Localism Bill

My Lords, I apologise. I should have jumped up before the Minister. I will speak to Amendments 98K and 98M in this group. On the two other amendments in the group, Amendments 98J and 98L, which would remove ““and other”” and ““or other”” respectively, an important, if not fundamental, point to be made is that the Government are proposing to use in this Bill language which in local government is rather out of date. Local government used to talk about financial interests and non-financial interests. If you had a financial interest, you had to declare it. You then had to do whatever the council instructed you to do, such as leave the room or sit there and not speak. If you had a non-financial interest, you had to declare it, but you were not usually subject to those sanctions. My experience is that local government nowadays talks about personal and prejudicial interests, which are similar. However, prejudicial interests, while they include financial interests, are wider ranging and may include interests which are not directly financial but which are nevertheless thought to be prejudicial to somebody taking part in discussion and debate. Personal interests, which have to be declared, are those which people should know about but are not thought to be prejudicial to people taking part in a debate. It seems to be common practice in local government nowadays for those words to be used. I was fairly sure that they had been used in the previous legislation, although I have not looked it up. Perhaps along with my noble friend, I would ask the Government to check the nomenclature, because there is no point putting in legislation words which are not now used on the ground and, in any case, are narrower perhaps, and less clear certainly, than the words and categories now used in local government. My amendments in this group follow on from the amendments in the previous group. They are part of a package of the way we suggest the new standards regime needs to be changed. First, if there is to be a local system of councillors being sanctioned by local committees and no National Standards Board procedure, there needs to be an appeals procedure written into the system. There has to be a way in which someone who feels aggrieved by a local decision is able to appeal to a wider group against the sanction made against them. As I understand it, this is normal human rights and administrative tribunal procedure. In many ways these bodies will be operating as administrative tribunals and we hope that the Government will look at this issue. We suggest that it should not be a national quango such as the Standards Board for England and that it should not be run by central government; it should be operated within local government by representatives of local government and it should be set up in co-operation with the LGA. As my noble friend Lord Shipley said, we have set out ways in which this can be done. My second point concerns parish councils. The Government have not bottomed the issue of parish councils on this new standards regime. I have a long briefing about the problems that it will cause to parish councils but I shall not read it all out. If parish councils have to operate their own procedures, there will clearly be resource implications. Big town councils might be able to do it—although it might be wasteful of their funding—but small parish councils will not possibly be able to do it. If there are many individual local codes so that parish councils operate different systems and some do not have any, how will members of parish councils be trained to understand the code? How will parish clerks, who play an absolutely crucial role, be trained in the new system? My experience from talking to people involved in standards committee throughout the country is that where there are lots of parish councils they seem to occupy quite a high proportion of the time of standards committees. The reason for this is obvious: parish councillors are not getting the expert advice on standards matters—on declarations of interest and so on—which they ought to be getting; and parish clerks are perhaps not being trained or not passing on that advice. I am a huge fan of parish councils but there may be something about parish-level politics and government that leads to individual rivalries and encourages people to make complaints against each other. Whatever it is, there is no doubt that parishes form quite a large part of the workload of standard committees in many different places. To leave them adrift, as this Bill seems to do, does not seem the right way to go. In our view, the parishes probably need their own system. That system ought to be operated via the established means of communication and training that parish councils have with the National Association of Local Councils and other bodies such as the county organisations, and there ought to be county-level standards committees for parish councils. Whatever the system is, doing it within the parish council community is a sensible idea—particularly if the parish council finds itself cast adrift with a district that does not have a system. In any case, if districts have different codes of conduct and different systems for standards committees, the parish councils will have to join in those willy-nilly whether or not they agree with the systems and the codes. A separate parish system seems to be the way to look at things. My final point relates to criminal offences. Again, we think the Government have not thought this issue through properly. On failures to declare interests, a major failure is a very serious matter indeed, whether it be a failure to register or a failure to declare during a meeting. A minor failure would require a sanction—but not a draconian sanction such as being hauled up before a magistrates' court. Yet the government system seems to mean that if the offence of not declaring or not registering an interest is not sufficiently serious for the DPP to agree to prosecute, there will be no sanctions at all. That does not seem to be the right way forward. As for the criminal investigations and vexatious complaints, that needs thinking through; there are enough vexatious complaints on standards already that end up with people being found not guilty and having no sanctions against them—or, in my case, the complaint was proved and the sanction was nothing. People can imagine what happened. There are enough cases of people using the standards procedure for political or personal vexatious purposes. Think of the prospects of this being used when criminal sanctions are possible. You would get massive headlines in the local papers that the complaints had been made, it would all come to nothing but the damage would all have been done. It has to be thought through a bit more carefully. I join my noble friend Lord Tope in hoping that we can have discussions with the Government in the mean time and that at the very least we can get the thing thought through again. If no change occurs at the end of the day, so be it—but we are convinced that the Government have not yet got it quite right.