London Local Authorities Bill [Lords] (By Order)

I agree with my hon. Friend that this is a very wide-ranging Bill. The fact that it is the 10th such Bill to emanate from London local authorities in a reasonably short space of time shows that London local authorities are pushing at what are reasonable bounds on the powers that they should be taking in legislation. They keep trying to extend those bounds, taking more powers for themselves; indeed, there are powers in the Bill that I think go too far. The consequence of what my hon. Friend has described so pertinently—the fact that the Bill contains a large number of contentious clauses—is that unless its promoters listen to reason and allow it to be amended, it will find it jolly difficult to make fast progress through the House. Even it were to sail through the Opposed Private Bill Committee, it would encounter the same kind of difficulties on Report that the pedlars Bills were up against during the last Parliament. Significantly, my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green did not refer to the pedlary and street trading provisions in this Bill, but the Bill contains powers to seize commercial goods on the ground not of reasonable belief but of reasonable suspicion that an offence has been committed. We brought in the reasonable suspicion test, reluctantly, under anti-terrorism legislation. It is draconian in the extreme to seize people's goods or interfere with their liberty on the ground of reasonable suspicion that they might have committed an offence. Because of the strength of that argument, amendments replacing the term ““reasonable suspicion”” with ““reasonable belief”” were accepted by the promoters of the Bournemouth Borough Council Act 2010 and the Manchester City Council Act 2010—two pedlars Bills that reached the end of their proceedings during the last Parliament. The fact that no such amendments have been offered by the promoters of this Bill represents a pretty bad prospect for the Bill, because it suggests a certain intransigence and resistance on the part of the promoters to listen to reason. It might also suggest that they want to give themselves extremely wide powers to seize goods. I believe that such powers go far beyond what is reasonable.