Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall speak also to Amendments 109, 110, 112 to 114, 118 and 124. The Conservatives have Amendment 106 in this group and I look forward to the discussion about that. This is an important group of amendments because it seeks to do what I am not sure I should do, and that is to put into the Bill what the Government want in it but in a more sensible way than they have set out here. I have described it as the ““more sensible scheme part 1””. I might have described it as the ““less silly scheme”” as, ideally, we do not want any of this in the Bill. However, if the Government are adamant that they want a great deal of prescription and many of these detailed rules for local authorities in the Bill, then more sensible provisions should be set out in a way which is easier for people to understand and carry out. Clauses 13 and 14 are in a dreadful muddle and this group of amendments seeks to sort it out, together with Amendment 123, which is the second part of sorting out this part of the Bill. I had it in mind to put Amendment 123 into this group but I forgot. However, it is important that the provisions in the eight amendments to which I am speaking are taken together. Individually, some of them would not make sense but taken together they seek to substantially rewrite this part of the Bill. It is important that they are understood with Amendment 123, which we will discuss in a later group, as being the second part of what I consider to be a more sensible scheme. If I understand it correctly, the Bill sets out a four-stage process for dealing with a petition. First, once the petition is presented or sent in, the authority has to decide whether it is valid. If it is valid, it goes into the scheme; if it is not valid the authority does something else with it, whatever that may be; it may ignore it or deal with it in some other way. Secondly, there is a requirement to acknowledge a valid petition. The heading to Clause 13 is: "““Requirement to acknowledge valid petitions””," although the clause is about more than simple acknowledgement. Thirdly, once a petition is acknowledged as valid, the authority has to decide whether it should become an active petition, and there are further tests to apply to it. They are set out in the first part of Clause 14, which is entitled ““Requirement to take steps””, which is, again, not a terribly useful clause heading. I tried to amend these clause headings, but I discovered from the Public Bill Office that that is not allowed. For reasons I do not understand, it is not possible to amend clause headings. What you do if you substantially amend the clauses so that the headings are meaningless, I do not know. I suppose there is a sensible way of dealing with that. However, we are dealing with the clause as it is. Fourthly, the authority has to decide what action to take on the petition. Clause 14 is a muddle because it includes two things. It mixes the procedure within the authority that a petition has to go through and the decision on what to do with that petition. Clause 13(1)(b) is the beginning of the muddle. It reads, "““the acknowledgement must give such information about what the authority has done or proposes to do in response to the petition as the authority considers appropriate””." That is all-encompassing. What the authority proposes to do about the petition may mean which committee it will go to to be discussed, by what other means it will be decided within the authority or what action the authority is going to take on it. If there is a petition to complain that all the gritting bins were not filled up during the recent bad weather, the authority can sort that out by filling them up, making sure that they are on the schedule for filling up in future and writing back to say that it has done it. There are two different things here that are mixed up and ought to be separate. My amendments set out a procedure that divides up the sensible ways in which the petition will be dealt with. Amendment 104 and subsequent amendments are the first part of trying to sort this out. They deal with stage one and what to do when you get a petition, how to acknowledge it and how to deal with it. They do not deal with the decision made about it, unless there is an instant decision. I have tabled eight amendments that take this part of the Bill apart in detail and put it back together again, which is probably not the most understandable way to deal with this. I have come to the view that I would have done far better to have deleted it all and written down exactly what I want. However, I believe that what I am putting forward is more sensible and logical than what is provided in the Bill. Amendment 104 removes ““secure the following results”” in Clause 13 and replaces it with ““include the following provisions”” because Clause 13 does not deal with the results of the petition, but with the procedure for dealing with it. Amendment 109 is about the first stage response to the petition as it is set out in Clause 13(1). It includes the possibility that action can be taken immediately to deal with what the petition is asking for. If the petition asks for a simple thing where the council is not doing what it should be doing and what its council policy says it does do, the petition can be dealt with there and then, and it does not have to proceed any further to become an active petition. Amendment 109 states that action can be taken and that is enough to end the process. Amendment 110 deals with what happens if action is not taken. It suggests that the acknowledgement should provide that information and must give information about the way that the petition will be considered by the authority and, where appropriate, the democratic arrangements in which the petitioners may participate. That is not terribly different from what the Government are setting out in the Bill, but, in my view, it is a much simpler and more straightforward way of doing so. Amendment 112 is consequential. Amendment 113 concerns whether an e-petition should be acknowledged, which is a separate issue. It is a probing amendment to ask the Government why an e-petition should not be acknowledged. Amendment 114 seeks to establish that acknowledgements may be made by electronic means. Amendment 118 seeks to add a new paragraph to Clause 14(1) if action has not already been taken under Clause 13(1)(b). It simply says that the transition from a valid petition to an active petition—a slightly extraordinary and bureaucratic concept—does not have to take place if action has already been taken at the first stage. If it has, you have to move on. Amendment 124 would leave out paragraph (a) of Clause 14(6) as a consequence of Amendment 109. Stage 2 of what happens with a petition is set out in Amendment 123, which we shall deal with later. I hope that I have managed to explain what I am trying to do, as it is quite complicated. Clauses 13 and 14, to as far as about the top of page 9 of the Bill, set out what happens when a petition is sent in, how it will be dealt with by the authority and what the authority will do prior to deciding what to do about the petition. It is extremely complex and muddled. In these amendments, I have tried to set out a simpler, clearer scheme which would remove some of the muddle and allow the action on a petition to stop if the requirements of the petition could be satisfied straight away. If not, it would provide a means by which the petition could be passed to the authority in a sensible way. The scheme that I am proposing is considerably shorter than the one that the Government have put forward in the legislation. I beg to move.