Bournemouth Borough Council Bill [Lords]

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. To deal with the question of location, I shall refer to a conversation that I had with Mr. Mark Smith, Bournemouth's director of tourism. We spoke on Monday of this week, over breakfast at a hotel in Christchurch. The meeting was organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), although unfortunately he was not able to attend. Also at the meeting was a Bournemouth councillor, and I raised with Mr. Smith an issue that I had raised at a discussion at Bournemouth town hall some 18 months ago. Bournemouth says that it has a problem with illegal street trading and rogue pedlars in the town centre, so the suggestion was that the provisions of the Bill should be limited to that area and not extend across the whole area of the borough. I gave Mr. Smith the details of the restricted location proposed in the amendment, and he agreed that, to all intents and purpose, that was the core part of Bournemouth's commercial centre. Mr. Smith accepted that it would be an appropriate area to put in a restriction, but he was worried about making any concessions at this stage. He was also worried about what he described as the displacement effect—the possibility that activity currently taking place in the town centre might be displaced elsewhere. You may remember, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that that is exactly the same argument as the one that we addressed on Second Reading, when we debated whether the consequence of introducing this legislation in Bournemouth's town centre would be that the activity would be displaced into the borough of Christchurch. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr. Walter) spoke about towns such as Wimborne and Blandford in his constituency, but at that stage it was denied that there would be any displacement effect. Now, however, the argument about possible displacement is being used against my proposal, which is that the Bill should contain a clear definition of the part of Bournemouth to which these restrictions will apply. It is more complicated than it might seem, because different trading regimes already operate in Bournemouth. That point was borne out by the evidence from the same Mr. Mark Smith, the director of tourism, during the Opposed Private Bill Committee at the end of June and the beginning of July last year. I recall him saying, early on in his evidence, that although the Bill would apply to the whole of Bournemouth, some streets were prohibited streets, some were not, and there were some to which the local authority had not sought the application of the 1982 Act. It does not apply to quite a lot of the streets in Bournemouth. A question then arose—from a Committee member, I think—about how pedlars going to Bournemouth would know in which streets they could ply their trade. Although the Bill extends to the whole borough of Bournemouth, the whole borough is not subject to the 1982 Act, so pedlary not just from house to house but in the street will be able to continue in parts of the borough. The trouble is, however, as Mr. Smith conceded in his evidence, one will be able to find out the areas where the legislation will apply only by looking on the internet, and that is not a practical proposition for many pedlars. He said that the precise boundaries for the operation of the restrictions in Bournemouth should be set out in a leaflet, which they do not yet have in Bournemouth, and made available to all police authorities throughout the country. They would be able to distribute the details to people when they applied for a pedlar's licence, and those individuals would know the parts of Bournemouth in which they were able to exercise their pedlary certificate without getting on the wrong side of the law.