Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, welcome these amendments. I welcome the Minister’s speech a great deal more than his previous one. I will give him one cheer at least, maybe one and a half out of three cheers for this one—well, perhaps one and three-quarters. I do not regard these as concessions, except in the technical sense. Government Ministers and their civil servants—the Bill team—listened to the debate in Grand Committee and no doubt went away and discussed it with other people and agreed that the Bill, as it stood, was not perfect. No Bills are perfect when they come to this House, particularly when they start here. I am not going to jump up and down and say "Concession, concession". I will say thank you for going some way towards the case that some of us put forward in Grand Committee. The Government have not gone far enough. However, we can perhaps draw a line under it now. I have one or two questions. I am still concerned about how the county council will collect information at a very local level unless it is able to involve the district councils. In some places, the county council might have local people with all this information. However, in many places districts will have much better local knowledge to bring it all together and about which organisations ought to be included among the connected authorities that should be on the list of ways in which people can get involved. The county will know about the schools and education system, and they may know about the social services system but they will not know about many of the local groups and organisations which, nevertheless, ought to be included as connected authorities, because they have a financial relationship with the council, because they have council representation on it or are in a partnership—in one sense of that word— involving the council I will not go through the list of local organisations in Colne, with which I entertained—or otherwise—the Grand Committee. I remembered about 10 or 11 of them, without thinking very hard. All are genuinely connected organisations because they have links, quite close ones in many cases, with the council. I am a member of quite a few of them and go to their meetings. The district council has this information at its fingertips. If the district council has information anyway, can it be included in the information that the county council is collecting? The Minister suggested that districts could help in collecting information, where it was a sensible thing to do by co-operation with the county council. Will districts be prevented from doing this because it is not in this legislation or in practice? Again, local authorities, in general, are fairly sensible organisations doing things in a fairly sensible way, given the opportunity. Will a county and a district be able to get together in a district and work out, between themselves, how they will collect this information and which organisation should be collecting it? If so, it does not matter what the legislation says about where the responsibility lies; it is a question of whether there will be a sensible outcome. If the information handed down by the county to the district is incomplete, what does the district do, before publishing its document regarding how people can get involved? Does the district send it back to the county with a list of organisations that ought to be in it and are not, or can it write them down on a piece of paper and send them to the printers with its document? Can the district add things without any onerous burden? As the Minister said, we do not want onerous burdens. Can the district add things to the document from the county council? My final question is quite important. Will the information that a citizen gets, if he goes to the district council—the town hall—be identical to the information he gets if he goes to the county council information office just down the road, or perhaps even in the same building if they are really joined up? Will the document the county produces and puts on its website be identical to the one published by the district and put on its website? That seems a fairly crunch issue. They clearly ought to be identical. However, they can only be identical if the district is involved in collecting some of that information and if the county is able to take it from the district. I welcome the amendment relating to the 12-month period. The Minister undersold it. Originally, the Bill said that the county would only send the information to the district every 12 months. It now says that the county will collect the information every 12 months but will pass it to the district when it gets it. I made that point in Committee and am grateful that it was picked up. However, there are some important questions and I wonder if the Minister can answer them.