Manchester City Council Bill [Lords](By Order)

I will be brief, because a number of Members are waiting to speak and most of the points that I wanted to make have already been made very clearly, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), our Front-Bench spokesman. In a nutshell, the problem is that we are dealing with a very old and worthy piece of Victorian legislation that applies nationally and cuts across the ability of local councils to use the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982. The Act was designed to, among other things, enable a council to say how many street traders it wanted and what it expected of them, and it allowed a council to enforce those decisions through a system of annual licensing. In some cases, the interval is much shorter than a year, but it should not be longer than a year. I shall take Canterbury city council as my example. The council has decided how many street traders it wants and how many it is fair to have on the High street. I understand that at the moment it has given 13 annual licences and five temporary licences. The pitches are all on one side of the street to allow free movement of people on our very crowded High street, which is pedestrianised. In summer, it is sometimes so full that people try to use side streets if they want to make their way somewhere on foot. That whole system is effectively blown away by the Pedlars Act 1871. As the hon. Members for Pudsey (Mr. Truswell), and for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd), said, the 1871 Act effectively means that people who have no local locus at all, and who could have picked up a pedlars certificate from almost anywhere in the country—they are very easy to forge, so the person may not even have bothered to pay the £12.50—can put up a stand on wheels on the wrong side of the road, blocking an already extremely crowded street. Even if they commit no other offence at all, that in itself is a huge problem in a city that is a major regional shopping and tourist centre. There are a number of other problems, some of which are already familiar from the remarks of other hon. Members. I ask my hon. Friends who object to the measures to think for a moment about enforcement. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) is a good friend and we see eye to eye on many subjects. He is a man of total integrity and is recognised as such across the House. I do not for a moment accuse him of a having vested interest, but the plain fact is that any attempt to enforce the measure involves lots of money for lawyers. It is extremely expensive not only in terms of money, but in terms of manpower.