Localism Bill

I am going to speak in support of what my noble friend Lord Beecham said. It is the mention of airports that I cannot resist, of course, because we have one in Luton. I know how important it is to the local community and what a generator of jobs it is. In many ways, airports are the organisations least likely to need the measure that the noble Lord proposes because they have consultative committees anyway so there is automatically a wide engagement with the community. The principle of somebody who is potentially on the receiving end of a referendum or a petition knowing about that and the local authority having to make a decision to engage with them seems to be entirely reasonable. What we are balking at is that the specific amendment is a little too prescriptive and takes us too far down an unfortunate path. However, we are all well aware of the challenges that airports in particular face.