Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move amendment 38, in clause 11, page 7, line 26, after ‘with’, insert ‘the statutory provisions of’.

David Amess (Southend West, Conservative)

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 39, in clause 11, page 7, line 27, after ‘Chapter’, insert—

‘(a) prevents a principal local authority from relaxing the requirements of its petition schemes so as to apply it more widely than is required by this Chapter of the scheme, or

(b) ’.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

May I begin by seeking guidance on whether we will be considering whether clause 11 stands part of the Bill at the same time? I see you indicate, Mr. Amess, that that is so, which will be useful.

David Amess (Southend West, Conservative)

Order. I have just been advised that, because these are slightly unusual proceedings, we will be dealing with things separately, so there will be a clause stand part debate.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

Thank you, Mr. Amess; that is helpful.

I shall confine my remarks to the amendments tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall. They would ensure that local authorities will not be penalised if they seek to go beyond the base line of the scheme established under the Bill. Amendment 38 would amend subsection 6 of the clause, so that it reads:

“A principal local authority must comply with the statutory provisions of its petition scheme.”

Essentially, therefore, if an authority wishes to go beyond the scope of the statutory provisions and then fails to meet its ambitions, it will not be penalised for having done so.

As with so many other things, including planning guidance, the lowest common denominator is established and local authorities are averse to the risk of going beyond that, which means that people are not encouraged to go further. I hope that the Government want councils to do whatever they can to be as responsive as possible and that, rather than penalising councils that are slightly over-ambitious and are unable to deliver on those ambitions, they ensure that a minimum requirement is delivered. Similarly, amendment 39 would ensure that, if the requirements are applied more widely, there will be no impact on councils if they wish to go further.

The amendments are straightforward, and I hope that the Minister will take them in the spirit in which they were tabled—they are all about seeking reassurance that authorities that wish to go further and, perhaps, push best practice even further will not be penalised for doing so.

Rosie Winterton (Minister of State (Pensions Reform; Minister for Yorkshire and Humber), Department for Work and Pensions; Doncaster Central, Labour)

These amendments express, I think, the hon. Lady’s concerns that the requirements in the Bill may open the way for increased numbers of judicial reviews or complaints. I hope that I can reassure her on that and persuade her to withdraw the amendment. We do not believe that the petitions regime will be onerous for local authorities. When a council gets a petition, it must acknowledge it and take appropriate action in respect of it.

As the law currently stands, if the council received a petition and responded in a wholly unreasonable manner, it would be liable to challenge by judicial review. Although what we seek to do will not look fantastically different  from the current situation, the profile of petitions will be raised. People will know more clearly where and how to submit petitions and, crucially, they will know that there will be guaranteed a response. That is what is so important about the changes.

It is also true to say that, if all councils have a clear procedure for dealing with petitions, they will be protected from any accusation that they have acted in an unreasonable manner. Again, that is not necessarily very different from what councils do in relation to any other function that they discharge. I hope that that reassures the hon. Lady.

Amendment 39 proposes to insert that nothing in this chapter

“prevents a principal local authority from relaxing the requirements of its petition schemes so as to apply it more widely than is required by this Chapter of the scheme”.

Again, the hon. Lady’s concern is that, once a principal local authority has a petition scheme, it would be considered unreasonable and therefore a waste of resources for it to act in response to petitions that fall outside that scheme. I can give her some reassurance on that. I do not think that any aspect of the Bill’s requirements could be interpreted as imposing any sort of exclusive set of obligations for the handling of petitions. Therefore, we would not get the kind of criticism that she fears.

What we have tried to do in this chapter is make it very clear that the authorities are given a very wide discretion about what to include in their schemes and how to respond to petitions. Although local authorities must do at least what their petition schemes say they will do, they will continue to have discretion to go wider if they wish, and the provision will not prevent them from responding to any petition that they receive. With that reassurance, I hope that the hon. Lady will withdraw her amendment.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

I will not seek to push these amendments to a vote, but I would like to respond and reflect on some of the comments that the Minister has made. The Minister initially said that these were not onerous requirements. If that is the case, I wonder whether the Minister’s own Department will be taking on such a policy in relation to petitions. I understand that it does not count the number of petitions that it receives. If best practice is so straightforward, I see no reason why the Department for Communities and Local Government should not improve its efforts to ensure that it too abides by similar best practice.

The intention of the amendments was to raise questions about the sanctions in the Bill imposed on those local authorities not complying with the requirements on petitions. It seems that there will not be any. However, as was the case with the duties in the previous chapter that would promote democracy at a local level, I wonder whether it is another example of compliance being monitored by yet another key performance indicator. Once again, we are seeing mission creep: the Government say that they are reducing the number of key performance indicators but are increasing them through the back door.

I still have serious concerns about why this more general point is included in the Bill, but I shall not press the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

As ever, Mr. Amess, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

Clause 11, like the chapter, is similar to the previous one in its complete vacuity. One has to ask the deep philosophical question, “If this clause did not exist, would local government in Britain be demonstrably the poorer for it?” I suspect that the answer is no. It forcefully makes the case that the Government have run out of ideas. After 12 years of Labour Governments, the clause is a triumph of trivia. I am amazed that Ministers and Labour Members should be surprised that councillors feel undervalued from time to time. With such legislation, their decisions, their authority and their autonomy are circumscribed.

The important question is why it is necessary for such provisions to be made in primary legislation, reaching as they do into the nooks and crannies, and the minutiae of local government. Effectively, it is an assertion writ large that local councillors cannot be trusted to administer their areas properly—and, more importantly, that local electors are frankly too stupid to realise that their councils are either very good or very bad, and that they have to be drawn to water like the proverbial horse.

The irony is that things could have been different. When the White Paper “Communities in Control” was published in July 2008—it followed the Green White Paper “The Governance of Britain”, published by the Prime Minister in July 2007—there was a real opportunity to empower communities. To give the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears) her due, the late and not much lamented by the Labour party Secretary of State was committed. Some people made hay in the other place about the lack of petitions in Salford. I would not dare to make that point again, but the fact is that it would be a wasted opportunity.

The real problem is the accretion of power to unelected quangos and other bodies. The Bill makes no mention of that. As we all know—reference has been made to this before—people are concerned about the Child Support Agency, the Border and Immigration Agency, Jobcentre Plus and CAFCASS to name but a few, but where is the opportunity to petition them for immediate action? It is much easier for the Government to beat up on local government and make the assertion that councillors are not fulfilling the functions for which they were elected. That is wrong.

There is no empirical or academic evidence to underpin the clause, but a rather dodgy survey, the provenance and robustness of which we have never established, was debated in the other place in January. A Local Government Association survey apparently showed that 30 per cent. of councils fail to deal properly with petitions. That is the only evidence of the need for this intrusive, prescriptive and draconian clause to force local councils to do what they are already doing.

Paul Goodman (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Wycombe, Conservative)

Does my hon. Friend believe that the force of the Government’s argument is that there is a case for requiring Departments to respond to petitions? To give the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne her due, she pointed out on Second Reading that the Department does not have a good record in responding to petitions, and I am sure that she will make great play of that later. If the Department cannot get it right, why are the Government putting these cumbersome and burdensome duties on local authorities?

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

My hon. Friend makes his point powerfully, and I suspect that the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne is no longer on the South West of England Development Agency’s Christmas card list. Nevertheless, she made a strong point.

The clause is a displacement activity to cover up what the Government should have done, but have not done, to empower local people and to give them real financial autonomy and democratic powers. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden made the important point that many of us have constituents who have issues with housing and arm’s length management organisations, but instead of providing them with the capacity to petition, we are concentrating on other third-party bodies. Those responsibilities are falling to local authorities unfairly.

Looking back at House of Lords debates shows that there was significant consensus about the possible efficacy of the clause. It is interesting that many people with years of direct experience in local government held forth ad infinitum on the matter, and made some powerful points. Lord Greaves, the sage of Pendle said on Report:

“I would much prefer that the entire chapter on petitions did not exist. It is unnecessary.”— [Official Report, House of Lords, 17 March 2009; Vol. 709, c. 179.]

Paul Goodman (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Wycombe, Conservative)

Is my hon. Friend aware that the noble Lord is not the only person who seems to be of that view.

“Part 1, chapter 2 deals with petitions, and probably the less said about that the better. Petitions provide one mechanism for citizens to highlight concerns, but one must question whether 11 clauses are necessary. It looks to me suspiciously like micro-management.”— [Official Report, 1 June 2009; Vol. 493, c. 65.]

Those were the words of the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich on Second Reading. Does my hon. Friend hope, as I do, that the right hon. Gentleman will rise frequently to give us the benefit of his views?

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich is being uncharacteristically taciturn. As an hon. and fair-minded Member, he cannot reconcile the dichotomy between commitments in various Green and White Papers and by Ministers for real localism and the top-down centralism of the Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles), who knows what he is talking about with his expertise, said in response to the White Paper on 8 July 2008:

“If petitions are to play a more important role, does the Secretary of State realise that listening to them will be all the more important? The Government have ignored petitions on post office closures, polyclinics, a referendum on the European treaty and the congestion charge. What is the point in a council having a  duty to respond to petitions if it has been stripped of its powers to make any difference?”—[Official Report, 9 July 2008; Vol. 478, c. 1415.]

That is important. Furthermore, Ministers pray in aid the support that they have received from the Local Government Association. The Minister will know that the LGA believes that the clause, and its associated clauses, is a turkey. It says that

“the LGA does not accept evidence of widespread public dissatisfaction with the way petitions are currently handled by local authorities.”

It also says that it foresees

“problems with the introduction of a prescriptive process for handling petitions, leading to a greater bureaucracy for dealing with them...The LGA does not therefore agree with the proposal to impose a duty to respond to local petitions as outlined in the consultation paper”.

Furthermore, as Ministers will know, the LGA offers an alternative which we would have supported had Ministers themselves brought it forward as an amendment. That is to update

“the model constitution published by CLG following the Local Government Act 2000, along with updated guidance under S31 of that Act, setting out best practice guidance on handling petitions and deputations.”

That leads me to another important point. Given that these powers, duties and responsibilities are new to local authorities, I fail to see how any realistic impact assessment can be made of the cost of the proposals. They are plucked out of the air. We have no idea. In this age of difficult fiscal decisions and a lack money in terms of the grants given to local authorities, we will be piling even more responsibilities on them to deal, particularly, with petitions.

The clause—and others—is superfluous and unnecessary, as my right hon. Friend said. It is at the end game of a drive to a unitary state—not federalism, not localism, top-down Stalinist, draconian proposals which force people to do the bidding of Government. It stands as a disreputable rebuke to the best interests of local people and to democracy in this country.

Ian Stewart (Eccles, Labour)

How can a Front-Bench spokesman from a party that imposed a poll tax on the people of Scotland talk about a draconian exercise within this country?

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

I have respect for the hon. Gentleman and the question was fair. However, at that stage, ultimately, the sanction of the voters of Scotland and the other parts of the UK came into play. That is not any kind of analogy.

In the Bill, the Government seek to take away what authority and autonomy local government have left by forcing them into prescriptive schemes for petitions on the basis that they do not know what is good for their local area. For that reason, we want to divide the Committee on the stand part debate.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

I am not sure that I will be talking in quite such hyperbole as the previous speaker. However, I wonder whether the Labour party will draw some lessons from the example just raised, in which an unpopular policy was introduced that resulted in the Prime Minister losing her job and being replaced by somebody else. Perhaps this is the policy—perhaps this is the one—that will drive people to revolt. I suspect not.

Paul Goodman (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Wycombe, Conservative)

I would not push the analogy too far because the party in question won the election afterwards.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

I will not push the analogy too far. The only analogy that I begin my remarks with is that, once again, it is groundhog day because the first question has to be: why is this in primary legislation? If No. 10 can introduce an e-petition system on its website without the need for primary legislation, it begs the question of why we need to have this set-up for local authorities in primary legislation. I doubt whether anyone in this room thinks that it is best practice for councils not to respond to petitions. Everyone thinks it is a good idea to ensure that councils are as responsive as possible in whatever way possible.

Daniel Rogerson (North Cornwall, Liberal Democrat)

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the Bill says nothing about how councils should respond to a letter or a telephone call? Perhaps we need some primary legislation to inform council offices how long they should take to respond to a letter, which paper they should use and whether it is in the right sort of envelope.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

My hon. Friend is exactly right. If we are going to specify how councils should respond to petitions, why not specify how they should respond to debates, after how many rings they should answer the phone, what their working hours should be, how many times a year they should sit, the details of their scrutiny committees and how many visits planning officers should make? If this is where it starts, where does it stop in terms of the Government ensuring that local authorities fulfil their duties and are as responsive as possible? That is something that should be decided at the ballot box. If people feel that their council is inaccessible, they will have the opportunity to elect members who will stand on a platform to make their councils more responsive. The more responsive the members are, presumably the more likely they are to get elected.

Ian Stewart (Eccles, Labour)

Does the hon. Lady, in her calmer moments, not realise that there have to be certain basic standards across local government? Surely it is the role of national Government to help to set those basic standards.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. To follow the logic of that argument, one would expect central Government to be setting those standards and abiding by them themselves. Instead, the very Department that imposes these standards on local authorities, has no policy for dealing with petitions. It does not even count the petitions that it receives. There is no common standard set for any Government Department and even this Parliament has no clear procedure for dealing with petitions. Most of the petitions that get presented ultimately disappear into a beige sack; no one ever sees what happens to them.

If the hon. Gentleman’s argument is that we need consistency, why are we not applying the measure across the board? Why are we not setting down standards that ensure that all public bodies respond to petitions in the same way so that if people submit a petition to Parliament, a Government Department or the Prime Minister they  know that there will be consistency in the response that they receive? Should not the same be true of other bodies making decisions about public spending in their area, such as strategic health authorities, primary care trusts and all the other organisations we discussed in respect of previous clauses? If there is a need for consistency, and if that consistency would help people to understand how the process should work, why not apply the measure across the board? Why are we singling out local authorities in this way?

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

The hon. Lady and I are in danger of agreeing on too many things. Is there not a huge chasm between this micromanagement, interference at local level and the undermining of local autonomy and what we see in our casework in dealing with organisations such as the UK Border Agency? We routinely receive letters as Members of Parliament acting on behalf of constituents telling us that it will be two years before cases are even looked at. Is that not a huge chasm that the Government should be looking at?

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

The Government should be looking at that. If this is about trying to get people to understand how the process works and to have an impact on it, it should cross cut all Departments. The hon. Gentleman implies that the Government’s motivation behind all this is that they cannot help but centralise. That might be one of their tendencies, but I wonder whether the reason the provision is in the Bill is that we have so little on the legislative agenda. They thought that they could throw that in to provide an afternoon’s debate—it was an act of desperation to get something on the legislative agenda. We thought that a general election might have been and gone by now. So very little is on the agenda.

My main concern is that, by singling out petitions, the Bill might give people the impression that, if they have a problem, petitions are their only possible recourse. In reality, however, many other options are open to them, should they receive a service with which they are dissatisfied or a decision be made with which they do not agree. As will be seen in the discussion on later clauses, councils’ complaints procedures might be far more effective in resolving problems with individual officers. By putting petitions at front and centre, people might get the impression that they are the only way in which to register discontent. In some cases, however, they are not the most effective way in which to highlight or to resolve problems that individuals might encounter.

It comes back to a fundamental misunderstanding by the Government. The problem with petitions is similar to that with consultation, which has become a dirty word, because people think that it simply pays lip service to the decision-making process. For example, during the Post Office consultation, people had no impact on the outcome. They were basically told, “You will have an opportunity to have your say, but then we will do what we planned to do anyway.” That is why people are frustrated. There is no lack of understanding of how the process works. Petitions are not a miraculous way in which to address people’s frustrations.

The key thing that people want is this: if they have a problem or disagreement, their involvement must have the potential to impact on the outcome. However, the provisions in the Bill do not provide for that, basically because it is impossible for primary legislation to set out  how people’s involvement, through petitions or anything else, will impact on the decision-making process. That is what people care about. Clause 11(7) reads:

“Subject to that, nothing in this Chapter affects the powers or duties of a principal local authority in relation to any petition to it.”

Basically, that means that councils will have a duty to respond to petitions, but not to ensure that they have any impact on any policy or decision.

Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)

Again the hon. Lady makes a strong point, and it was made also by the Local Government Association: it is disingenuous of the Government to refuse to devolve further powers to local authorities while, in this Bill, making more onerous commitments on their behalf. In its response to the Bill, the LGA wrote:

“If the government is transferring power and influence to local authorities and citizens then councils should have the ability to take up issues on behalf of their residents with other public service providers.”

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth & Camborne, Liberal Democrat)

The key issue is not that councils should be required to respond to members of the public in their area; it is about what we can do to enable councils to be more responsive to the wishes and needs of the people living in the area. This part of the Bill, especially clause 11, does not address that point. I fear that it is just another example of how the Government, in their proposals, are missing the point. They are not hitting the target. People want the ability to impact on the decision-making process. They do not want to feel that they have simply been consulted to death, only for the original decision to be taken anyway.

That key issue has not been, and cannot be, resolved through primary legislation. It can be resolved only by genuinely devolving more power and resources to local authorities. We then have to give people the power at the ballot box to make their choices, if they do not feel that their council has done the right thing. It seems that the Government are terrified of letting go and allowing local authorities to be masters of their own destiny. To me, that is what is so depressing about so many of the provisions. I never doubted the willingness of the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears) to engage with people, but if these proposals are the answer, I wonder what the Government think that the question is.

Rosie Winterton (Minister of State (Pensions Reform; Minister for Yorkshire and Humber), Department for Work and Pensions; Doncaster Central, Labour)

Apart from the slightly odd intervention about draconian, dictatorial imposition on local authorities and individuals, what has emerged from the debate is that the Committee believes that petitions have a role to play in allowing local people to express their views and to hold their local authorities to account. Indeed, the Conservative document, “Control Shift—Returning Power to Local Communities” talks about petitions signed by more than 5 per cent. of local residents within six months being able to trigger a referendum. Obviously, the Conservative party approach to petitions recognises their role and, in that case, talks about being able to have a referendum. Therefore, I hope that there is not a huge difference of opinion on petitions having an important role to play.

Lots of remarks have been made about central Government. The CLG website clearly signposts people to how we deal with petitions, confirming that the Department already responds to all petitions and aims to do so within 20 days. From 9 July details of petitions received by CLG will be published on the site alongside the response. The Downing street e-petition has been extremely successful—something like 27,000 petitions have been accepted for response. The Downing street petition system does not respond to petitions that are offensive to sections of society, but all petitions are acknowledged and, once petitions have closed, they are either passed to the Prime Minister’s office or sent to the Department. Where a petition is signed by at least 500 people, signatories receive an e-mail detailing the Government’s response to the issues raised. We are certainly setting an example at the national Government level.

I want to draw the Committee’s attention to a Local Government Association survey of 102 councils in England—something like a quarter of the sector— which found that only 28 per cent. of councils guarantee an automatic response to petitions. However, at the same time a YouGov poll found that, if a response were guaranteed, 84 per cent. of people would be more likely to sign a petition to their council and more than half of people would be more likely to organise a petition.

With regard to the point made by the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne, if a petition is simply ignored—there is, as I said, rather a lot of evidence that that happens—people will not know whether the points raised in the petition have been responded to. She was saying, “Well, they can make up their minds at the ballot box”, but if they do not know what response there has been to their petition, it is very difficult for individuals to know whether changes have been made—sometimes, frankly, changes might well have been made. However, if people do not know about it, because no response was given, it is more difficult to make that judgment. That is why we are setting out a procedure that enables people to respond to a petition. That is one of many procedures that we have brought forward to ensure that petitions become an effective way for local people to express their views.