Localism Bill

My Lords, I support the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. She has to be at the LGA conference today, which will miss its usual presidential address because I am here. I was much convinced by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who said that we should avoid this whole issue. It will get us into an awful lot of trouble and legal hot water. However, I suspect that that will not prove an acceptable course of action and there will have to be an apportionment of blame to decide who the polluter is when the polluter must pay. That leads us to worry that that apportionment of blame cannot be undertaken by the Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government or Defra. They would be parties to the case and it would offend natural justice if they were the ones to decide how blame should be apportioned. Therefore, we get into the world of independent arbitration. The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, propose the relatively well trodden path of having the Chartered Institute of Arbitration choose the membership of a body that would do this. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, suggests the alternative of an independent review panel that would be appointed by the Secretary of State. The danger there is that people would not see a body appointed by the Secretary of State as entirely independent of the Secretary of State. I wonder whether there is a middle position that would satisfy all parties. Would it be possible to set out in the Bill the composition of an independent panel to perform the arbitration role? There might be two appointees of the Secretary of State, two appointees of the Local Government Association and—since London comes into so many of these arguments—one appointee of the Greater London Authority or London councils, with an independent chair appointed by the president of the Chartered Institute of Arbitration. Perhaps having that in the Bill would establish the independence of an arbitration body that everyone could see was not a creature of the Secretary of State. I hope the Minister will be able to give us some satisfaction on this.