ADMISSION OF PUBLIC AND PRESS TO LOCAL AUTHORITY MEETINGS (Hansard, 24 October 1972)

§ Mr. Graham Page
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
This is a drafting Amendment to complete the sense of Clause 99 as it now stands in its amended form. The Amendment was accidentally not put to this House after it had been debated. I am afraid that it was a slip for which I take responsibility when we were last before the House on Report. It somehow did not get put to the House and we are putting that error right now.

§ Mr. Blenkinsop
May I take this opportunity of welcoming this provision? We had some anxieties at one stage that there would not be a real acceptance of the position of the Press and public at meetings. This has been cleared up now with a reasonable kind of compromise.

§ Mr. Graham Page
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
With respect to the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Blenkinsop) I rather 1044 feel he was thinking of this Amendment rather than Lords Amendment No. 151, which was a paving Amendment. I will deal with this a little more fully, because it is an important matter and it is one on which we have met objections put by the right hon. Member for Deptford (Mr. John Silkin) to the Clause as originally amended.
The intention of Clause 99 is to extend the provisions of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act, 1960, to all meetings of local authority committees. At present, it applies only to meetings of local authorities at which they are obliged under certain circumstances to admit the Press and public and to certain committee meetings such as the meetings of the education committee. The intention of Clause 99 is to provide that all committee meetings of the local authority should be open to the public, and therefore to the Press, unless certain steps are taken to exclude them from the meetings.
As drafted the Clause applies to any committee appointed by one or more local authorities under Clause 101, not being a committee falling within Section 2(1) of the 1960 Act. The Amendment is designed to ensure that the Clause applies to those committees which the House will find listed in Clause 100(9). To some extent, it is a technical Amendment, a matter of the right way to refer to all committees of local authorities. The position is that Clause 100 and Clause 101 extend local authorities' discretion to make arrangements for the discharge of any of their functions by a committee and to appoint committees for this purpose. This more flexible machinery replaces the existing statute law on committees with certain important exceptions which are listed in Clause 100(9) under which certain existing statutory requirements to appoint committees are retained.
The Amendment is necessary in order to apply Clause 99 to the local authority committees listed in paragraphs (c) to (h) of Clause 100(9). It was feared that, without the Amendment, Clause 99 would not apply to those committees.

§ Mr. Graham Page
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
This Amendment also relates to the admission of the public and Press to local authority committee meetings. It removes from Clause 99 the provision in subsection (3) which would have enabled a local authority to decide in advance to close to the public the meetings of any particular committee for periods of up to 12 months at a time if it considered that much the greater part of the business to be transacted was such that closure would be justified on grounds identical to those set out in the 1960 Act where that Act permits the exclusion of the public from a meeting. The deletion of subsection (4) is consequential on the deletion of subsection (3).
The 12 months' exclusion provision was intended for committees dealing mainly with business which needed privacy, and it was thought, when we first presented the Clause on Report, that this would be a convenient form for the local authorities to arrange for the exclusion of the Press from those committees normally dealing with business of privacy. The right hon. Member for Deptford (Mr. John Silkin) criticised the provision on the ground that it would defeat the object of the Clause and that if the local authority was given power to pass a resolution lasting for 12 months there was the danger that it would be exercised extravagantly.
I accept, having studied the matter, that a resolution should be put, not to cover the period of 12 months, but at each meeting. Recurrent business requiring privacy can be conducted by sub-committees. We thought originally that it would be right to require the Press to be admitted to sub-committees, but on reconsideration we removed that provision but left in the 12-month resolution provision. I think that that was wrong and it has been put right in another place. Advance warning of possible closure can be given in the statutory public notice of a meeting and of the agenda of that meeting and thereby the Press and public may be warned that if they appear in order to attend the meeting they may well be faced with this resolution at the outset.
It must be conceded that power to close the proceedings of a committee for up 1046 to 12 months could easily be used to exclude the public permanently from the committee and thereby defeat the purpose of the Clause. The practical point will still remain that it will be necessary under the 1960 Act to give public notice of the time and place of a meeting even though it is proposed to pass a resolution straight away to close the doors to the public. That notice will still have to be given. It is possible that this situation would arise with the public notice of a council meeting or of an education committee meeting. So this provision is nothing new. It may be a nuisance to have to do it, but I think that it carries out the spirit of the Act to state on the public notice whether there is to be a resolution to close the meeting and to take that resolution for every meeting.
If experience shows it to be desirable, authorities can indicate the possibility of closure in appropriate cases in the public notice. I do not think that there will be very great inconvenience for the public or Press in doing that. I think that the weight of advantage is on the side of putting some difficulty in the way of local authorities taking the opportunity to exclude the public and Press.