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Standing Committee D
Thursday 10 April 2003
(Morning)
[Mr. Roger Gale in the Chair]
Clause 10
Proceedings of licensing committee
8.55 am
Mr. Malcolm Moss (North-East Cambridgeshire): I beg to move amendment No. 82, in
clause 10, page 6, line 17, at beginning insert 'Subject to subsection (2A),'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment No. 83, in
clause 10, page 6, line 26, at end insert—
'(2A) Regulations made under subsection (2) may not make provision for—
(a) the public to be excluded from any meeting of a licensing committee or subcommittee, or
(b) the public to be denied access to the agendas and records produced in respect of those buildings.'.
Amendment No. 139, in
Mr. Moss: Amendments Nos. 82 and 83 deal with the power delegated to the Secretary of State under the clause, which may—I use that word judiciously—prevent the public from attending licensing hearings. Under current legislation, magistrates are the licensing authorities and the public are rightly allowed to attend the licensing proceedings, which ensures the openness and accountability of the system. The potential is there, through the instigation of the clause, for closed-door decisions.
The House of Lords Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform highlighted such matters as a cause of potential concern. Its recent report stated:
''Clause 9 enables regulations (subject to negative procedure) to make provisions about proceedings of licensing committees and their sub-committees. Matters such as public access and publicity for local authority committees are already provided for in primary legislation (e.g. Part VA of the Local Authority Act 1972). The House may wish to enquire what use might be made of this power as the regulations could not override primary legislations.''
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport responded by saying:
''Given the administrative nature of these matters and the fact that in many respects the proceedings of the licensing committees will be determined by local authorities' own standing orders, it appears sensible and appropriate for these matters to be left to secondary legislation, and for the negative resolution procedure to apply.''
The Government do not recognise the importance of such matters in their response to the Select Committee, especially in the light of their need to
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provide the Secretary of State with broad powers to regulate the conduct of licensing committees. The Select Committee did not receive an adequate response about what use may be made of the Secretary of State's powers, given that the regulations are necessarily overridden by the primary legislation.
Why is the provision included in the Bill, when the powers delegated to the Minister by its inclusion cannot override the Local Government Act 1972 and other legislation? What use would such regulations be in that case?
Mr. Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight): I apologise to the Committee for having arrived after my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) had started speaking.
Amendment No. 139 has an objective similar to that of amendments Nos. 82 and 83, but its approach is slightly different. I want to ensure that as far as possible, regulations should be the same when applied to different local authority committees. I was surprised that the Minister felt it necessary to give himself the power to write regulations in respect of the conduct of what is, after all—if I may use this term—a bog standard local authority committee.
We already have licensing panels and planning committees, and they exercise quasi-judicial functions. I find it difficult to understand what additional regulation could be required. Is the Minister proposing a different regime, and would it be more difficult, for example, to require a licensing committee or sub-committee to have the same notice provisions as other committees? Is he proposing that public access to papers should be restricted on other grounds than those that apply to other committees?
I am concerned that members of the public might be confused about whether they have the same rights of access to information about applications for licences as for other proceedings of local authority committees. I am sure that the Minister will demonstrate that a range of different arrangements are necessary, but I have not yet seen anything to convince me of that.
There is another issue. It is not whether the Minister will detract from the general basis of local government legislation—for example, by restricting access to information, or by not requiring licensing committees to give the same notice or have the same quorums as other committees—but whether he will go further. I gently encourage him to do so in one respect—in defining the word ''urgent''. It is defined in regulations covering school governing bodies, but not in general local government legislation. It is important that we understand what ''urgent'' means, particularly as at our previous sitting the Minister prevailed upon me to withdraw my amendment about urgency. Perhaps he will be prepared to make such a provision himself.
At the moment, ''urgent'' can be—and, as I know to my cost, is—interpreted by committee chairmen in local government to mean that when officers cannot, for some reason, get a report out in time, they can say, ''We'll pop it on the table five minutes before the meeting, and that will be adequate, because it is 'urgent' ''. That denies the public, and councillors,
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reasonable opportunity to scrutinise and question reports that come before committees.
One can imagine what would happen if the licensing policy were cooked up by the chairman and two officers five minutes before a meeting and then handed to the licensing authority. Those who drafted it might say, five minutes before the meeting, ''We've been drafting this for a long time, and this is the draft available now. We've got to get it all done within six months because the Government say so. Take it or leave it.'' That, I regret to say, is the approach of the ruling groups on some local authorities. That is why it is important to have a definition of urgency.
I will not give examples, because I do not wish to upset any member of the Committee, but it is a fact that the chairmen of ruling groups on some local authorities—and, indeed, some officers, following the rather poor example of their chairmen—tend to adopt that approach. In school government regulations, an urgent matter is defined as one that is so urgent that it would not be possible to call a further meeting of the committee of the governing body to consider an issue. In other words, something is urgent if it would be impossible to call another meeting before the time limit was up.
However, in local government more generally, it is possible for people to say, ''We're not going to have another meeting for three months''—or a month, or whatever—''We've got to cram this item into the agenda, despite the fact that notice wasn't given, that the papers aren't available and members of the public may not be able to scrutinise it.''
Mr. Kevan Jones (North Durham): I am intrigued by the hon. Gentleman's line of argument, and I wonder whether he could give an example. When I, like many hon. Members, served in local government we were quietly governed by the standing orders and offers of advice from the chief legal officer, which would not have allowed us to simply bang such a thing on the agenda at the last minute without notice.
Mr. Turner: I only wish that the standards adopted by the hon. Gentleman and the local authorities with which he has been connected were general throughout the country, but they are not—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Reading, East (Jane Griffiths) says that they are, but they are not. Local authority officers allow such things all too frequently. I have said that I am not going to embarrass Committee members by talking about any political party—although the Minister himself pointed in the direction of a particular political party a moment ago.
Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster): All too often, where there is a culture of allowing decisions to be made under delegated powers, urgent decisions are made and ratified at the next full committee meeting. That applies especially to planning committees now, and it could apply to licensing committees unless there is a tightening up along the lines suggested by my hon. Friend.
Mr. Turner: I agree that matters can be considered under delegated powers. Of course, a decision made
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under those powers before the introduction of the new arrangements for local authorities would have been a decision by officers, who tended to consult the chairman of the committee first, to see whether he could deliver a majority for that decision and ratify it in due course. The chairman would then make the decision and bounce it through the committee six months later on the grounds that it had already been made and it was all water under bridge, so it was too late.
Mr. Jones: I am not sure in what strange councils Conservative members have been operating. Perhaps they could give an example of a planning application, or any controversial decision, being dealt with under delegated powers. I challenge the hon. Gentleman to give an example of the things he mentions actually being done.
Mr. Turner: Small variations in planning consent issues are frequently made by officers under delegated powers, but that does not mean they have not consulted the chairman to check that he will, some way down the road, deliver a majority for a decision.
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