Philip Davies
Main Page: Philip Davies (Conservative - Shipley)London Local Authorities Bill [Lords] (By Order)
Philip Davies Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mike Freer
It is for the Government to decide whether they wish to give that general power to the police. The difficulty here is that, especially with regard to authorised officers such as civil enforcement officers, there is a gap in the legislation. London councils wish to plug that gap. If my hon. Friend wishes to push, through the Backbench Business Committee or other channels, for the Government to pursue this, I will wish him well and support him. However, we have a loophole in London that needs to be addressed.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The problem with that is that London is unique: it is visited by large numbers of people from all over the country and my constituents, for instance, would not be used to such a regime in the Bradford district. How are they supposed to feel when they find on a day visit to London that these powers have been given to local authorities in the capital? How are they supposed to know whether the people concerned have got that power or not? They should be able to have an expectation of what powers people in this country have and do not have.
Mike Freer
My hon. Friend makes a good point, but I believe that the basic premise is that abuse of the law is no excuse. If people are seeking to litter in London, they should take the consequences. I am sure my hon. Friend’s constituents would do no such thing when visiting our fine city of London, however.
Clause 6 corrects an anomaly. At present, only commercial premises are required to prevent the accumulation of litter outside their buildings. This measure allows all public buildings—whether schools, hospitals or police stations—to be covered by the legislation. Closing that anomaly makes all people responsible for keeping their buildings clear of detritus.
Clause 7 includes the rather peculiar measure of the reintroduction of the power to install turnstiles in public lavatories. I never thought I would be elected to talk about public lavatories. I thought I had left that behind when I left Barnet council. However, this is not the old-fashioned, almost portcullis-type turnstile of the 1960s and 1970s; this is the modern turnstile that we are more used to in tube stations, which is fully disability-accessible. This measure will allow particularly the City of Westminster to use the revenue from the turnstiles to be reinvested in the provision of services, including those facilities themselves. We are asking our councils to do more with less and we expect public toilets, particularly in the centre of London, to help in that. This provision will allow the City of Westminster to continue to provide much-valued services.
Clause 8 is predominantly about the “polluter pays” principle. Those of us who live near fast-food establishments will be increasingly annoyed about getting up every morning to find a line of fast-food wrappers all down the highway or pavement. We are used to the people responsible being prosecuted for the litter they generate, but this measure allows councils to recover the costs from the commercial operator trading from the public highway. At present, the council can recover only the cost of the administration of issuing a street-trading licence. This allows the council to recover the costs of clearing and sweeping the highway, and particularly of taking away the litter generated by that street trading. In this age of austerity, if we are asking our councils to do more with less, we should allow them to recoup the cost of providing such services from those who caused the problem.
Philip Davies
I am puzzled that my hon. Friend blames local takeaway establishments for litter. Surely he would accept that it is not those establishments that cause the litter, but the individuals who visit them. So why does he want to penalise people who are not responsible and let off those who are?
Mike Freer
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, but if he wants to deal with the people who cause the litter, he should support the clause that requires people to supply their name and address when fixed penalty notices are being served. This is a pincer movement, because one provision deals with those who operate the businesses that generate the litter and the other clause deals with those who drop it, and therefore both sides of the argument are covered. The cost of collecting litter in London runs to millions of pounds and it falls on the innocent taxpayer, so either the businesses have to be more responsible or the individuals who cause the litter have to be prosecuted. Either way, the Bill provides the necessary regulations to allow the London councils to get on with it.
Mike Freer
My hon. Friend makes a good point, but that is not my understanding of how the scheme in London would work. I am more than happy to take that away and to get him some reassurance on it, but my understanding is that if an establishment is inspected on a Monday and gets one star, it is deemed to be an off day. The environmental health officers will probably know whether it is an off day; if they have had cause for complaint about an establishment before, they will know of a pattern of behaviour. If they go into somewhere such as McDonald’s and it is a poor visit, they will know that the company takes such matters seriously and that it is likely to have been an off day, but it is less likely to be an off day in a local corner shop that has had a history of complaints, so it will go back on the risk register. I am happy to take away my hon. Friend’s point and to confirm whether the inspection would be within a matter of weeks, if requested by the establishment, to ensure that people are not stuck with an unfortunate grading that they felt to be unfair.
Philip Davies
I understand my hon. Friend’s point, although I have a fear that this is a solution looking for a problem. Who will know what a star rating means? If I walked into an establishment that had three stars on the outside, I would have absolutely no idea what those three stars meant. I would not know what the criteria were for one star, two stars or three stars. It might satisfy the bureaucratic instincts of the local authority, but it would not add a great deal to the customer’s experience. I am not even convinced that local councils are best placed to decide these things. I am sure that according to the bureaucratic monsters in local authorities the jam produced by the Mothers’ Union would have only a one-star rating, but I would be perfectly happy to eat it. I am not sure that this is an entirely meaningful measure.
Mike Freer
I am sure that the jam made by the women’s institute in Shipley is a fine product. The system with one, two, three, four and five stars is relatively understandable. Most people understand: five stars good; one star bad. My hon. Friend understands a three-star or five-star rating on a hotel, but I suspect that he does not know the mechanics of how that star rating was awarded. If he wants to understand just how the gradings have been arrived at, that information is available to him and I shall happily forward him the details. Most people seem to understand one, two, three, four and five stars.
Robert Neill
I understand and sympathise with the hon. Gentleman’s point, but he will recognise that that is a wider issue than the provisions of this Bill.
Robert Neill
I must draw my remarks to a conclusion. I have been generous so far—
Robert Neill
There is an argument about whether fairness includes desserts, but I will give way to my hon. Friend.
Philip Davies
The Minister has picked up a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). I agree with the point that he has just made about sex encounter establishments and that, in that regard, the legislation is unnecessary. Will he consider those aspects of the Bill that are worth while—and that would therefore be worth while for every local authority—and introduce legislation to cover the whole country, so that we do not have to do this piecemeal, authority by authority?
Robert Neill
I hear my hon. Friend’s point and I have already set out some of the aspects of the Bill that we think are advantageous and why we wish to see it make progress. I am not sure that my hon. Friend is in a very localist frame of mind, and we may therefore have to part company on the ultimate destination of the Bill.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. I hope that my observations are of help to the House and the promoters of the Bill, and I again reiterate my offer of consultation in those areas about which we have reservations. We are committed to giving local authorities more flexibility to reflect local needs and priorities and it would therefore be appropriate for the Bill to progress further. We will seek amendments in Committee to address the areas of concern that I have highlighted.
Mr Chope
I agree with my hon. Friend that this is a very wide-ranging Bill. The fact that it is the 10th such Bill to emanate from London local authorities in a reasonably short space of time shows that London local authorities are pushing at what are reasonable bounds on the powers that they should be taking in legislation. They keep trying to extend those bounds, taking more powers for themselves; indeed, there are powers in the Bill that I think go too far. The consequence of what my hon. Friend has described so pertinently—the fact that the Bill contains a large number of contentious clauses—is that unless its promoters listen to reason and allow it to be amended, it will find it jolly difficult to make fast progress through the House. Even it were to sail through the Opposed Private Bill Committee, it would encounter the same kind of difficulties on Report that the pedlars Bills were up against during the last Parliament.
Significantly, my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green did not refer to the pedlary and street trading provisions in this Bill, but the Bill contains powers to seize commercial goods on the ground not of reasonable belief but of reasonable suspicion that an offence has been committed. We brought in the reasonable suspicion test, reluctantly, under anti-terrorism legislation. It is draconian in the extreme to seize people’s goods or interfere with their liberty on the ground of reasonable suspicion that they might have committed an offence. Because of the strength of that argument, amendments replacing the term “reasonable suspicion” with “reasonable belief” were accepted by the promoters of the Bournemouth Borough Council Act 2010 and the Manchester City Council Act 2010—two pedlars Bills that reached the end of their proceedings during the last Parliament. The fact that no such amendments have been offered by the promoters of this Bill represents a pretty bad prospect for the Bill, because it suggests a certain intransigence and resistance on the part of the promoters to listen to reason. It might also suggest that they want to give themselves extremely wide powers to seize goods. I believe that such powers go far beyond what is reasonable.
Philip Davies
As my hon. Friend knows from our debates on the pedlars Bills, I agree with him wholeheartedly on this matter. I believe, however, that this Bill is worse than those Bills. It deals not only with a suspicion that an offence has been committed, but with a suspicion that an offence might be about to take place. A person could be suspected of being about to commit an offence that might take place. Furthermore, in addition to property being confiscated on that basis, the Bill would also confer a power to confiscate the vehicle in which the property was carried. The idea that central Government are bad and local government is good is surely wrong; the problem in both cases relates to the word “government”. We should not allow any government, local or central, to have such draconian powers.
Mr Chope
I agree with my hon. Friend. I am sure that, when hon. Members start to look at the detail of these provisions, they will be as concerned as he and I are about their implications for civil liberties. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) will report back to his colleagues in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice on our concerns about these fundamental issues of human rights and individual liberty.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me a second bite of the cherry. Does he agree that it is unacceptable for the Government to hide behind the idea of localism on these matters? They should not be allowed to say that local authorities are entitled to do anything they want to, simply on the basis that such decisions are being taken locally. Surely localism must come with some responsibilities.
Mr Chope
Absolutely; I hope that that is what the Government believe as well, even though my hon. Friend has expressed his concern that that might not be so. Time will tell.
“Localism” is a good term, but it was rejected by Front Benchers in relation to pedlars. I remember Front-Bench colleagues during the previous Parliament arguing that there was a strong case for having national legislation on pedlars, so that there could be consistency across all local authority areas. There is also an enormously strong case for saying that we need consistency in the application of the criminal law, and that people should not have their goods seized unless there is a reasonable belief that they have committed an offence.
May I briefly revert to the petition of the Society of London Theatre and the Theatrical Management Association, as I do not think that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green really addressed the concerns set out in it? They are concerned that commercial theatre in London, which is not finding it easy in the present economic climate, is going to be burdened with additional charges as a result of clause 8. The petition submits that its members are already making their own arrangements for the cleaning of the pavement and so forth, and that the basis for the additional charge has not been made clear. The petition submits that the existing wording of section 115F of the Highways Act 1980 is sufficient in so far as it enables London borough councils to recover their reasonable expenses in connection with the granting of permission to put items on the pavement. I hope that the promoters will address that concern before the Bill makes further progress.
Let me move on to clauses 9 and 10, which deal with what is colloquially known as Scores on the Doors—a system intended to ensure that the people providing catering services at retail food outlets have to display their standing by putting up a notice in the window. A petition against this has been drawn up by the British Hospitality Association and another petition has come from the pubs organisation, the British Beer and Pub Association. Both those petitions highlight the fact that there should be a voluntary aspect to this scheme, but London councils are usurping the position of the Food Standards Agency, which has already said that it thinks these issues should be a matter for voluntarism.
My hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green has said that he and his council have no faith in the Food Standards Agency. If he brings forward a Bill to abolish the Food Standards Agency, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and I will strongly support it. In fact, we put in a bid to become co-sponsors of such a Bill, but unless and until the Food Standards Agency is abolished, the reality is that it has the responsibilities given to it by Parliament. It ill behoves a group of councillors, however experienced they might be, to second-guess that organisation and say that it has no faith in it and is therefore going to try to duplicate its role and go further than it has gone.
Mr Chope
I entirely agree. The disclaimer states:
“Food premises may only be inspected every 6-36 months as specified in the Food Standards Agency Code of Practice.”
There is the potential for an enormous amount of damage to be caused to the reputation of commercial businesses that will have to stick on their doors something that is unrepresentative of the true position.
Philip Davies
I congratulate my hon. Friend on wiping the floor with this part of the Bill and illustrating so effectively what nonsense it is. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), said that the Scores on the Doors process had already raised standards. If the voluntary scheme is working well and raising standards, and if seeing the stars on display is so important to customers, will customers not instinctively prefer to visit only the restaurants that display their stars? If a restaurant or other food establishment chooses not to display its star rating, it will risk not receiving any custom from the people who consider the system so important.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes his point perfectly. We in this House have the privilege of the opportunity to try to introduce some common sense into these measures before they become set in law. I hope this debate will enable that to happen, certainly in relation to clauses 8 and 9, against which petitions have, for good reason, been submitted. Depressingly, the petitions were presented in the other place as well, and they did not have any impact. Nobody seems to have been listening. I hope somebody will start to listen soon because we are talking about potential threats to the viability of lots of small businesses in the ever-important hospitality industry. There is the possibility of gross injustices arising from these provisions.
Mr Chope
My right hon. Friend brings his legal expertise to bear on this issue and asks a very pertinent question. I am not in a position to answer it, but if the promoter of the Bill—or the promoter’s representative in this place today—wishes to intervene to do so, I will gladly give way. If the Bill has been as well prepared as one would hope after three years of gestation, one would expect that point to have been taken into account by its drafters—although perhaps we should not be so certain about that.
The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) was enthusiastic about the only parts of the Bill that my hon. Friend the Minister said the Government were concerned about. That is an interesting cameo within this debate. I hope my hon. Friend will stick to his guns in pursuing his concerns about clauses 11 to 22 and will insist that clause 23 is removed as being absolutely redundant.
Philip Davies
The Society of London Theatre and the Theatrical Management Association are worried that clause 23 will have a big impact on their theatres. Occasionally, there is some nudity or semi-nudity in a production and this measure may well have a negative impact on such shows. Will my hon. Friend acknowledge that concern as well?
Mr Chope
Absolutely. My hon. Friend the Minister said the legislation that had been introduced nationally since the Bill was first produced covers the national picture. I am sure it takes properly into account the concerns that have been expressed, and to which my hon. Friend has referred.
I want to refer back to an earlier part of the Bill. Clause 7 deals with access to public lavatories. I have the privilege of representing a constituency with one of the highest proportions of elderly people in the country, and we in Christchurch are proud to have been the winner of the loo of the year awards on many occasions. Ours is a prudent council, and it has now reached the stage where the councillor and the officers responsible for winning those accolades do not attend the awards ceremony because they cannot afford the cost of the travel, but they are grateful recipients of the awards.
Mr Chope
I do not know whether my right hon. Friend had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he was making that observation, but I suspect that he did. If he did not, he is living on another planet. In the City of Westminster, for example, the council raises an enormous surplus in parking charges, many of which are paid by people who do not reside in the borough. The original idea was that those fees should be reinvested to improve public facilities in Westminster, but that has not happened in practice. The idea that if local authorities can impose more charges for access to public toilets, the quality and availability of those toilets will improve is pie in the sky.
Philip Davies
Does my hon. Friend accept that this could be argued the other way round? He says that turnstiles are not desirable, and that is a perfectly legitimate view. Even if someone would argue that they are legitimate, surely any local authority should be able to introduce them in their local toilets, not just London boroughs. Why would we just extend this privilege to London, and why would the Government not extend it to every local authority that so chooses to use it? I hope that he would accept that such an approach would be pure localism, as opposed to giving localism only to London.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes another very good point. I am sure that if the coalition Government are short of new policies to enact they will think seriously about my hon. Friend’s suggestion. Before they do so, however, they might look at the document produced a couple of years ago by the Department for Communities and Local Government, which set out a strategic guide, spread over the best part of 100 pages, on “Improving Public Access to Better Quality Toilets”. Nowhere in that strategic guide was anything that suggested that the answer to all the problems was to reintroduce turnstiles, which were outlawed in an enlightened moment in 1963. They should probably remain outlawed and I do not think that the case for reintroducing them has been made.
I am also very concerned about the Bill’s provisions on pedlars and street trading, to which I have already referred—my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley engaged in a short exchange with me on that point. Those powers go far in excess of what is reasonable. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green did not consider them when he introduced the Bill. In a sense, this is a warning shot, because a number of us have been jealous of the rights of small groups to be able to carry on their activities and not to find themselves subject to harassment by officialdom. The wide powers that are given under the Bill to Westminster city council and to Camden borough council are a licence for harassment. They give tremendous powers to local authorities to harass the people they wish to drive out of business because it does not suit their purposes and because they find it rather difficult to try to enforce the law as it stands nationally. They want to give themselves extra powers to impose penalties on the grounds of suspicion, and I think that that is wrong.
One is left asking whether anything in the Bill is worth saving, or whether it would be much better to put the promoters out of their misery and not give it a Second Reading. My hon. Friend the Minister thinks that we should give the promoters the benefit of the doubt. For my part, I think that they have had three years in which to try to get their tackle in order and they have manifestly failed so to do. They have not really come to terms with the change in the mood out there, which is very much against interference and regulation by local authorities, pettifogging bureaucracy, penalties, putting pressure on people and making it very difficult for them to argue against penalties, which makes them have to go along and pay another fine or penalty. The promoters misunderstand the mood and there is a great demand for some consistency in our criminal law across the whole country rather than having special regimes for licensing in the London area, as proposed in clause 23, or special regimes for penalties for street trading, as found in the clauses that promote powers for Westminster and Camden.
I obviously support my hon. Friend the Minister as regards the parts of the Bill to which he is opposed. There is so much wrong with the Bill that there is a danger that if we allow it a Second Reading, an enormous amount of our colleagues’ time will be taken up in the Opposed Private Bill Committee. If the promoters are as reluctant to compromise as they appear to have been in the other place, we will end up taking up a lot of time on the Floor of the House on Report and Third Reading. It might be better to put the promoters out of their misery at this stage and force them to go back to the drawing board and propose a fresh Bill that is more in tune with current thinking.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I am rather nervous about contributing to the debate, following my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Mr Chope) and for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who expertly filleted the Bill in a way that I could not possibly do. I shall not spend a great deal of time adding to their comments, but I shall make a few brief points
My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset is right to say that the Bill is disagreeable, but I do not doubt the intentions of my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), who wishes to do what he sees as in the best interests of his local area and other parts of London. I hope he listened carefully to the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for North East Somerset and that he will reflect on them at length. Both speeches made it abundantly clear why the Bill should be unacceptable to anybody with a Conservative philosophy. It strikes at the heart of the values that Conservatives should believe in.
I have no doubt that Opposition Members will think that many of the provisions are marvellous. The Bill represents the state running riot. It is a charter for bossy local authorities. That is what brought many of those on the Opposition Benches into politics in the first place. Surely, as Conservatives, we should protect the public from bossy local authorities and over-zealous bureaucrats. We have all seen in our own lives that the moment local authority staff put on their car park warden’s jacket, they think they have become something akin to Hitler, and take great pleasure in ordering everybody about and telling people what to do. We should be guarding against that, not expanding their powers and giving them a charter to go even further.
As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said, the first part of the Bill, which deals with penalty charges and gives local authority bureaucrats powers that we would normally reserve for the police, is deeply disturbing. We should not countenance such a proposal. We saw such freedoms undermined during the 13 years of the previous Government. The last thing we want under the new coalition Government, particularly a coalition that incorporates the word “liberal”, is to go further, giving the state more power over individuals to impinge on personal freedoms. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset so ably said, the right of officials to demand people’s names and addresses is something that we might have expected to see in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, not in a free country. I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green will think about that again.
I agree with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset about street furniture on the highway. Presumably local authorities will agree to let businesses have street furniture on the highway because they think it is a good thing for their local residents. If so, why do they not let those businesses get on with it? Why would they want to take money off businesses that are trying to provide a service that the local authority presumably thinks is a good one, which is why they gave them the permission in the first place?
One of my major problems with the Bill is that it is intended to damage small businesses. Such bureaucracy is meat and drink to large businesses. I used to work for a large multinational company. Although we may occasionally have been irritated by the volume of regulation and unnecessary bureaucracy, we could afford to employ teams of people to deal with it. We could afford to put up with the extra costs sometimes incurred. Many small businesses, which are struggling enough, especially in the current economic climate, do not have the financial capability to deal with the powers that the Bill would give local authorities.
The Bill reflects the mindset that running a small business is a licence to print money, that everybody who has a small business must have millions of pounds in the bank, that they are unscrupulously ripping off their customers in order to make an unhealthy profit, and that it is the duty of the local authority to get some of that nasty wealth off them. What sort of Conservative would want to promote a Bill with such an attitude behind it?
The only way businesses make money is by looking after their customers and giving them a good service. Anybody who does not do so does not have a business for very long. Businesses are some of the most acutely aware organisations when it comes to social responsibility and contributing to local communities. Local businesses often have a better record of making a positive contribution to their local community than do many local authorities, which are given power after power by such Bills. We should be deeply suspicious of attempts to give local authorities more powers to trample all over small businesses—the many people who are trying their best to earn a living and to put back into this country the entrepreneurial spirit that we have lost.
I cannot really add a great deal to the Scores on the Doors scheme, because my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch made it abundantly clear that it is an absolutely ludicrous provision. When even the Scores on the Doors people themselves claim that their ratings cannot be relied on as a decent guide to the food hygiene of premises, why on earth should we make it mandatory for customers to see such information and for businesses to display something in which the people who promote it do not have confidence?
If the voluntary scheme works well, and that seems to be the consensus, why on earth would we want to make it statutory? Why not just allow the voluntary scheme to flourish? As I said in a brief intervention on my hon. Friend, if a star scheme is so important to customers, and if it is the be-all and end-all of the information that they want in order to judge a premises, any business that does not display it basically invites people to walk past and go somewhere else. The market will sort those things out. If the scheme is so important to customers, all premises will want to display it anyway. That is what the free market is about. Surely my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green understands the principle of the free market and how it works. He should want it to flourish, rather than having such little faith in it. That is what we have seen for the past 13 years, with a Labour Government and the mess that that got us into.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
Unfortunately, I do not know my hon. Friend’s constituency well, but in my constituency, where there is a tremendous number of takeaway shops and licensed restaurants, we have tried to encourage some responsible behaviour, because many customers have been leaving areas that one sometimes has to tread through with great care. The voluntary approach has not quite worked, so does my hon. Friend not accept that, where it has not worked so well, some legislation should be introduced to encourage a better neighbourhood and environment?
Philip Davies
No, I absolutely do not, because I do not want unnecessary regulation. My hon. Friend’s point of view is that the voluntary scheme has not worked, but his colleagues have not expressed that view. Even if it has not worked, however, I reiterate the point that if such information is so important to customers, they will presumably give their trade only to premises that already display it. If they do not like the fact that it is not displayed, they do not have to go to such places; they can go somewhere else. That is how the free market operates, and it is the free market that I believe in. I am sorry that my hon. Friend has such little faith in the free market and the principles upon which it works.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
My hon. Friend makes a characteristically good case in support of his argument, and I join him in supporting—
Mr Deputy Speaker Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Some hon. Gentlemen have just come into the Chamber, but in fairness they ought to have been here for most of the debate. I am being quite lenient, but I really do think that we ought to think about that in future.
Philip Davies
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will continue. I will have a chat outside with my hon. Friend; we can resolve our potential differences outside the Chamber.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is much bigger than I am, so I would not want to get into an argument with him.
I accept absolutely the points that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset made about selling cars on the street and via the internet. I came into politics because I wanted to try to encourage people to be entrepreneurs, to believe in the free market, to sell their goods and to be buyers and sellers. I do not want the Government or local government sticking their noses into every aspect of people’s lives. If people want to sell a car and somebody wants to buy it, and they are both happy with the price, why not let them get on with it? Why do we need government, either local or central, interfering in every aspect of people’s lives? Surely we should try to encourage people to do things themselves, so that they do not have to go to big car dealerships. Why do we not just let them get on with it and stop interfering?
Philip Davies
If somebody is legally able to park their vehicle on a particular part of the street, it does not matter to me whether it is my next-door neighbour’s car, a car somebody is selling, or an ice cream van. My suggested solution to the hon. Gentleman, to which he may not have given any consideration, is that if he does not think that cars should be parked in a particular location, his local authority should put down double yellow lines so that people are not allowed to park there. If people are allowed to park at a particular point, what on earth does it matter whether it is my next-door neighbour’s car or somebody else’s car with a small sticker saying, “For sale: £500”. It seems to make a big difference to the hon. Gentleman, but I cannot see why. I ask him to reflect on why he decides that he is a Liberal when he has such an illiberal approach towards people selling their property.
I wish to concentrate on the licensing aspects of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Minister made a perfectly good point about clause 23, which is wholly unnecessary. A couple of years ago, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, on which I serve, undertook a report on the Licensing Act 2003. We took evidence about certain clubs, including lap-dancing clubs, and we made recommendations about how best they might be licensed. As my hon. Friend made clear, the previous Government, in the last throes of the last Parliament, created new legislation enabling lap-dancing clubs to be licensed as sex encounter establishments—something that people may or may not agree with. As he said, the job has been done. The last thing anybody needs is a London Local Authorities Bill to start trampling all over the licensing regime dealt with by the previous Government and which does much of what the Bill seeks to do. I seek confirmation from him that he will strike out clause 23, which even the biggest supporters of the Bill would concede is completely and utterly unnecessary.
My main point concerns the seizure of goods. I cannot emphasise enough how absolutely outrageous the Bill’s provisions are in this regard. The only fair way to do this is to quote a small section of the explanatory notes. I would be astonished if people who read it were not completely outraged by what is proposed. It says:
“Westminster City Council officers already have power to seize items used in unlawful street trading where the items are required for evidential purposes, or where the items are subject to forfeiture by the courts. On a street trading prosecution, if there is a conviction, the magistrates’ court can order the forfeiture of any goods seized in relation to the offence.”
So the provision is already in statute. It continues:
“Authorised officers cannot exercise their powers of seizure unless they suspect that a street trading offence has been committed.”
The London local authorities are complaining that they cannot exercise their powers of seizure unless they suspect that a street trading offence has been committed. That is not good enough for them: they want to be able to seize these goods even when they do not suspect that an offence has been committed. They say that Westminster city council officers already
“use the powers regularly in the West End”
to deal with
“unlawful sales of hotdogs and other hot food from portable stands.”
But they complain:
“City council officers are unable to seize hotdog trolleys until the vending begins.”
That is not good enough for the poor local authorities—they cannot seize these things until an offence has been committed and somebody actually trades. So they want, through the Bill, to
“enable City Council officers”—
pettifogging bureaucrats in the local authority with, no doubt, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said, their peaked caps—
“to seize receptacles which are in a street and which the officers have reasonable cause to suspect are intended to be used in connection with a street trading offence.”
Can Members imagine where we would be if the police started arresting everybody who was walking down the street because they might go into the nearest shop and start shoplifting? We are giving such a power to council officers, which is totally unacceptable. Any hon. Member who supports a Bill that provides such powers should be ashamed of themselves if they believe that they support freedoms in this country.
Philip Davies
I certainly am. I would urge any right-minded person, particularly with a conservative philosophy, to do so, because nothing in it supports such a philosophy.
It gets worse than local authorities wanting the power to seize things they have reasonable cause to suspect are intended for some kind of offence. Let us imagine that I am walking down the streets of Westminster trying to take home a hot-dog trolley that I had just bought. What would I do if a local council bureaucrat came along and said, “Hold on, you might use that to sell hot-dogs illegally, so I’m going to take it off you”? Is that really the type of country we want to live in, and are we happy to pass such legislation? Not only would local authorities be able to seize the hot-dog trolley that I had bought legitimately and was transporting home, but they would be able to seize any vehicle used to transport it where they found it in the street. Are we going to give council officers that power? We must be stark raving mad even to think about giving the Bill a Second Reading.
The Minister and the shadow Minister say casually, “Oh, well, of course there are some deficiencies in the Bill, but let’s just iron them out in Committee.” On that basis we may as well not bother with the Second Reading of any Bill. If we are saying, “We all know the Bill’s a load of drivel, but we’ll pass it now so we look as if we’re being supportive and then fillet it in Committee”, we might as well just let every Bill go into Committee and see what we can do from there on.
The point of Second Readings is that Members may not like certain legislation in principle. I do not like this Bill or the philosophy behind it, which is anti-small business and anti-freedom, and I do not like the draconian powers that some council officers seem to think are theirs by right—not in the country that I want to live in.