Localism Bill

My Lords, I warmly welcome the Bill. I have some specific points to raise on certain aspects of it, but, before doing so, I shall make a brief observation about what I believe will be the highly beneficial impact of the legislation on local authority members. I was a district councillor in Brentwood in the late 1980s. Although I have played no subsequent role in local government, I know that public service and the burdens that go with it have changed considerably since then and not always for the better. I may be a little dewy-eyed about it, but, back then, it seemed that councillors were relatively free to campaign on issues, to talk openly about planning issues and to work with their local communities free from burdensome regulation. In recent years, that freedom has been seriously eroded. Councillors are far too often warned off pursuing particular policies because of a possible clash with other laws and regulations or the threat of judicial review, as my noble friend Lady Eaton outlined earlier. This has been compounded by the real danger from no-win no-fee arrangements and the menace of the compensation culture. This is particularly true in the area of planning where overly burdensome rules on predetermination make it impossibly difficult for citizens to engage with their local representatives or to seek to get them to campaign on important local issues. I agree wholeheartedly with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on this. Along with the welcome abolition of the Standards Board regime—I know that we have heard different views about that today—which encourages trivial complaints about local councillors and has become something of a busybodies’ charter, the clarification in the Bill of the rules on predetermination and the introduction of the general power of competence will return much needed freedoms to local councillors to act in the best interests of their communities. When I was a councillor, I learnt from the pages of the Brentwood Gazette about the vital importance to local communities and to active citizenship of a vibrant and informed local media. By that, I mean not just the local newspaper—which is highly significant in any community—but also local radio and the local advertising community, an equally important part of the civic tapestry. In a few small respects, there are issues in the Bill which impact on this local media landscape and I want briefly to highlight them. In doing so, I declare an interest as executive director of the Telegraph Media Group and as a director of the Advertising Standards Board of Finance, which funds the work of the Advertising Standards Authority. The vast majority of the objectives contained within the Localism Bill pertaining to advertising, including restrictions on the placement of advertising trailers in fields as well as on fly-posting and graffiti, are to be warmly welcomed, but there is one minor exception relating to outdoor advertising and to Clause 111. Outdoor advertising sites play an important role in the life of a community. Around 30,000 large roadside billboards nationwide advertise local services, liven up derelict areas and often act as important points of public information. The vast majority of these advertisements comply fully with the law and with the codes of advertising practice policed by the Advertising Standards Authority. Very occasionally, however, a local planning authority finds it necessary to take enforcement action against a site where the media owner has not apparently complied with relevant legislation in obtaining planning permission. At the moment, outside London, an advertiser has the right of appeal against that decision to a local magistrates’ court, which can weigh up the issues and reach a swift decision without too much cost to the local authority or the advertiser. Disputes can be resolved without fuss where they should be: in the community involved. That is localism in action. It is a different matter within London, where, under Section 11 of the London Local Authorities Act 1995, there is no right of appeal and an advertiser can challenge a decision, at great expense, only by judicial review. This is a power which in two judgments of the High Court, most recently by Mr Justice Irwin in Clear Channel v London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham in 2009, has been described as ““draconian”” because of the lack of an appeal process and because media owners are often deterred from challenging a possibly erroneous use of a power by a local planning authority because of the costs involved. It therefore seems quite wrong that a Bill dealing with localism should seek—as it does in Clause 111—to remove the common-sense, local right of appeal within local authorities outside of London and replace it with this draconian, anti-local and unfair regime that exists in the capital, clogging up the valuable time of the High Court in the process. That is completely the wrong way round. Surely we should be respecting the rights of local communities to deal with such matters within those communities rather than in a far off court by importing into London the system that works so well outside rather than the other way around. That would be real localism. Dealing with this point would also cover off an important point of principle. As far as I can tell, Clause 111 appears to be extremely unusual in the context of this legislation in that it is the only provision within Part 5 relating to planning that lacks any right of appeal. That cannot be just and I hope we can deal with this constructively in Committee, as it is at heart a technical not an ideological issue and one that I believe has cross-party support. I will make one very quick point about local newspapers and their scrutiny role in the local community, a point touched on by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich earlier. As this House has discussed many times, local newspapers have a vital role in scrutinising local authorities and the way in which local taxpayers’ money is spent. If localism is to mean anything, and this legislation is to work in practice, it must mean that local people have access to information about how decisions are taken. How else can they take advantage of the exciting new powers this Bill offers them, which my noble friend Lord Wei outlined earlier? In recent years this has become more difficult with the move to cabinet-run councils taking secret decisions behind closed doors. The provisions in the Bill on the establishment of oversight and scrutiny committees to hold the local authority executive to account can help roll back that tide and allow such committees to become a valuable addition to public access rights. However, this is not a substitute for a free and vigorous local press, which must be allowed rights to attend the actual local government meetings at which decisions are discussed. That is why I am concerned that the Bill does not more clearly limit the fairly widespread ability of local authorities to exclude the local media from access to meetings. This can be remedied if the Secretary of State is prepared to issue robust regulations under paragraph 11 of Schedule 2 to the Bill and the new Part 1A of the Local Government Act 2000, which are predicated upon openness. I am sure that this is the instinct of the Secretary of State—it certainly fits in with the spirit of this Bill—and I hope that at some point during the passage of the legislation the Minister will be able to reassure us on those points. I hope these small points I have raised can be tidied up in Committee because this is an excellent Bill, which I believe has the potential to be as significant in handing real powers to local people and energising them in their local communities as the right to buy was in the 1980s in creating a property-owning democracy. In doing so it will have my wholehearted support.