My Lords, as we are in Grand Committee, the rules ensure that I have no choice but to withdraw my amendment, which I will of course do in a moment. I am grateful to the Minister for expressing sympathy and understanding, but what the 20 organisations and thousands and thousands of other parties—including a majority of councils and councillors—are looking for is not sympathy but action.
I accept entirely that it is complex but I just remind noble Lords that it was introduced in Greater London in 1974—coincidentally, the year in which I first became a councillor for the ward that I have already described, which has a number of streets that have to be exempted from the ban for practical and physical reasons. When a road or pavement is exempted, it is marked accordingly on the pavement and with a prescribed street sign, so that everybody knows that it is exempted and the extent of the exemption. The important point that we are trying to get across here is that in Greater London parking on pavements is illegal unless exempted, and that should be the situation in the rest of the country. People will then know where they stand: it will be illegal unless there is a sign and marking on the pavement that says it has been exempted. The local authority will deal with those exemptions and will have drawn up and published criteria for dealing with them, so it will be publicised in that way.
I do not want to provoke him again by saying this, but I do not think that my noble friend Lord Deben and I are that far apart. All I would say is that we have over 40 years of experience and practice in dealing with these issues in Greater London, which is arguably one of most densely populated urban areas in the country, and it works reasonably well. There is always
an issue of enforcement, but there is something there to enforce. So what I and, in particular, the supporters and campaigners on this issue seek from the Government is rather more than sympathy or understanding, or leaving the situation, which is widely recognised as cumbersome and inadequate, as it is. We are looking for them to actually take action and to say to people that parking on pavements is illegal unless it is exempted.