Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, we debated this a little in Grand Committee and I am happy to try to reassure noble Lords that their concerns are misplaced. In fact, I suggest that Amendment 37 might have the opposite effect to the one intended. The petitions regime, which this chapter introduces, does not impose any onerous burden on local authorities. If a council gets a petition it must acknowledge it and take appropriate action in respect of it. As a matter of ordinary public law, if a council received a petition and responded in a wholly unreasonable manner, it would even now be liable to challenge by judicial review or perhaps, although it is rather more difficult to see how, by the district auditor. The situation will not be all that different after the petitions provisions of the chapter are in place. One difference will be that the profile of petitions will be raised. People will know where and how to submit petitions and, crucially, that they will be guaranteed a response. There is a theoretical chance, I admit, that raising the profile of petitions and increasing the number that councils receive could lead to an increase in legal action against councils. Our judgment is that it will not. If all councils have a clear procedure for dealing with petitions, this will serve to protect them from any accusation that they have acted in an unreasonable manner. All a council has to do to avoid legal action is to comply with its own procedures. That is no different from what it has to do in relation to every other function it discharges. As noble Lords are aware, the Bill requires principal local authorities to have a petition scheme which secures at least the requirements set out in this chapter. An authority’s scheme can go wider than these provisions but Clause 11(6) provides that, whatever commitments are made in a scheme, the local authority is legally bound to comply with them. The problem with Amendment 37 is that it limits the requirements in the subsection to cover only the statutory parts of its scheme—that is, only those which stem from this Bill. If we were to accept the amendment, local authorities could set a petition scheme which voluntarily goes wider than the requirements of the Bill, and then pick and choose whether to uphold the commitments they had made in their formal scheme when dealing with any petitions which fall under the voluntary part of the scheme. This would certainly create a two-tier scheme where it would not be clear to petitioners how their petition would be dealt with. Amendment 37 would therefore increase the risk of legal challenge because it would invite argument that the council had committed to doing one thing in its petition scheme and then done something else entirely. The amendment would not oust any court jurisdiction to consider whether an authority had acted reasonably in its response to a petition; it would just mean that, instead of assessing whether the council had complied with its published procedures, a court would have to examine wider issues of reasonableness. We share the objective that citizens should have a clear understanding of how their local authority will deal with petitions. However, I fear that Amendment 37 would undermine that objective. Therefore, on that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw it. Amendment 39 would insert express provision that nothing in the chapter, ""prevents a … local authority from relaxing the requirements of its petition schemes so as to apply it more widely than is required by this Chapter or the scheme"." The concern expressed by the noble Lord is that, once a principal local authority must have a petition scheme, for it to act in response to petitions which fall outside that scheme would be considered in some way to be unreasonable or a waste of resources. I do not believe that this concern is justified. I do not think that any aspect of the requirements of the Bill could be interpreted as imposing any sort of exclusive set of obligations for the handling of petitions. As such, I believe that there would be no grounds for criticising local authorities for continuing to exercise their public law powers in response to petitions which fall outside their petition scheme. The provisions of this chapter are deliberately framed in a manner which makes it clear that authorities are given a very wide discretion on what to include in their scheme, and how to respond to petitions. The Bill does not set fixed limits on how a function is to be discharged by principal authorities. While local authorities must do at least what their petition scheme says they will, they will have the discretion to respond to any petition, even if it does not meet the requirements of the scheme which they have set out. Nothing in the Bill prevents local authorities responding to any petition they receive. I hope that the noble Lord finds those assurances helpful and that he will feel able to withdraw the amendment.