Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, Amendment 59 picks up any remaining issues in Clause 13. It is, effectively, a stand-part debate on Clause 13. "A requirement to acknowledge valid petitions"—those in Clause 12—is another heading that will have to be changed. I clearly do not want to remove this clause as a whole. The particular issue that I want to raise at this last attempt is in Clause 13(1)(b), which refers to, ""what the authority has done or proposes to do in response to the petition"." It says that the acknowledgement must give information about that. In Grand Committee, I tried to rewrite Clauses 13 and 14, in a fairly ambitious way, to get them to make more sense. There are two different issues here. One is the procedural issue of how a petition is dealt with, and one is the substantive issue of what is being dealt with. Take, for example, a petition about potholes. The procedural issue concerns how the petition is received by the council; whether it is accepted under Clause 12; how it is acknowledged; what information people are given about how it will be dealt with; and how it is dealt with. Is it dealt with by an officer or a councillor? Does it go to a particular committee for discussion? Does it go to a joint committee of two authorities for discussion, as it perhaps would on my patch? What happens? That is the procedural side, which people need to know about. On the other hand, there is what the council will do about the issue that is referred to in the petition. I call this the substantive issue. Clauses 13 and 14 would be a great deal better if these two responsibilities of the council were dealt with separately in this way. That did not meet with the agreement of the Government when I moved the amendments in Grand Committee. They have done nothing about that. We are left with quite a messy series of detailed rules and regulations, which are difficult to understand, set out in nearly two pages of primary legislation. I ask the Government to look at these clauses again and try to rewrite them so that they make sense to anybody who picks them up and reads them—or gets a report from their council, setting them out—if and when this legislation is passed. We all understand how it will work now, but it took us quite a long time to sit down, understand it and work it out. I ask the Government to look at separating the procedural responses to petitions from how the substantive matter in the petition is dealt with. They are two separate things, but they are muddled here. I beg to move.