Licensing Bill [Lords]
8:55 am
Mr Malcolm Moss (North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I wish to match the effusiveness of the Minister. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Gale, again—if that is the operative word in such circumstances.
We agree with the Minister that the Bill is as important a piece of legislation as any before Parliament. It will affect every aspect of society's cultural, social and leisure activities. It is a far-reaching and wide-ranging Bill. The Minister is greatly respected as someone who always aims to create good, practical and beneficial law. I am sure that we will not be disappointed by his responses during our debates.
I am not criticising the draftsmen of the Bill or the civil servants at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport who have spent many months, if not years, on its gestation. It has been a massive task. Unlike the Communications Bill, however, this Bill has not received pre-legislative scrutiny. Despite such scrutiny, that Bill still had a fairly bumpy passage in Committee.
There are considerable differences between the White Paper and the final product. The Bill is complex and we shall make every effort to ensure that, when it is on the statute book, it is workable and practical and will enhance the lives of members of the community, but not over-regulate those activities that should be beyond regulation.
In our opinion, the programme resolution needs to be more flexible. We have no criticism of the end date and we are happy to work with it, but we should discuss the guillotines. We have only three sittings—that is, until lunchtime on Thursday—to discuss some critical elements of the Bill. Those include schedule 1, which deals with entertainment and is highly contentious, the licensing authorities and the debate on magistrates versus local authorities, which is at the core of the Bill. There is also the matter of the central licensing authority and the general duties of licensing authorities. Those are dealt with in critical clauses and we are expected to debate and scrutinise them in three two-and-a-half-hour sittings.
We have no criticism of the total time allotted, but I put it to the usual channels that Opposition Members do not think that enough time is allotted to the earlier critical clauses and schedules. We hope that there will be a rethink, if we have not done justice to many of the clauses by Thursday lunchtime.
Question put and agreed to.