London Local Authorities Bill [Lords] (By Order)

I certainly am. I would urge any right-minded person, particularly with a conservative philosophy, to do so, because nothing in it supports such a philosophy. It gets worse than local authorities wanting the power to seize things they have reasonable cause to suspect are intended for some kind of offence. Let us imagine that I am walking down the streets of Westminster trying to take home a hot-dog trolley that I had just bought. What would I do if a local council bureaucrat came along and said, ““Hold on, you might use that to sell hot-dogs illegally, so I'm going to take it off you””? Is that really the type of country we want to live in, and are we happy to pass such legislation? Not only would local authorities be able to seize the hot-dog trolley that I had bought legitimately and was transporting home, but they would be able to seize any vehicle used to transport it where they found it in the street. Are we going to give council officers that power? We must be stark raving mad even to think about giving the Bill a Second Reading. The Minister and the shadow Minister say casually, ““Oh, well, of course there are some deficiencies in the Bill, but let's just iron them out in Committee.”” On that basis we may as well not bother with the Second Reading of any Bill. If we are saying, ““We all know the Bill's a load of drivel, but we'll pass it now so we look as if we're being supportive and then fillet it in Committee””, we might as well just let every Bill go into Committee and see what we can do from there on. The point of Second Readings is that Members may not like certain legislation in principle. I do not like this Bill or the philosophy behind it, which is anti-small business and anti-freedom, and I do not like the draconian powers that some council officers seem to think are theirs by right—not in the country that I want to live in.