Canterbury City Council Bill

My understanding is that the effect of clause 5 in the Canterbury and Nottingham Bills is that pedlars would be able to operate only from house to house and not on the street. My hon. Friend will probably be aware of one of the findings of the Durham university research, which was that a very high proportion of people who sell house to house and purport to be pedlars are not lawful pedlars. There is an irony in all that, because although some of the Bills state that pedlars can carry on going from house to house, there is quite a lot of resistance from households, with good reason, to people arriving on their doorstep offering to sell them things. They are nervous about those people's credentials and whether they might pose a threat to them as occupiers. That is why, when we go canvassing at election times and at other times, we increasingly come across labels on people's doors saying that they do not want pedlars and hawkers and so on. At a time when there is more public resistance to house-to-house activity by pedlars but more willingness, in my experience, to accept the role of the pedlar in the general street scene, these two Bills are working in the opposite direction. They will allow pedlars to continue to operate from house to house, but not to operate in the street. On behalf of all the promoters of these Bills, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central—his council is the lead authority for these six Bills—