Localism Bill

My Lords, I had hoped that the Government might take a rather different view on this. Having listened carefully to what the Minister has said, I am now even more convinced that I am right and they are wrong. The Minister referred to libel and data protection. I am not sure that either has much to do with it. Data protection would come into it with personal details being divulged to whichever licensing committee it was, which are private and should not be made public. If councillors made them public, they would be liable for it. However, that is not at all the point that I am making. For example, there could be two rival taxi businesses in a community. The taxi business is fairly cut-throat. People do not make a great deal of profit and work very long hours. There are attempts to do the other side down, perhaps in a legal way. One faction is larger than the other and gets to the councillor who happens to be on the licensing committee. They say, ““We do not want you to give a taxi operating licence to this person or taxi driver licences to these people, because they will be able to expand their operation and compete with us. We will find it more difficult””. These are personal applications. It would be outrageous if that councillor went around saying, ““Yes, I will block the personal applications for taxi driving or operating licences from this or that person””, before the meeting. Councillors should be banned from saying things like that. Any councillor who goes around making such promises should be banned from taking part in the decision. These decisions, particularly the alcohol decision, were until recently made in magistrates’ courts. Can you imagine a magistrate being in that position: going around and promising a community that they will block a particular person from taking over a pub and being the licensee because that community wants somebody from that community who it favours? Imagine the pub is in the middle of a big estate, and the estate has somebody who they would like to take over the pub, but the owners have an alternative in mind. To go around campaigning against that person getting a licence to run that pub would be absolutely disgraceful. It should be banned by law. The more I listen to the Minister, the more I am absolutely convinced that I have raised a genuine problem. I disagreed with the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton. He was saying that he wanted everybody to be treated the same, but he wanted it to be more restrictive for everybody. The Bill says that predetermination —I keep wanting to say ““predestination””, but that is not quite it—should be abolished for everybody. I am not suggesting that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is saying that, but it is what the Government are effectively saying.