Canterbury City Council Bill

My hon. Friend may be right or may be wrong. It is difficult to know at this stage the main motivation behind these provisions, but he raises a very good point. I fear that the powers given to local authorities by these Bills will inevitably lead to some people on the council using them as a money-raising exercise, perhaps to plug the financial hole that will no doubt be left in local government because the Government are spent up and there is no money in the kitty for the future. I worry about the full implications of that. In summary, these two Bills are flawed on many levels. I do not doubt the honourable intentions of my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury and the hon. Member for Nottingham, East, as they are clearly trying to do what is best for their local areas, but we must also consider the bigger picture of national law. Whatever aspect of the Bills that Members may be unhappy or nervous about—pedlars or ticket touting, for example—given that the Government have consultations under way on all these matters with responses from both sides of the argument, which they are considering very thoroughly, it would be premature to pass legislation in this way at this stage. When legislation passes through the House, many organisations employ expensive lobbyists and have powerful groups to argue on their behalf. Pedlars are a disparate group by definition, and they probably do not have the resources to employ expensive lobbyists to argue on their behalf. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) has done a tremendous job in arguing their point of view, but even with that, and with the reports and the research he has shared with us, I fear we are in danger of passing legislation without fully understanding its implications for pedlars.