Localism Bill

I recall at Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, speaking very passionately about how one needs to respond to constituents. The assumption is that a councillor will always be on the side of his constituents, but that may not be the case. A councillor may decide that a particular project—let us say, an application for a bail hostel or something of that kind—is one that he, having heard the evidence, would want to support. It might be an incinerator or an abattoir, which may not play terribly well with his constituents. How would those constituents feel, as opposed to the commercial developer who might be the applicant—which is assumed normally to be the case—if they believed that their councillor had made up his mind in favour of something that they did not want without being open to persuasion and hearing their arguments and representations at the decision-making meeting? If one takes that point of view into account, one has the grave concerns which both my noble friends have advanced and which require detailed consideration by the time we get to Report. This is not a one-way street. We have to be very careful about how we might seek to change the balance within what is, as I implied in my earlier intervention, a quasi-judicial function. It is about only those that I think we are concerned.