Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not think that I can add anything to what I said in Grand Committee on this important clause and on this element of it. In subsection (2), which states that petition schemes must specify the number of signatures of people who live, work and study in a local authority’s area, we intended to free local authorities to decide for themselves what the threshold number of signatures should be. The noble Lord would surely approve of that in principle. When we consulted about this, there was no consensus on what the threshold should be, so this clause allows local flexibility. Some issues are of concern to the whole borough, whereas others are of concern to people in just one street or people from a particular ethnic group or with particular interests. Some authorities already respond to all petitions that they receive. Because we want to minimise bureaucracy, the Government urge those authorities to continue to do so. Other authorities may believe that a higher threshold for the number of signatures is more appropriate—for example, because the population in their area is very high. As I said before, principal authorities can set different thresholds for different topics, proportionate to how many people are affected by different issues. The threshold chosen will be in an authority’s scheme, which must be publicised under Clause 11(4). That will ensure that local people know what the threshold is for their area. We do not think that the requirement on authorities is burdensome. It will be open to authorities to take account of the number of signatures that a petition has attracted in deciding on the proportionate response to it. We expect that authorities will set a very low threshold—perhaps less than 10 signatures—for petitions that are guaranteed a response. We want to ensure that responding to petitions is not a simple tick-box exercise. That is why we propose that authorities should have to set local thresholds at which petitions will trigger a debate of the full council, which is of course a slightly different issue. A threshold is needed there to ensure that issues of significant concern to the community are debated without overloading the council. These thresholds would be 5 per cent of the local population at most. I appreciate that the noble Lord is struggling with the concept of some of the process, but Clause 12 is so important to the whole architecture and purpose of what we are trying to do that I hope that he will not press his attempt to remove it entirely.