Clause 47 - Designation needs confirmation or general approval to be effective
Housing Bill
11:00 am
Mr Matthew Green (Shadow Minister, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Local Government & the Regions; Ludlow, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 256, in
clause 47, page 30, line 41, at end insert—
'(2A) The appropriate national authority must issue general guidance on the factors and issues it will have regard to when exercising its powers under subsection (2).'.
This is the amendment to which I briefly alluded earlier. It is designed to find out why the Minister wants to be able to veto local authorities' attempts to deal with bad landlords, which is what clause 47 does. Amendment No. 256 is not designed to remove the Secretary of State's power, because I know that I would come up against a brick wall—the Minister would resist that because, instead of trusting local people to get rid of councillors, he wants to have the power to jump on local authorities if he does not think they are doing their job correctly.
The amendment is designed to ensure that the Secretary of State, or in Wales the National Assembly, issues general guidance on the factors and issues to be considered when the powers under subsection (2) are exercised. We do not want councils to go through a lot of work only to discover that the Secretary of State will not consider their proposals. The amendment would mean that they were given guidance on what proposals might be considered and agreed to by the Secretary of State. We should provide guidance for the sake of local taxpayers, who will be paying for the officers who do the work. If councils had to go
through the consultation and work involved in putting an application together, only to come up against a Minister who said that he would never consider their proposal, that would clearly be a waste of time and money. The Minister might say that he would produce guidance anyway, but the amendment would give him the opportunity to do exactly that.