Commons Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 1:"Page 2, line 41, at end insert—" ““(4)   There shall be a duty on the Secretary of State and the Minister in the National Assembly for Wales to fund the costs of commons registration authorities.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the amendment addresses the need to persuade the Secretary of State and the Minister in the Welsh Assembly Government to fund the administration costs of common registration authorities. I tabled this amendment because there is great concern among commons registration authorities—that is, in the local authorities—that this legislation will create a considerable amount of work. The work will include computerised mapping, the translation to computers of maps from 1905, which, in some local authorities, mostly demarcate the well known boundaries of commons in their locality. It is painstaking work that requires a great deal of accuracy. The level of human resources needed to carry out the time-consuming work of implementing electronic registers—it is certainly not required of commons registration authorities in all local authorities—is expensive. The legislation must be effective and effectively run. Our question is whether the Government want the legislation to be successful. It will not be unless resources are adequate to cover a massive land area of England and Wales—in the area that I come from, one-third of the land area. The subject was raised in Committee and also, as I am sure the Minister knows, in a meeting between commons registration authorities and Defra in the first half of 2005, in Cheltenham. The information from that meeting was that around £100,000 would be available. In the comments made to me, given the magnitude of the task that I described, that sum was felt to be wholly inadequate to meet the job that the commons registration authorities will have as a result of the legislation. I think that I have made the point very clearly on this amendment; therefore, I beg to move.