Clause 4
Sustainable Communities Bill
10:45 am
Nick Hurd (Ruislip - Northwood, Conservative)
Or even new clause 4, Mr. Bercow, but it is to do with the word “may”. An interesting piece of research that has been prepared for me reinforces those concerns about the word “may”. It is called “Lostin Translation—The Abandonment of Ministerial Assurances.” The claims of abandoned assurancesthat it happens to list date back to 1997, but I am sure that a more objective exercise could be undertakenthat covers a longer period, spanning several Administrations.
The point is that people—certainly this Committee—will not take ministerial statements on trust. We need something more robust in the framework of the Bill. We cannot allow good intentions to be lost in translation. I do not know whether the Minister is familiar with the movie of that name. It is one of my favourites, and contains long sections in which Bill Murray is wandering around a hotel in Tokyo with a baffled look on his face. I hope that when, as seems inevitable, the movie of the Sustainable Communities Bill is made, the director will not choose to dedicate large sections of that film to images of the Minister wandering the corridors of his Department, asking, “Why is it that whenever I say something, it gets lost in translation when it comes to the clauses put before the Committee?” That is what appears to have happened in the case of this new clause.
I congratulate the Minister on his flexibility in relation to subsection (1) of the new clause, but I would also reinforce the message of the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne on subsection (3). You kindly, Mr. Bercow, gave me some leeway to refer to my amendment. I do so only in order to draw to the Minister’s attention what we are trying to achieve, which is to make it extremely clear who should be party to the new agreement.
I recognise that the Government’s new clause contains a seed of something that may actually be more ambitious than even the Bill’s sponsors contemplated, and I congratulate the Government on their ambition. However, that ambition is qualified by the word “may”. As currently drafted, the new clause incorporates too much flexibility for my taste, and I sense for the Committee’s taste as well, in that a potentially less enlightened Secretary of State than the current one, who might even be of a different political colour and might not like the Bill, could remove from the process key Departments or agencies that should not escape the spotlight.
The amendment that I tabled sets out a list of institutions that are parties to local area agreements which is drawn from pages 54 and 55 of the local Government Bill. That is a logical source given that the Government have said that they see the Bill as an extension of local government legislation and as a mechanism for strengthening local area agreements. I put it to the Minister that to seek to be more explicit in this Bill in defining the agencies and Departments that it covers is consistent with everything that he has said. I understand that the Government want to take broad powers and retain as much flexibility as possible, not least because they need to consult the people likely to be affected, and the Committee is sensitive to that, but subsection (4) of the new clause is too loose and we need a stronger commitment, which we can achieve by reinserting the word “shall”.
Jeremy Corbyn rose—