Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, there are degrees of opposition: some things are absolutely crazy and can get me going, such as an amendment that we debated earlier, and some things we would be better simply not doing. This is in the latter category. If you are going to do this then, as I said in Committee and I stand by it, this is a sensible clause. I do not know which the three local authorities are. One is Bristol and one is Kingston, but whether the third is also Liberal Democrat run I do not know. The two named by the noble Baroness certainly are. Perhaps that says something; I do not know. If it is made clear to local authorities what e-petitions are and what they are meant to do, if local authorities are given clear guidance on how to conduct them and if they are encouraged to do it, then I think that this should happen, particularly if it was a joint initiative between the LGA and the Government. If this were to be done in a serious, voluntary way, half the authorities in the country would set up schemes within 12 months and most of them within two years. Once it became known that other councils were doing it, there would be a demand for it locally and those councils that did not want to do it would be forced to do it by their residents, local newspapers and other local groups. There is no doubt about that and that is the way to do it. Unfortunately, the people who write this legislation do not understand local government and how things work locally. They think that the only way to achieve anything through a local authority is to send out ever greater amounts of detailed prescribed legislation, delegated legislation, regulations and guidance and to keep beating the local authority over the head. That is way that it happens and local authorities, to their credit, survive. Our experience of an e-petition facility is the No. 10 Downing Street website. The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said that it is a success and there is no doubt that some campaigns have been able to make successful use of it. But, as a means by which people can influence legislation and public policy, it is not very successful; in fact, it is completely useless in most cases. Most of the petitions receive not even a cursory consideration within the system of government and the corridors of power. For example, if petitions are put up on the site about matters that are the responsibility of particular departments, I see no indication that they are even referred to those departments for consideration; they are simply dealt with by No. 10 Downing Street. To try to find out how government departments deal with all this—because if the legislation is going to insist that local authorities do this, it really ought to be a matter of, "Do as we do", and not, as it appears at the moment, "Do as we say, not as we do"—my noble friend Lady Hamwee and I put down a series of Written Questions, which we are continuing to pursue. The information that we are getting is fascinating. It is fascinating because we are not getting any information. We are simply being told, in the case of most departments, that they do not deal with petitions as petitions; they just regard them as correspondence and deal with them as such. So far as I can tell, no government department, including the Department of Communities and Local Government, which is sponsoring this legislation, has a petition facility on its own website, and, on the information that we have been given so far, only two of them, one of which I think is Defra, have set up a link to the No. 10 e-petition facility from their own websites. So the position within Whitehall is not satisfactory if the Government are promoting this for local authorities. I am not going to go through the wodge of information that I have received in Written Answers in any detail, but I shall be compiling it all in due course. Two points come out of it. One is that the Bill will require local authorities to give special consideration to what at the moment are valid petitions and what in due course will be called Section 12 petitions—that is, petitions that fit within the Bill. None of that takes place in government departments at the moment. None of them is required to look at petitions in any particular way other than simply replying to them and giving an answer. One or two departments have said that they operate the "Whitehall standards". I am not sure what they are. They probably just refer to correspondence. It would be interesting to know whether there are any specific Whitehall standards in relation to petitions. I do not think that there are. Nothing in the Bill about how a local authority will have to receive a petition, acknowledge it, deal with it, consider it and refer it to a committee to be considered if that is what people want, and nothing of the rules about what constitutes a petition—how many people have to be on it, and so on—applies to government departments. If the Government are insisting on all these things being forced on local authorities in this detailed way, they ought at least to get their own house in order and apply similar standards to their own departments—particularly to the Minister’s own department, although the latest Answer that I have had from her suggests that people there are now thinking, "Well, if we’re going to say that Westminster, Lancashire, Pendle and Bradford have got to do this, then perhaps we’ve got to do it as well". It will be interesting to see the result of this process. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 30 withdrawn.