient to take the following:
Lords amendments C7 and C8, and C9 and amendments (a) to (h) thereto to the Canterbury City Council Bill.
Lords amendments L3 and L4, and L5 and amendments (a) to (h) thereto to the Leeds City Council Bill.
Lords amendments N3 to N5, and N6 and amendments (a) to (i) thereto to the Nottingham City Council Bill.
Lords amendments R4 to R7, and R8 and amendments (a) to (i) thereto to the Reading Borough Council Bill.
2.30 pm
Stuart Andrew:
My understated manner was mentioned earlier, and I plan to carry on in that manner as I speak to this group of amendments. The pedlar provisions have generated the most interest, from those who petitioned against the Bills in the Lords and from a number of hon. Members in this House. Under the existing licensing legislation, an exception is given to persons who act as a pedlar under the authority of a pedlars certificate granted under the Pedlars Act 1871. The Bills would have limited
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1110
that exemption so that it applied only to pedlars who traded by way of house-to-house visits. All other pedlars would have required a street-trading licence or consent.
The Lords Committee amended the pedlar provision very much in favour of pedlars. The amendments made will now restrict the exemption from the street-trading regime enjoyed by pedlars to trading by house-to-house visits, trading without any means of support—that is, by traders carrying the items they wish to sell—or trading with a wheeled trolley that does not exceed 0.75 metres in width, 0.5 metres in depth and 1.25 metres in height. The overall size of the display of goods has also been listed in the provision. So the Committee has limited the circumstances in which the restrictions on acting as a pedlar can apply.
Mr Chope: My hon. Friend has referred to the Committee stage of the Bills in the other place. He will be aware that since then, on 27 November last year, the Government issued a consultation paper that proposes to repeal the UK-wide Pedlars Act in order to comply with the European services directive. How is that consistent with the rewriting of clause 5, which still purports to amend the Pedlars Act?
Stuart Andrew: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. Honestly. This process has been going on for a considerable time. In fact, even back in the 1990s, the Home Office was promising to introduce changes, although it never did so. We could go on debating these matters for many years to come. I shall now continue to make my points.
In addition, the amendments provide that the restrictions on pedlars’ activities should be confined to areas that have been designated by the councils. Each designation must be justified against two criteria. One involves ensuring road safety; the other involves preventing the obstruction of the highway. So, as I mentioned, the regime in the Bills is now far more generous to pedlars than the one originally set out in the Bills. The promoters of course accept the decision of the Lords in this regard.
I am aware that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has tabled further amendments to these amendments on all four Bills. His amendments are mainly concerned with the designation of areas. They would have the effect of allowing designation of streets rather than areas, and would limit the reasons for designation further than the Lords Committee thought necessary. The promoters do not agree that his amendments are necessary or desirable. They believe it to be entirely appropriate that they should be able to safeguard against obstruction of the highway, as the Lords decided.
My hon. Friend has also tabled amendments to the Nottingham City Council Bill and the Reading Borough Council Bill. Nottingham and Reading have included extra provision whereby the councils will be able to control the purchase, as well as the sale, of tickets under street-trading legislation. It is perhaps worth noting that the sale of tickets on the street is already subject to street-trading legislation nationally, but ticket touts buy tickets as well as sell them. My hon. Friend’s amendments would not change the position in general for Nottingham and Reading councils. They would still be able to control the buying of tickets. The Lords amendment that he is
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1111
seeking to alter is a consequential one, and the councils do not believe the change to be necessary or desirable. I therefore commend the Lords amendments to the House.
Mr Chope: As my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) suggested, we have now come to the meat of the Bills—namely, the provisions on pedlars and street trading. Their lordships looked at the issues and decided that clause 4 should be left out. Amendment C8 covers that. Under amendment C9, clause 5 would be left out and the new clause to which my hon. Friend briefly referred would be inserted.
Confusion has been caused. Since the Lords looked at these issues in November 2011, the Government have come forward with a consultation that effectively says that, because of the impact of the services directive, it is important that the Pedlars Act be repealed nationally. Although I agree that this process has been going on for a while—many years, perhaps—this is the first time we have got what might be described as a European dimension. If the European services directive is going to apply as the Government interpret it, we in this subordinate legislature will not be able to act outside its terms. The Government will not have any option but to proceed along the lines set out in the consultation document.
The Minister is looking at me in a way that suggests he wishes to intervene and put me right. If that is correct, I will be happy to give way to him.
Mr Nuttall: Will my hon. Friend give way to me instead?
Mr Nuttall: The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills impact assessment states:
“In any case, our assessment is that the Government has no choice but to abolish the Pedlars Act to comply with the European Services Directive.”
Mr Chope: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reinforcing my point, and if the Minister wishes to intervene, I would be happy to give way.
Matthew Hancock: Unusually, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) accurately represents the Government position. Some aspects of the Pedlars Act are inconsistent with the European services directive. The consultation that will close on 15 February is known to the four authorities involved; they know that a consultation about a change in the national law is taking place. The proposals up for discussion in the consultation include repealing the Pedlars Act and amending the national street trading regime, and the local authorities would need to amend their legislation to take account of any such changes.
Mr Chope: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I therefore presume that the Government will vote against Lords amendment C9, which was passed in the other place in 2011, as it has been overtaken by events. It tinkers with amendments to the pedlars legislation, but the Minister says the legislation should be completely repealed.
Philip Davies: On this basis, it is irrelevant whether Members vote for or against that amendment. It does not matter which way the Government vote, therefore, because it will be a complete waste of time whichever way they go.
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1112
Mr Chope: That may be the case in the future, but our national Parliament is still sovereign to the extent that, until we implement the services directive in legislative form, we will have the existing law on the statute book. If we accept Lords amendment C9, we will in effect be re-enacting something the Government tell us is no longer consistent with European law.
Many Members—and, I suspect, many pedlars, too—would be very pleased if we were to free ourselves from the shackles of Brussels, and we are greatly looking forward to the referendum on the matter. The points being discussed today are part of the campaign, as we are setting out reasons why we would be better off out. Until we rid ourselves of distractions from Brussels, however, we are stuck with having its rule of law apply to our own legislation. I hope that in due course the Minister will explain the Government’s position: do they support or oppose amendment C9?
Philip Davies: Is my hon. Friend in favour of Amendment C9?
Mr Chope: I have some sympathy with amendment C9 as it contains many of the proposals that we were trying to persuade councils other than Leeds to accept when this Bill was before our House. Leeds conceded that instead of having a regime under which pedlars could only go from door to door, it would be content with one where pedlars could go to pedestrianised high street areas, provided they did not cause an obstruction by having a very elaborate and large apparatus. That is where the concept of having trolleys of limited size came from; it came from Leeds city council, and the idea was discussed with me and some of my hon. Friends. The proposal to give pedlars the freedom to operate on the street with a trolley of sufficient size to enable them to display their goods and provide articles to those who wish to purchase them is a valuable development and makes a lot of common sense. Although the Government consultation specifies a maximum size of trolley rather larger than the one specified in amendment C9, they appear to accept the principle.
2.45 pm
On whether I personally agree with that amendment, I am still very sceptical about whether the Government interpretation of the services directive is correct. When we first raised this issue after the services directive had come into force, the Government took the line that it was of no consequence or interest, so their interpretation has changed significantly in just a couple of years, and they might change it again. Because things are in a state of flux, it would seem to me premature—if one can use that word in respect of a Bill that has been before this House for over six years—to proceed now with amendment C9.
The Minister has said that the amendment was passed in the Lords and since then there have been developments, but there has been no opportunity for us to accommodate this in our legislative process, because the promoters of the Bill could not anticipate what the Government were going to say in their consultation at the end of November. It is interesting that the consultation paper was issued so late that it would not have been possible, even with their lordships’ procedures, for the promoters to move a Third Reading amendment, even if they had been really
31 Jan 2013 : Column 1113
on the ball. The promoters have therefore not been able to reflect in the Bills what the Government now say is the position.
One would have expected the Government to table amendments to the Lords amendments to set out, beyond peradventure, what, if anything, should be in the Bill instead of clause 5, which is being left out. I find the situation rather perplexing. It is important that it is clarified.
Mr Nuttall: My hon. Friend mentioned that it was suggested in the consultation document that a rather larger trolley be allowed. Is he as surprised as I am that neither the promoters nor the Government have brought forward amendments to bring the new clause in Lords amendment C9 in line with the consultation document?
Mr Chope: I am surprised about that. I am also a bit disappointed in myself, because I should have tabled such an amendment so that the House could have discussed it. I failed to do that, so the House does not have the opportunity to compare the alternative proposals for the best size of trolley.
Philip Davies: While we are on the sizes of trolleys, my hon. Friend will see that Lords amendment C9 gives specific measurements for trolleys, including a width of 0.88 metres, a depth of 0.83 metres and a height of 1.63 metres. First, can he help those of us who do not understand the meaning of 0.83 metres by telling us what those measurements mean in old money? Secondly, does he have any idea why those measurements are so specific?
Mr Chope: The short answer is that I am not able to convert metres into feet and inches. I take my hon. Friend’s point that it would be much better if the measurements were expressed in a way that most people can understand. Most people understand feet. I am told that I am approaching 2 metres in height, if that gives my hon. Friend any guidance on the size of the trolleys.
Philip Davies: How wide are you though?
Mr Chope: The issue of depth is also an important one.
Matthew Hancock: As my hon. Friend knows, the consultation is ongoing, so there is good reason not to bring forward amendments at this stage. To do so might be seen as prejudging the consultation. The appropriate size of trolleys is part of the consultation, so when the consultation closes, we will bring forward conclusions on what is the appropriate size.