London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend is doing a great job in defending his local authorities, and I hope that as a result he will in due course be granted the freedoms of his boroughs, if that has not already happened. I accept what he says about localism and about London, especially parts of central London, being different in character from other parts of the country, but I do not believe that we should have one regime of civil liberties in London and another elsewhere. If that were the case, we could, for instance, introduce much more draconian laws for people causing trouble or holding demonstrations in London. Nobody has yet suggested we should have a differential criminal law relating to where an offence takes place, yet that is what we are building up to under this decriminalised regime of law. It will result in alternative sets of laws applying to London as against the rest of the country. I argued that point when we were discussing various pedlars Bills. Pedlars travelling across the country want the certainty of knowing what the law is; they do not want different laws in different parts of the country. That argument applies even more strongly in the context of whether someone has the right to ask for our name and address and whether we will be subject to a criminal penalty if we refuse to give that information. Clauses 3 and 4 address important matters of principle, and amendment 10 seeks to alter clause 4 as follows:"““leave out 'a community support officer or an accredited person' and insert 'or a community support officer'.””" Amendments 11, 12 and 13 address the same theme, and seek to remove from clause 4 powers relating to accredited persons and to confine them to police community support officers. The reasoning behind that is the same as the reasoning I articulated in respect of the amendments to clause 3.