Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s intervention. I welcome her support and that of my noble friend, who made some very telling comments. I know that we are pre-empting a larger debate, which will surface as we go through the amendments, on whether we should legislate for petitions at all, and I shall use those arguments as we come to them. I am confused by the noble Lord’s opposition now to a clause that he said he was in favour of in Committee. He was relatively full of praise for the clause and congratulated the Government on it. During later discussions he went so far as to say that he did not seek to leave out e-petitions. I was hopeful that we might maintain some consistency and I am surprised by his new-found opposition. I can only confirm what I said in Grand Committee, which was that e-petitions are an invaluable tool. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said, we need to look only at the success of the No. 10 e-petition site and the experience of local authorities such as Bristol and Kingston to see how effective e-petitions can be in communicating community concerns and giving public bodies the opportunity to address them in ways that they could not have dreamt of even five years ago. Therefore, it is only right that our legislation should show that people can make petitions in this way. The noble Lord seems to think that this is happening, or might happen, in many more places, but so far we are aware of only three local authorities operating e-petitions out of the 388 authorities in England. We want to make more happen and we have chosen this vehicle to do that. We want to achieve both visibility and a systematic way of drawing petitions to the attention of the community, as well as their rights under the Bill to receive acknowledgements and action. We will come on to that in later amendments. These provisions are essentially about raising standards everywhere. This is an important clause and I am disappointed by the noble Lord’s response. I certainly stand by my comments in Grand Committee and wish to see Clause 10 stand part of the Bill.