Clause 10 - Proceedings of licensing committee
Licensing Bill [Lords]
8:55 am
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight, Conservative)
I apologise to the Committee for having arrived after my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) had started speaking.
Amendment No. 139 has an objective similar to that of amendments Nos. 82 and 83, but its approach is slightly different. I want to ensure that as far as possible, regulations should be the same when applied to different local authority committees. I was surprised that the Minister felt it necessary to give himself the power to write regulations in respect of the conduct of what is, after all—if I may use this term—a bog standard local authority committee.
We already have licensing panels and planning committees, and they exercise quasi-judicial functions. I find it difficult to understand what additional regulation could be required. Is the Minister proposing a different regime, and would it be more difficult, for example, to require a licensing committee or sub-committee to have the same notice provisions as other committees? Is he proposing that public access to papers should be restricted on other grounds than those that apply to other committees?
I am concerned that members of the public might be confused about whether they have the same rights of access to information about applications for licences as for other proceedings of local authority committees. I am sure that the Minister will demonstrate that a range of different arrangements are necessary, but I have not yet seen anything to convince me of that.
There is another issue. It is not whether the Minister will detract from the general basis of local government legislation—for example, by restricting access to information, or by not requiring licensing committees to give the same notice or have the same quorums as other committees—but whether he will go further. I gently encourage him to do so in one respect—in defining the word ''urgent''. It is defined in regulations covering school governing bodies, but not in general local government legislation. It is important that we understand what ''urgent'' means, particularly as at our previous sitting the Minister prevailed upon me to withdraw my amendment about urgency. Perhaps he will be prepared to make such a provision himself.
At the moment, ''urgent'' can be—and, as I know to my cost, is—interpreted by committee chairmen in local government to mean that when officers cannot, for some reason, get a report out in time, they can say, ''We'll pop it on the table five minutes before the meeting, and that will be adequate, because it is 'urgent' ''. That denies the public, and councillors,
reasonable opportunity to scrutinise and question reports that come before committees.
One can imagine what would happen if the licensing policy were cooked up by the chairman and two officers five minutes before a meeting and then handed to the licensing authority. Those who drafted it might say, five minutes before the meeting, ''We've been drafting this for a long time, and this is the draft available now. We've got to get it all done within six months because the Government say so. Take it or leave it.'' That, I regret to say, is the approach of the ruling groups on some local authorities. That is why it is important to have a definition of urgency.
I will not give examples, because I do not wish to upset any member of the Committee, but it is a fact that the chairmen of ruling groups on some local authorities—and, indeed, some officers, following the rather poor example of their chairmen—tend to adopt that approach. In school government regulations, an urgent matter is defined as one that is so urgent that it would not be possible to call a further meeting of the committee of the governing body to consider an issue. In other words, something is urgent if it would be impossible to call another meeting before the time limit was up.
However, in local government more generally, it is possible for people to say, ''We're not going to have another meeting for three months''—or a month, or whatever—''We've got to cram this item into the agenda, despite the fact that notice wasn't given, that the papers aren't available and members of the public may not be able to scrutinise it.''