My Lords, this amendment is just trying to help the Government. They have a bit here that is wrong. I raised it in Committee and I thought it would be sorted out. I apologise that I did not notice that it had not been until it was too late to get it on the Marshalled List. Never mind: it has appeared.
In all these different sections and all the alphabet soup of IPNAs, PSPOs and the rest, there is a definition of what the local authority is in relation to that particular area. In the case of IPNAs it is all the principal local authorities. In most of them it is the lowest-tier principal local authority. For example, in relation to public space protection orders it reads:
“‘local authority’ means—in relation to England, a district council, a county council for an area for which there is no district council, a London borough council, the Common Council of the City of London or the Council of the Isles of Scilly”.
The definition here in relation to criminal behaviour orders is outdated. The definition in Clause 28(4) has, I think, been picked up from previous legislation which must have been enacted before there were any unitary authorities apart from the Isle of Wight, and certainly before there were any unitary counties. It simply reads:
“‘local government area’ means—in relation to England, a district or London borough, the City of London, the Isle of Wight and the Isles of Scilly”.
This means that those areas where there is a unitary county, not a unitary district, are not included and so they are simply missed out of the list. These include Northumberland, Durham and Cornwall, for example, and, I think, one or two more.
My amendment will simply delete “the Isle of Wight”, which is a unitary county, and insert the words,
“a county in which there are no districts”.
That is equivalent to the wording elsewhere. As I say, I am just trying to help the Government by making the legislation cover the whole of England and to get it right. I beg to move.