Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, whatever my more general views of the Government, I do not see why I should not say when I am content with one of their amendments. Clause 12 will no doubt now need a new heading, because it is headed "Valid petitions". We will discover by what process headings of clauses get changed. I attempted to amend this heading in Grand Committee, when I tried to get rid of "valid", but the Public Bill Office told me that I cannot table an amendment to change a clause heading. However, the process by which the change is made will now occur. How it will happen I am not quite sure. It is probably a bit like how the Conservatives used to choose their leader in the old days. It will emerge. There is only one remaining issue with which I am not happy: the requirement, which was the old paragraph (c), that a petition under Clause 12 has to be signed by at least the specified number of people who live, work or study in the authority’s area. There is a parallel provision somewhere about the number of people who have to sign a petition to have it debated. It seems to us that this provision is still unnecessary and will lead to a lot of problems locally. The worst thing that could happen is that an authority could set the bar too high, so that lots of perfectly reasonable petitions would not qualify to be dealt with in this way. We talked in Grand Committee, so we do not want to do it again, about the circumstances in which people in a particular street or local area might want to sign a petition, and about the size of a village, or whatever it may be, in relation to the size of a city. Just because an authority is big, such as a large city or a large county, does not mean that it does not have small communities, which might want to put forward a petition in which quite low numbers might be appropriate—20, 25 or 30—whereas the authority might say, "We are a big county, or a big city, and we will set the bar at 1,000", or whatever. It seems to us that this matter should be left to local common sense and not be dealt with through an attempt to lay down arbitrary numbers. In Grand Committee, the answer from Ministers was that authorities will be able to set different levels and numbers for different purposes. It is not easy to see how to do this in any sensible way that will not get the barrack-room lawyers really going. The context of the petition is important, as is its purpose. It may be that a petition covers a whole county, but only covers a relatively small number of people who have a particular interest in something. Rock climbers, for example, may be interested in a few crags in the county and petition the county planning department over something in relation to them. It may be people sailing on mill lodges or reservoirs. It may be anything. It may be people who are a special interest group, who are only a few and so widespread that they cannot be related to the communities in which they live. I have been trying to think of how this could be done since Grand Committee. It is going to be very difficult and I ask the Government to look at this again. We have time left in this House and we have the whole of the House of Commons procedures when the Bill goes there, so they have a chance to do so. They have not got it right yet, so I hope that they will look at it again. I beg to move.