London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend's imagination is so wonderful and glorious that it allows us to consider the possibility that a malevolent neighbour—you could not possibly have a malevolent neighbour, Mr Deputy Speaker, being so good natured yourself, but others may—could take a little photograph of the car. Do you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you can take photographs with your telephone nowadays? This is one of the great lights of modern technology. People take photographs even of MPs going about their daily business and put them on websites. They have not yet said that any MP is for sale, but they could take a photograph with their mobile telephone of a motorcar, put it on the internet, say it is for sale, and then ring up the council and say, ““Look what my neighbour is doing”” and how outrageous that is. Around comes the authorised officer and practically drives off in a brand-new Bentley. That would be very tiresome for the person who had bought a brand-new Bentley, if anybody could afford such things in these days of austerity. I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. He identifies a concern that we should all have. We in the House are all in favour of brotherly love—I look at my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) as I say that, and I know how much he values brotherly love among all peoples and all nations—but I am sorry to say that that is not how people live sometimes in the real world. They sometimes have disputes. They sometimes go to law courts over a hedge that is 2 or 3 inches above where it should be. They sometimes go to law courts over a perch of land, if that is still a unit that is allowed in these European days, and they argue through the courts for years and years, decades and decades, and cost themselves hundreds of thousands of pounds for a piece of land that was worth £20 or £1,000 to start with. We could in this way, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, have neighbourly disputes made worse. The injunction that we get from the Bible, ““Love thy neighbour as thyself,”” would fall on sandy ground, as we found that all those cars were being purloined, in effect, by those authorised officers. My amendment 44 deals with the form of the notice and the detail. We have got to the standard of proof: there ought to be proof. We have got to the fact that the notice ought to be issued by a magistrate, not by some tatterdemalion council officer, to quote the word so beloved of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North. I come on to how the notice is determined. It is important that that should be done by the Secretary of State, by somebody of standing and seniority, somebody who can take the broader view into consideration when determining how the notice ought to be drawn up, the details that would be put in it and how precisely it is set out. Why do I choose the Secretary of State? Because the Secretary of State, who may have faults—it has occurred that Her Majesty's advisers have had faults over many centuries; indeed, this place has executed one or two of them over the years for having those terrible faults, but they are accountable to Parliament, so that if they agree to a notice that is unfair, they can be called to account here by the constituency MP or by other MPs who happen to take an interest in the rights of the individual. However, if the matter is left to the council, there are some councils across the land that never change hands. They remain Conservative or Labour for generation after generation. They become laws unto themselves, able to treat their people as they wish, without the real weekly, monthly, yearly accountability that the Secretary of State might have. Even accepting that there have been Secretaries of State to whom one would not wish to give house room, the broad principle is that the Secretary of State, by virtue of his responsibilities in office and his accountability not only to this House, but to the other House of Parliament, and the fact that he holds his seals of office by a commission from Her Majesty the Queen, and that the Prime Minister can remove him from the holding of those seals of office by the wiggling of an eyebrow, if he is so determined to wiggle his eyebrows, gives us a degree of protection and that is why I and a number of hon. Friends have tabled amendment 44 to replace the words ““the council”” with the words ““the Secretary of State””.