Clause 97
Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
10:30 am
Tom Brake (Shadow Minister, Department for Communities and Local Government; Carshalton and Wallington, Liberal Democrat)
It is a pleasure to see you this morning, Mr. Chope. The purpose of the amendments is to help the Government to achieve what they set out to achieve—to give local authorities greater powers. On Second Reading, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said:
“It is the job of central Government to enable local government to play”
the role of
“leading the drive for sustainable communities, regenerating our city centres”.—[Official Report, 22 January 2007; Vol. 455, c. 1145.]
Allowing local authorities to make and confirm byelaws must be part of the recipe for that, yet only the Department for Communities and Local Government is giving up its power to confirm local authority byelaws; other Departments are not. Hence, we have in front of us a series of rather complicated amendments. They refer to a number of Acts and are designed to ensure that other Departments are required to give up their powers to confirm byelaws.
The approach that the Government have adopted hardly demonstrates joined-up government. What is the logic of the DCLG giving up its confirmatory powers when, for instance, the Department for Transport does not? Is the problem that the Department for Communities and Local Government has not managed to secure support for its Bill from the Department for Transport?
Hon. Members may be wondering whether that really matters: the answer is that it does. I have been supplied with a helpful briefing by the Local Government Association, which sets out a very good reason why it matters. Newcastle city council has been unable to get confirmation of a byelaw to ban smoking in a particular public place from the Department of Transport. The council made a byelaw application under section 35 of the Highways Act 1980 to ban smoking in Eldon Garden, which I am sure is a very pretty place. I do not know if any members of the Committee have visited Eldon Garden—perhaps they could describe it if they have. The application, which was submitted in March 2004, remains unconfirmed by the Department for Transport. At one point in the process, the Department said that it did not have time to consider the application.
Another smoking ban, confirmation of which was this time requested of the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister by Newcastle, was submitted in September 2004 and took two years to confirm. Clearly, there is a need for Departments other than the Department for Communities and Local Government to give up their powers to confirm byelaws. If the Minister will not accept our sensible and straightforward amendments, I hope that at the very least he will bang his colleagues’ heads together at the Department for Transport to try to accelerate the process of confirming the byelaw to which I referred. That proposal might well be overtaken by other measures relating to smoking, but if a Department is taking nearly three years—from March 2004 to now—to fail to make progress on a byelaw, the Department for Communities and Local Government needs to pick up the issue and run with it.
Of course, the Department for Transport is involved with byelaws that apply to many other matters, be it taxis, walkways, horse-drawn omnibuses—I am not sure how many of those are still in operation—or guided transport systems other than railways. Bylaws on countryside recreation and local nature reserves are obviously the responsibility of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Byelaws on public libraries are the responsibility of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and those involving acupuncture, piercing and tattooing are the responsibility of the Department of Health.
The experiences of Newcastle city council tell us why the amendments are necessary. I hope that when the Minister responds to the debate, he will tell us whether his Department made any attempt to secure the support of other Departments. If it did, why did discussions about giving up confirmatory powers not bear fruit? Will he also confirm whether he will, in the example that I have referred to, put pressure on the Department of Transport to accelerate the process? Will the Government consider returning to this matter to ensure that their bid to give local authorities greater powers in relation to byelaws is delivered? I await the Minister’s response with interest.