Canterbury City Council Bill

Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will try to be proportionate. It may be that the leader and chief executive of Manchester city council were out of order in writing to us in the terms that they did and went beyond the bounds of a Third Reading debate. However, it is worth putting it on record that they admitted that the problem was caused by large wheeled stalls and not pedlars carrying goods on their person. This Third Reading debate is an opportunity for us to see how a Bill fits into the national context. I was delighted to hear the leader of my party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), reaffirm recently our commitment to encouraging entrepreneurs and promoting enterprise in order to strengthen the UK economy and our international competitiveness. It is clear that one pathway to enterprise open to every UK citizen of good character is to obtain a pedlar's certificate. A licensed pedlar can sell goods from town to town and house to house the length of breadth not just of England and Wales but of the whole UK. We need to look at the national context in considering whether it is reasonable and proportionate for two councils to disapply the freedoms that pedlars enjoy to operate in their local authority areas. To their credit, the Government have responded to the threat to enterprise from the proliferation of private Bills and the threat to good regulation posed by a whole lot of pieces of legislation that are different from each other sometimes in small particular but sometimes in significant particular. We are talking about 3,000 or 4,000 pedlars with certificates. As the report to which I have referred by Durham university says, the essence of a pedlar is not necessarily that he has a lot of passes in his GCSEs but that he has good interpersonal skills. So we are not necessarily talking about people who will be able to look at the detail of legislation to see how they can comply with it before they visit a particular town.