Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, other than referring to two things the noble Baroness said in moving these amendments, I am not going to make any general comments about the petition sections of this Bill. I will reserve those for Amendment 40, which is the important stand part debate. I will respond to the Government’s amendments, and I am not going to press Amendment 50, which was put down by mistake. I had not actually noticed that the Government had taken the date out. That was my fault. The Minister congratulated those of us who took part in all those Grand Committee sessions. She said noble Lords "worked hard". I thought the Government simply thought we were hard work. Either way, I take it as a compliment and thank her for that. She also repeated what she has said throughout this Bill, that only one in five councils make information available about how to provide petitions, and we just disagree about the facts there. What she means is that when her officials looked on council websites, they could only find that information on one in five websites. That is different from whether information is made available or not. In the case of my own council, information is made widely available on the announcement notices for meetings, which are stuck up everywhere. It is also on the website if you look for it. The real problem here is one I have raised previously in that a lot of council websites are a bit old-fashioned, and some are pretty awful. I am not suggesting that the Government bring in a detailed Bill to help councils put their websites together, although that would be their approach under this. I am suggesting that the Government, together with the Local Government Association, should spread best practice. Some councils have very good websites, but that does not include my own, I am afraid. The problem is that there is an old-fashioned approach to some websites; they provide a limited amount of information which is set out in traditional council-ese that those of us who are used to agenda papers will understand. A lot of websites are very good at telling you how to get somebody to do a special refuse collection from your backyard if you are throwing furniture out, how to get the rat-catcher out or promoting events in the local park, but not so good at promoting local democratic involvement or making it easier for people to find out what is happening at the next area committee meeting. I am glad to have the nodding support of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who is in his place now. I will go through some of the amendments very quickly. A lot of them are to take out the word "valid". I am extremely grateful for this as I waged a campaign against "valid". I fear that they will now be called Section 12 petitions, at least within local authorities, unless people think of a better term. Perhaps they will be called parliamentary petitions, although that would give the wrong impression, like when we used to have parliamentary trains. The Government have seen sense on this; this simple amendment does a lot to change the difficulties that many of us foresaw of this scheme discouraging or even preventing a lot of the petition work which takes place already and restricting people’s rights. The removal of the requirement that the petition should be addressed to the council in some formal way is common sense. On the stuff about organisers, I agree entirely with what the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said. We were arguing together about that. On the date, the Government have made a common-sense change. Making it absolutely clear that e-petitions and paper petitions will be treated the same by the procedures of the council is sensible. The six-month rule will stop councils saying that they have had one petition and the next five that come from different parts of the area on the same subject will be rejected simply because they have already had one, or that they will reject one after four months if circumstances change. That is absolute common sense. I can only thank the Minister and her Bill team, who listened to our arguments and agreed that at least on some things we were talking sense. I regret that they did not move on some other matters, but at least within the confines of this large, bureaucratic and structurally wrong scheme and its restrictions, these are very sensible amendments. We will look back at those Grand Committee sittings and think at least we did something to make these provisions work a bit better. Amendment 31 agreed. Amendments 32 to 36 not moved.