Clause 5
Local Democracy, Economic Developmentand Construction Bill [Lords]
4:45 pm
Paul Goodman (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Wycombe, Conservative)
Subsection 6 was added in the Lords, if I remember rightly. I have nothing more to say about it. Generally, the aim of the clause appears to be—I hope the Minister will say a little more about it in a moment—to protect local authorities, up to a point, from some of the consequences of the earlier clauses that we debated this morning. Subsection (1) looks forward to a situation in which a local authority has apparently requested information from other bodies in order to promote understanding and so on, and those other bodies have been less than helpful. Someone somewhere—one of the many brilliant civil servants who work on the Bill—presumably said, “Look Minister, we need some protection for local authorities if all those many other bodies we have listed in earlier clauses turn out to act unreasonably.” That, returning to our leitmotif, illustrates the folly of putting all these things on the statute book at all, because having done so one then has to insert supplementary clauses such as this one in order to protect bodies that have been listed in earlier clauses.
I am not a lawyer, but I am quite interested in this. There will presumably be a legal definition that the Minister knows, or inspiration will provide an answer about the extent to which the other body has not provided the information for the local authority as required. I am curious to know how one judges the extent to which the body has provided or not provided the information that would enable the local authority to be protected by the clause.