Manchester City Council Bill [Lords](By Order)

I was going to come on to that point, but may I first remonstrate with the LGA? I am concerned that it has taken so long to get on to this issue, which has been around for a long time. Successive Governments have tinkered with it. In respect of the last reviews of the statutory obligations, the Government accepted all nine recommendations, but I am not aware of the LGA having put forward any form of consultative document on that. It has been very slow. On the fees, of course local councils want to raise more money. If Canterbury, Bournemouth and elsewhere, including Manchester, had their wits about them, they would increase those fees—to, say, £600—and door-to-door salesmen, or pedlars, or whatever we want to call them, would be priced out of business. That would be unfortunate, because people should not be precluded from going from door to door; that should be encouraged. The point has been made—we all know this, as we have recently had a by-election in Crewe and Nantwich—that we are not always welcomed on doorsteps. Surely one has the right to be able to go from door to door; that activity should not be covered by the Bill and we should not allow its prohibition in the longer term. I had promised to speak for only 10 minutes, but I wish to make a final point. Enforcement is possible as things stand, but it requires people who are willing to do it. We have heard a lot of arguments today that it costs such and such a figure, but there are ways of enforcing this and they should be used. We do not have to introduce new Bills and new statutory obligations. Let us leave things to the review that the Government are going to undertake, and let us see what the rights and wrongs are. As I have said before to hon. Members in this debate, what evidence do we have that our system is not working? The evidence is pitifully little. I suggest that councillors need to take a stronger line, using trading standards, the police and their own council resources—CCTV and so on—to administer this situation, because it is not beyond the wit of man. If we can solve parking problems, we can solve a lot of things in city centres. Let us be honest, the matter is a bit of a hot potato, with various crimes that I do not need to discuss, but I am sure that we could deal with this. I continue to oppose this Bill, because I strongly believe that it is not the way to make progress. I believe that we need a framework document, put together by the Government and enacted either by this Government or the next Government—I know who that will be; it will be our Government. I would like to think that we could have this debate again after the autumn, when we could look at what the Government are proposing in much more detail. At that point, we should stop what is going on and examine it in the cold light of day, before we make another mistake.