Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, with the leave of the House I am moving the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. Also in the group are Amendment 48 in my name, which is an overlapping amendment, and Amendment 83, which is similar. One of the things that we tried to do in Grand Committee was to establish in which areas the scheme proposed by the Government would get in the way of things that the council was doing already, either through other legislation which involves legal consultation and processes and the ability of members of the public to make representations as part of those processes, or simply by carrying out consultation processes on its policies in whatever areas they might be. The amount of public consultation that takes place nowadays is fairly large; it is certainly enormous compared with the situation 30 or 40 years ago. Quite often in districts where councils are trying to make a difference—because they are thought to be disadvantaged in some way, or there are environmental or housing problems or whatever, or they are putting forward regeneration or planning schemes—a lot of consultation is involved. The amount is so great that people often complain of consultation fatigue and say, "We don’t want to be consulted any more; we just want you to get on with it, please, whatever you are doing". A huge amount of consultation already takes place. However, in planning and licensing applications a formal, legal consultation process is set down involving deadlines, procedures as to what has to happen to representations, the relevant council committees and the various ways that the applications can be dealt with. That is in legislation. For example, there is a deadline by which councils are supposed to deal with planning applications—eight weeks, or 13 weeks for major applications. Councils will have their own systems for advertising applications, notifying neighbours and asking for representations, which may well involve petitions. They often do; if people get worked up about a scheme, they get their neighbours to sign a petition or they go to the town centre and sign one. A lot of petitions are submitted as part of the normal planning application process. As regards the wider process—the plan-making process, which now involves the local development frameworks—a huge amount of consultation takes place. The planning authority has to draw up a scheme of public involvement, although I have forgotten the exact terminology for it, which is set out in the Planning Act which we took through this House only recently. The representations are fed into the planning process and the council will have a detailed scheme as to how that works, which may involve petitions. Putting those petitions into the Section 12 petition scheme, as it will inevitably be called, is ridiculous. It will not work, because petitions will also have to go into the formal planning process, anyway. If people demanded that they should go to an overview and scrutiny committee and then that there should be a debate at the full council meeting, in some cases that would begin to border on the unlawful. That is because the way in which the process has to be done is set out in the planning legislation, the planning regulations, and the council’s adopted schemes that have to be approved by the Secretary of State and are formal documents. Equally, it is important that licensing applications are dealt with in a proper manner. In taxi, alcohol or premises licensing, you are dealing with a quasi-judicial function where the council has by law to set up a separate committee. The members of that committee have to have training and they make the decisions. The rest of the council cannot do anything about it if it does not like it—as I know to my cost—when they make wrong decisions. Any representations have to go into that process and if they do not, it is a waste of time anyway, because they will not have any impact on the decisions that are made about the issue of the petition. Planning and licensing applications that are dealt with in legislation ought to be excluded from this particular petition scheme. It is common sense that they should be excluded, and if they are not, councils will get into real difficulties in how to deal with them, and they may get into legal difficulties if they start trying to deal with legitimate planning application or licensing matters outside the particular tram lines of the planning and licensing systems. We are not trying to be awkward in any way in putting forward these amendments. We are very concerned that the Government have not thought the provision through properly and have got it wrong. I do not ask that these amendments be approved tonight—well, I do, but I do not expect them to be approved—but I ask the Government to think very clearly about these matters. My final point is less important in terms of the legal background to all these decisions. Let us imagine that a council is proposing to build a new leisure centre with three possible sites and it is carrying out a formal public consultation process. Petitions may well come in with regard to that. People may want it in one particular site, residents in one area may say they do not want it anywhere near them under any circumstances, thank you very much. Whatever the petition says, they may say they want it somewhere completely different. They may say they do not want it at all, or it is the wrong sort of leisure centre. Petitions come in as part of consultation processes, so it would be wrong to have a system set down in the law of the land that says that petitions coming in have to be dealt with in some way outside that process, and that people have a right to have full council debate before the consultation process is properly concluded, for example. The council will come into it at the end of the process, when the recommendation to the council is made and the council will accept that recommendation, or it may refer it back. But it would be wrong to have people able to go to the full council half way through the process to pre-empt a carefully structured consultation that is taking place, and a carefully structured decision-making process. It would be disruptive and a recipe for people who understand how to work the system to try to pre-empt decisions in ways that would not be helpful to good decision-making. I am totally in favour of democratic decision-making, and of people being involved in decision-making, but where major schemes like this have been put forward—or even small schemes such as what to do about a piece of land in somebody’s back street—when a consultation process is taking place in a proper structured way, it would be completely wrong to allow petitions from people to bypass that and go through this new system. I beg to move.