Bournemouth Borough Council Bill [Lords]

It is a pleasure to move amendment 2, which is supported by four hon. Friends. With it, we will discuss 27 other amendments on the Bournemouth Bill and 28 on the Manchester Bill. In this debate, it will become apparent that the amendments go to the heart of the concerns that have been expressed by many people about the wide-ranging content of the Bills and the potential impact on the livelihoods and very survival of pedlars the length and breadth of the country. Amendment 2 needs to be considered with other amendments, but it is designed to ensure that pedlary and trading are treated as separate activities. For too long, some councils have equated street trading with pedlary and, by extension, rogue and unlawful street trading with lawful pedlary. That is at the root of the problem. That issue is addressed in the detailed amendments to clause 5, which I shall discuss shortly. However, I shall take the amendments sequentially, so I shall start with amendment 3, which would delete clause 4. I tabled amendment 3 because clause 4 extends the application of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 to services. For example, as we have discussed during earlier stages, services might include teeth whitening, or applying an artificial tattoo to someone's skin. Since the Bill was drafted back in 2007, however, there has been an important legislative development—the implementation under UK law of the European Union services directive by means of a statutory instrument. I had the honour to chair the Committee that considered the statutory instrument. Under the directive, which came into effect on 31 December last year, pedlars of services only will no longer need a pedlars certificate, and those obtained by pedlars of services before the changes came into effect will continue to apply until they expire. I tabled amendment 3 to try to draw the Minister on the important issue of the interaction between the services directive and pedlary, and the provisions in the Bill. That point was referred to briefly last week on Third Reading of the Nottingham City Council Bill and the Canterbury City Council Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) said, in a throwaway line, that he thought that the advent of the services directive had made the extension of the Bills to cover services redundant. Since then, I have received a letter from the agents acting for the promoters of the two Bills before us today stating that they assume that the effect of the services directive interacting with the rules relating to pedlars will be different. However, the whole issue is up in the air. By proposing that we leave out clause 4, I thought that we could try to probe the representatives of the promoters in the Chamber or the Minister on the interaction with the services directive. The importance of the services directive is that it enables people who are supplying services and resident in other parts of the EU to come to this country and continue supplying those services without inhibition or legal restriction. To carry on activities as a pedlar in the UK, the person concerned needs to obtain a pedlars certificate, which they can from any police authority in the land if they can establish that they are of good character. Importantly, however, they must also establish that they have been resident for some time at a fixed address within the area of the police authority to which they applied for the pedlars certificate. The provision relating to pedlars is at odds with the services directive, because it is regarded by the EU as an unreasonable restraint on the right of somebody to work wherever they wish within the EU. UK law currently states that one can engage in pedlary only if one is resident and has a fixed abode in the UK; one does not have to be British, but one has to show evidence of residence here. So at the very time that the services directive has been brought into law, we have before us a Bill that purports to extend the scope of pedlary to services. I find that rather confusing. It seems to me that clause 4 is probably redundant. Much of the stuff that comes from Brussels is pretty impenetrable to people of ordinary intelligence such as Members of Parliament. Perhaps the Minister, with the benefit of legal advice from people who are better remunerated and wiser, will be able to guide us through the interaction of the services directive with pedlary and explain to us whether, in the light of its implementation, he too believes that clause 4 is redundant and superfluous, not to mention rather confusing.