Clause 26
Commons Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture & Rural Affairs), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 50, in page 15, line 5, leave out ‘association' and insert ‘council'.
It is a challenge to know how to introduce the amendment. I would be quite happy if the Minister said that he would be happy to accept it, and we could move on, because it has huge support, which I will describe. The amendment is logical and sensible and I look forward to listening to any reason that the Minister might have to oppose it. It goes without saying that were it to be approved, there would be a large number of consequential amendments and I hope that we will not waste time arguing about that. We are at the principal point at which the term to be applied to the new statutory bodies needs to be considered.
As the Committee and the Minister are aware—the Minister made the point in his previous comments on Second Reading, in the Committee and outside the House—it is expected that a very large number of voluntary commons associations will remain in existence. Indeed, the Minister said that there will be many occasions on which groups of them will come together to form a statutory body, which is why the next few clauses in the Bill are relatively vague. I entirely agreed with the Minister when he said that he wants to leave it open to see how things work and how groups of organisations and people come together. We will discuss later issues such as the proportion that should belong to commoners. Overall, I support the Minister’s desire for flexibility.
A number of these overarching bodies already exist. We discussed on Second Reading the Dartmoor commoners council, which is laid down in statute—the Minister has tabled an amendment on the matter. There is the Federation of Cumbria Commoners, the Federation of Yorkshire Commoners and Moorland Graziers, the Welsh commoners forum and, I am sure, many, many other groups of individuals who come together within an umbrella organisation. What is common to them is that they bring together voluntary commons associations.
The second part of my case is that there is no doubt that many voluntary commons associations are not convinced that it is in their interests to convert into statutory associations because of the costs and regulation involved in doing so. The Minister will seek to allay that concern, but it is genuine. Thoughts on the issue are being put forward in a joint paper by the NFU and the National Sheep Association, which represent many hundreds of commoners. The Welsh commoners forum is also involved in putting the case.
The associations are very concerned that there considerable added costs will be involved in running a statutory body by comparison with running a voluntary body. The Minister made it clear that he wants to keep voluntary bodies when they wish to remain so. Indeed, it is likely—many may say desirable—that a statutory body would be an umbrella body for a group of much smaller voluntary associations.
That leads me to the issue of the terminology. For the life of me, I cannot see why we need to call the statutory body an association, given that the voluntary body will remain a voluntary association. That can lead only to considerable confusion. As I said, many existing umbrella bodies have chosen other words to describe themselves, such as “council”, “forum”, “federation” and so on.
I am not wedded to the word “council”; if the Minister says that it has too many local government connotations and that we need to think of another term—“commons court”, “federation” or whatever—I shall not mind. My principal point is that to avoid confusion it would be wise for the word “association” not to refer to both a statutory and a voluntary body, because nobody would know the difference.
Somebody trying to deal with their local commons association would not know whether it was statutory or voluntary without some investigation. If the titles were different, that person would know that there was a distinction. I have struggled with this issue and I shall listen to the Minister with interest if he tries to persuade us to leave the Bill as it is. There is, however, an unarguable case for an alternative term. As I said, if the Minister wants to think of a term different from “council”, so be it, but it has to be other than “association”.