Clause 11
Local Democracy, Economic Developmentand Construction Bill [Lords]
5:15 pm
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.