Commons Sitting of 12 July 1996

Preamble
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock,
PRAYERS
[[MADAM SPEAKER in the Chair]
PRAYERS
  PETITION

    Northolt Airport
    9.34 am
    Mr. Harry Greenway: The petition of the residents of the Ealing, North constituency—I am presenting a sample of up to 10,000 signatures—declares that they totally oppose plans to extend Northolt airport, including proposals contained in the United Kingdom airport capacity report of the Select Committee on Transport 1995–96, as they would lead to a vast increase in aircraft noise and pollution levels, and would create impossible traffic levels, which have already increased excessively because of Northolt's proximity to Heathrow airport. Any such expansion would make life intolerable for the people of the area.
    The fact that up to 10,000 people have already signified their resolute opposition to the proposals of the Select Committee on Transport—these are people within or very close to my constituency—is a clear sign that it would be very wrong of the Government to accept a preposterous proposal that would so damage the lives of my constituents as to make them unbearable.
    They believe—I strongly support them—that the Government should reject the all-party suggestion out of hand:
    The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons makes it clear to Her Majesty's Government that they are totally opposed to any expansion of Northolt Airport and in particular that they are totally opposed to the 1995–96 Parliamentary Select Committee on Transport's 2nd Report on UK Airport Capacity which recommends the further expansion of Northolt Airport on a complementary basis to Heathrow Airport.
    I beg leave to present the petition.
    To lie upon the Table.

  Orders of the Day
    Noise Bill
    Lords amendments considered.
    Noise Bill
      Clause 1

        ADOPTION OF THESE PROVISIONS BY LOCAL AUTHORITIES
        Lords amendment: No. 1, in page 1, line 7, at end insert
        ("or an order made by the Secretary of State so provides").
        9.37 am
        Mr. Harry Greenway: I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.
        Madam Speaker: With this, it will be convenient to discuss also Lords amendment No. 2.
        Mr. Greenway: The House will be aware that the Bill includes provision for a new offence to deal with excessive noise at night emanating from domestic premises. The Bill enables local authorities, by resolution, to adopt for their areas the new night noise provisions. The amendments would, in addition to the local authority power to make a resolution, enable the Secretary of State to make an order applying the new night noise provisions to the area of a local authority. The order cannot have effect until three months has passed from the date on which the order was made.
        In considering the need for the amendments, we need to ask ourselves one key question: in practice, will the new offence operate in places where there is a real problem with excessive night-time neighbour noise?
        Mr. Nigel Waterson: As I understand it, clarification of the existing powers of temporary confiscation and forfeiture of noise-making equipment will not itself be adoptive, and the amendment will make no difference in that respect. I understand also that, when the Bill becomes an Act, the power will become available immediately in its clarified form to local authorities. Is that correct? Perhaps my hon. Friend will clarify the position.
        Mr. Greenway: So far as I understand it, that is the position. If it is not, I shall come back to my hon. Friend, but I am sure that he is right. I thank him for making that point, because it is of great importance to everyone in the land.
        Some of my hon. Friends are not confident that the new, excellent powers will be adopted in every area, which is a problem, but I think that we are generally agreed that making every local authority operate the new offence is not the answer. There will undoubtedly be local authorities that have little need for a night-time noise service, and such authorities may have to cut back something that has a higher priority locally to provide the service. A middle way might be to make it mandatory for all urban authorities, but one then has the problem of defining what constitutes an urban authority. I am very tempted by the idea that it should be.
        Mr. Roy Thomason: Does my hon. Friend accept that the problem of noise often applies to semi-urban, even rural areas, as well, and so to talk of these measures in terms of urban authorities might be misleading in terms of assisting those who need it?
        Mr. Greenway: I accept that noise can come from anywhere. It can come from heavily urban authorities and from rural and semi-rural authorities, and definitions are extremely difficult. It is clear, though, from past prosecutions and reportage, that some local authorities, particularly rural areas, do not regard night-time noise as a severe problem, and therefore to force all local authorities to adopt the measure when, I hope, it becomes an Act, might be taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The freedom to adopt or not in the first place is of great importance and must be respected.
        It is always easy in life to take an all-or-nothing decision, but the problems may arise afterwards, which is when any anomalies arise, when one is faced with difficulties, irregularities and situations that one had thought existed when the total decision was taken but which did not actually exist. Bearing in mind that we would be giving money to local authorities that do not necessarily need it and taking it away, possibly, from urban authorities—despite the problems of definition—where it is urgently needed, it is right to strike the balance, which I seek to do this morning, by accepting the Lords amendment.
        I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for undertaking on Report to review the workings and take-up of the new offence after two years. He also said that the Government would not oppose an amendment that gave the Secretary of State the power to order local authorities to operate the new offence.
        That is very important, as individuals and Members of Parliament could make representations directly to the Secretary of State and pressurise him or her into forcing local authorities to operate the new offence. We would then see the democratic process at its most effective, assuming that we have such a sensible Secretary of State as we have now. Thus, the Secretary of State would be able to take action if the review showed that that was desirable.
        Lords Amendment No. 1 provides the order-making power. Lords Amendment No. 2 is consequential amendment, to allow at least three months to elapse before the Secretary of State's order takes effect. It gives the local authority time to put its organisation into place. These amendments are a sensible way forward and address the concerns of hon. Members without imposing an unnecessary burden on local authorities. I commend them to the House in that spirit.
        After talks with the Department of the Environment, I understand that the new night noise offence, with confiscation provisions, is expected to be implemented next April, which will coincide with the money resolution coming into effect, and will allow time for full consultation on the technical aspects of measuring the noise.
        Mr. Thomason: My hon. Friend referred specifically to money, and clearly there are problems about the cost of enforcement of the provisions of the Bill. Can my
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        hon. Friend give some idea of the costs involved, particularly for local authorities that may have an order imposed on them under the amendment?
        9.45 am
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend makes an important point. We should remember that the money resolution was set at £3 million, which has already been accepted by the House and so would be law, so to speak. Costs in terms of wages, salaries, the number of enforcement officers required and so on will vary from area to area.
        Personally, as a sound and—if I may say so—successful schoolmaster, I know that, to be successful, one must go in hard straight away. If a teacher takes on a new class—I am not straying, Mr. Deputy Speaker; I am drawing an analogy—or starts to run a new school and begins by being weak, grinning at everybody like some Cheshire cat, willing to accommodate any reaction, they will get nowhere.
        But if they go in ferociously, prepared to deal with any nonsense, from wherever it might come, fearlessly, without flinching, strongly and resolutely, as though they are going to win, they will win. One can always come back from a strong position, but one can never go forward to a strong position from a weak one.
        Mr. Hugh Dykes: That was a very moving lecture.
        Mr. Greenway: I am glad that my hon. Friend is moved.
        Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris): Order. The hon. Member must remain in order as well, though.
        Mr. Greenway: I am seeking to remain in order by drawing an analogy, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
        To complete the analogy, this is an important and fundamental part of my Bill, which my colleagues and I hope will become an Act. If, at the implementation stage, local authorities go in hard straight away and go for the troublemakers—let us remember that one in 10 of the population face this problem, according to The Mail on Sunday, which I thank for its support and whose marvellous campaign I commend; I also thank the Evening Standard—and makes some strong prosecutions, if the courts are determined and confiscate noise-making equipment, which they will have the power to do, and impose a £1,000 fine, and if the £100 on-the-spot fine is accepted, the problem will fall away very fast and they will be able to reduce costs.
        Mr. Peter Luff: My point follows on from that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) about cost.
        Surely the cost of implementation will depend on the number of areas on which orders are imposed. It is not clear to me how many areas will have orders imposed on them. It is also not clear to me whether the Secretary of State will have power under this amendment, about which I have serious reservations, to limit the imposition to a specific area of a district council.

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        I can think of rural district councils—I shall talk about one later—that have urban concentrations where noise is a real problem, but they might not want the obligation of a night noise enforcement role across the whole district council area. I should be grateful for clarification.
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend the Minister will, I am sure, give a view as to how the Secretary of State sees the amendment.
        In terms of cost, the money resolution was £3 million. That is, of course, for all local authorities. We must remember that there will not be a requirement on local authorities to implement the Bill. The pressure will come from within communities—it will certainly come from the community of Ealing, North.
        Mr. Dykes: I was very impressed with the advice my hon. Friend gave about the role of a teacher in a school, and the parallel he drew with implementing the powers under the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) also covered that point in his intervention.
        Does my hon. Friend agree that many local authorities are fed up with having too many rules and regulations imposed on them by Parliament through national legislation? Many are eagerly awaiting the powers in the Bill. That is why my hon. Friend should be commended and supported for introducing this vital measure.
        I represent a heavily congested urban area, as does my hon. Friend, and during the past two years I have had at least eight examples of incidents in which the powers in the Bill would have been extremely useful. Indeed, recently there have been disturbances by religious groups at 4 am. If the powers had been available, we could have dealt with that problem. Does my hon. Friend agree that his Bill will be welcome throughout the country, especially in urban areas—not just the rural areas referred to earlier?
        Mr. Greenway: I am enormously grateful to my hon. Friend for the defining points that he made about the effect that the Bill will have, and needs to have, in urban areas.
        Mr. Waterson: On the subject of additional costs for local authorities, can my hon. Friend confirm that about a third of local authorities already have some form of night noise complaint service, so the additional costs on them would be minimal?
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend is right. Many local authorities already have environmental noise and pollution officers. The problem is that, in many areas, they operate on a very limited basis only. Ealing council is Labour-controlled—and miserably so. It cut that important service when it took office in 1994. Now, noise patrols operate only one or two nights a week. That is not enough. There must be a full service in areas such as Ealing, Eastbourne and Harrow, where the communities require it. I hope that my Bill will ensure that that happens.
        The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. James Clappison): My hon. Friend has touched on an important point about discrepancies in the service offered by different local authorities, including
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        London local authorities. He rightly said that his borough of Ealing provides only a partial service, whereas some other London boroughs provide a full service. I am sure that he will join me in expressing the hope that local authorities will pay attention to what their residents want on the important issue of noise.
        Mr. Greenway: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making such an important point. In Ealing and other areas, local people want a full and proper night noise patrol, as well as patrols at other times. I have the expectation that local authorities will provide that.
        Mr. Peter Viggers: My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) and my hon. Friend the Minister both expressed the view that the Bill's effect would spread. Does my hon. Friend think it possible that some local authorities might withdraw their noise patrols, as Ealing did, or does he see the Bill has having a one-way ratchet effect that will extend noise patrols?
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend makes an important point. Once the Bill becomes law, I anticipate the ratchet effect referred to by my hon. Friend, leading to comprehensive cover every night of the week. Initially, there will be pressure from the many people who have suffered from noise problems for many months, or even years. They will call upon the service when it starts, so local authorities may have to put more money up front than they would have to expend over the long term. As I said earlier, if the problem is hit hard in the early stages, it will diminish, and local authorities will be able to reduce their cover and therefore the costs.
        Mr. Keith Vaz: The hon. Gentleman knows that the Opposition support his Bill. I am trying hard not to be partisan—notwithstanding the fact that I am a little outnumbered this morning. He made some comments about Ealing council. He must know the pressure that local authorities have been under during recent years because of cuts in Government expenditure. Would he support Ealing council if it said that, as a result of his Bill, X amount of resources would be required to enforce it?
        Mr. Greenway: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the Bill. He rightly points out that it has all-party support, and nothing I say challenges that. However, I am sure that he will understand that I must challenge Ealing council. Its chairman of the environmental services committee—who calls himself the chair; I think chairs are for sitting on—has said that the council may not implement the Bill when it becomes law. I do not want to be unduly long, but I intend to come back to that point. If the chairman makes that sort of threat, he must expect me to challenge it.
        The hon. Gentleman was right to say that additional finance must be provided for local authorities, including Ealing, to implement the Bill. That money will be provided. Indeed, as I pointed out in my opening remarks, the House has passed a money resolution to accompany the Bill. Ealing council would not need my support, because it would get the necessary money in the usual and sensible way. I must point out that the council is enjoying an additional £5.6 million on its budget from central Government this year, so it is not that hard up.
        Mr. Thomason: My hon. Friend says that the money will be available. Can he confirm that that means that it will be available in the sense that it will be put into the usual grant distribution process in the Department of the Environment and distributed to all local authorities according to the usual mechanism? It will not be specific, and therefore will not be directed only to those authorities that have either chosen to implement the Bill or are obliged to do so by virtue of the Secretary of State's order, if this amendment is accepted.
        Mr. Greenway: I respectfully point out to my hon. Friend that that is a technical question for our hon. Friend the Minister, rather than for me. I shall leave it to my hon. Friend to deal with it.
        To continue with my remarks about interpretation, I gather that the new and clearer powers on confiscation, as they relate to the existing statutory position, will take effect from the autumn. I have been given that information by the Department of the Environment, and it is worth putting it before the House, because it is of great importance.
        The Bill applies to night, rather than day, noise; it does not cover barking dogs—other legislation already does that—aggravating as that problem can be. I have a few instances of that in my constituency. Indeed, people from across the country have written to me complaining not only about barking dogs, but about screeching peacocks and peahens, among other things. Therefore, there is much noise apart from the noise of neighbours, but that is already dealt with legislatively and is not covered by the Bill. I would not want anybody to be misled about that.
        There will be pressure on local authorities to implement the legislation, because people are suffering. As I have said, one in 10 of the population are said to suffer seriously from noise pollution caused by neighbours. Some suffer to the point at which they commit suicide. There have been 17 reported deaths in recent years of people who were driven by relentless noise from neighbours to the point of destroying themselves. That shows the seriousness of the issue.
        In moral and spiritual terms, noise not only has a sad effect upon those who are at the receiving end but shows the wanton wickedness of the perpetrators. No society can tolerate such inconsiderate behaviour between neighbours. The world is my neighbour, and I have the duty to my neighbour that I have to myself.
        Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris): Order. There is much validity in what the hon. Gentleman says, but it is well beyond the terms of the amendment.
        10 am
        Mr. Greenway: I am seeking to deal with the pressure for implementation of the measure which the amendment addresses. The amendment gives the Secretary of State power to order local authorities which have not implemented the legislation within two years to do so.
        I seek to bring to the House's attention the existing social pressures. They are also political pressures, because in the end social pressure becomes political pressure if it is not addressed. If people take their own lives because of the wicked, inconsiderate and destructive evil behaviour of their neighbours, that is a political pressure, which local
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        authorities will have to address.The Mail on Sunday has reported vivid stories of people who have committed suicide as a result of the pressures upon them.
        Local authorities will have increased powers to implement the Bill's strong provisions, and I do not see how they could ignore them. If they do, the Secretary of State, through the democratic processes, will be able to lay them on the line.
        Mr. Dykes: I hope that I am in order. Does my hon. Friend agree that the mainspring of the legislation is the depressing and distressing selfishness of some citizens? We have to contend with that in our surgeries when we listen to stories about the selfishness of neighbours. We live in the age of blaring radio sets, mindless chat shows and rubbish music that is played all night in cars and homes. My hon. Friend is performing an outstanding service by providing the legislation, because many people are reaching breaking point.
        In my surgery, I have heard distressing, heart-breaking stories of neighbours who suffer. When I put the inevitable question, "When you remonstrated or had words with the neighbour at 1 or 2 am, what was the reaction to your request to turn down or turn off the radio?", I am told, "They just laughed in my face." What is causing such behaviour in our society?
        Does my hon. Friend think that we need further legislation to insist that people behave in a neighbourly way, or would we prefer—
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. This is becoming a speech, and is certainly outside the terms of the amendment.
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend may have strayed a little, but I acknowledge that his point is important.
        The Bill's adoptive nature will give local authorities considerable discretion about taking up the new offences. I hope that authorities in areas where the problem of noisy neighbours is marked will not tarry in adopting them. They could tackle the problem straight away, and I hope they will. Some local authorities say that they will not, and that is the burden of our debate.
        The statistics showing the need for the amendments are interesting. There were 131,153 complaints to local authorities about noise from domestic premises in 1993–94. That is more than a threefold interest over the past decade. A worrying fact is that fewer than 0.3 per cent. of the complaints led to convictions. That is a disgrace, and it causes real distress.
        Some councillors in Ealing, including the chairman of the environmental services department—who, as I have said, calls himself the chair—claims that the Bill is not necessary to address the problem. That is unbelievable. People come to my surgery desperate for action on night noise. The chairman of that committee is quoted in the Ealing and Acton Gazette, that most authoritative local paper, as saying that there are enough powers to address the problem of noisy neighbours. That is nonsense.
        Mr. Waterson: He should resign.
        Mr. Greenway: He should.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes an important point. The amendment would give the Secretary of State power to direct the adoption of the noise legislation. There has been a significant increase in complaints about noise, and local authorities should direct their minds to it. If they are not prepared to listen to their residents, powers should be available for the Secretary of State.
        Mr. Greenway: Those are powerful words by the Minister, and they are valuable in the political and social context of noise in society and between neighbours. The world will note what he has said.
        Mr. Viggers: My hon. Friend said that there were 131,153 complaints, and that it was a threefold increase. He also said that one in 10 people suffer because of noise from domestic premises. That is about 6 million people. Where will all this end?
        Mr. Greenway: That is a matter for speculation. The answer to my hon. Friend's pertinent question is that I think that it would be substantially decreased by the implementation of the measure.
        In Ealing, some Labour councillors claim that the Bill does not need to be deployed because existing legislation is adequate to deal with the problem. I have received a huge number of complaints about noisy neighbours in my surgeries, by letter and in every other way in which Members of Parliament receive such complaints. They can represent only the tip of the iceberg.
        Only 13 prosecutions were brought on noise-related problems by Ealing council in 1994–95, and of those only 10 were successful. Yet the chairman of environmental services has gone on record as saying that the Bill is not needed. He is hugely out of step with my constituents, who repudiate every syllable he has said on the matter.
        The fact that only 13 prosecutions were brought in a single year and only 10 were successful makes the remarks that the council has enough powers to deal with noise absurd. They are not laughable, because it is not enough to laugh at such remarks. They must be driven back down the throat of him who utters them. He should withdraw the remarks, eat humble pie and implement the Bill, as I shall see he does.
        Most victims of neighbourhood noise come from heavily populated areas. A Mr. Purbrick of Cardiff complained about the volume of neighbour noise, and said that he could not get redress and needed to do so. I have no doubt that there will be great pressure on local authorities to implement the Bill, but if they fail to do so, the amendment will deal with the problem. I acknowledge the wonderful work done in another place by Baroness Gardner of Parkes, a former member of the Greater London council, who has been a notable political figure in London for many years. I thank her for all she did, and the other place for its warm support for the Bill.
        I believe that, in the next two years, once the Bill is law, pressure will exist between areas in which the Act is successfully implemented and noise is effectively reduced, and areas in which the Act is not implemented. Local figures, Members of Parliament, councillors and others will be able to compare areas in which the Act is implemented and working well and where it has not and the problem continues. That will create its own pressure,
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        but there will be many other pressures. Therefore, the importance of the amendment is beyond measure. I commend it to the House.
        Mr. Luff: I am grateful to catch your eye first in the debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and to have my own opportunity to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) for his work on this important Bill. I share with him the belief that it is important.
        I am reminded of a story of a visitor to Chartwell to see Winston Churchill. He was sent out to the garden to see the great man, who, he was told, was preparing a speech for the House. He heard a voice from behind a hedge saying, "Mr. Speaker, I had not intended to intervene in this debate." That sums up my position today. I am here primarily because my Periodicals (Protection of Children) Bill appears further down the Order Paper. I shall not move further consideration of the Bill, because the publishers have made great progress on a voluntary code of conduct which more than meets all my concerns.
        I scanned the amendments to the earlier Bills on the Order Paper, and I have to say that I viewed them with considerable alarm. When the Noise Bill left this place, it was a perfectly reasonable Bill, but it now risks becoming draconian. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North seemed to understand the dilemma of those local authorities that would not wish necessarily to use the discretionary powers that his Bill originally gave them. The debate about whether the powers in the Bill should be discretionary or mandatory lies at the heart of amendment No. 1.
        I have a reputation for interventionism—for liking to give the Government powers to do things—which is entirely unjustified. I genuinely believe that the amendment is wrong. it seeks to give the Government too much power to interfere with the affairs of local authorities. I have some difficulty in opposing the amendment, because I understand that, if we sent it back to another place, the whole Bill could be lost. So I shall be looking to my hon. Friend the Minister for some strong assurances about the way in which these rather dangerous powers will be exercised by a future Secretary of State.
        10.15 am
        I support the Bill, because there has been a huge increase in noise complaints in my constituency surgery. I have seen a surge in complaints this year. I have read the earlier proceedings on the Bill in this place and in another place and some of the horrific stories that my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North cited. I believe that even a murder has been caused by night noise nuisance, which the Bill seeks to correct, but I note that such events seem to be concentrated in urban areas.
        We should be able to trust local authorities to use the powers that the Bill gives them, if they feel that they need to do so. I do not see why we should be in the business of forcing local authorities to assume powers that they do not wish to assume. I read the accounts that my hon. Friend gave of the likely scale of protest that would occur—particularly, I suspect, in urban areas—if the local authority decided not to implement the powers that the Bill gave them. The force of democratic protest in areas in which night noise is a nuisance is sufficient to assure

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        us that the Bill will be implemented where it is necessary and where the local authorities embrace the powers willingly.
        We had this debate on Second Reading, in Committee and on Report. There was a huge dispute among Conservative Members as to whether the powers should be discretionary or mandatory. That dispute spread across the House. The hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) expressed concern in the Standing Committee on 13 March that many councils would not adopt the proposals.
        On the other hand, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Mr. Atkins) was clear that the legislation should be permissive. He said:
        "Does he recognise that councils in heavily rural areas, where the pressure of noise is not as obvious as in Bexley or other urban environments—that is not to say that the problem does not arise in rural areas because it does—will need permissive legislation, rather than being made to enforce legislation?"—[Official Report, Standing Committee C, 13 March 1996; c.6.]
        He was right to make that point.
        On Report, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) spoke strongly. I will not repeat his words, because he is here to make his own speech. I appreciated what he said on 10 May. He was right. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North responded in a way that suggested that he agreed with my hon. Friend's remarks. He said:
        "However, to force all local authorities to implement the Bill where it was not needed would be mistaken. That would simply put people through a bureaucratic process."—[Official Report, 10 May 1996; Vol. 277, c. 548.]
        He was right to make that observation.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: Perhaps I can make it clear that the Bill places no mandatory requirement on local authorities to implement it. If the amendment is accepted, as I hope it will be, that position will not be changed, but the Secretary of State will have a power to order local authorities to implement in some cases. Obviously, no Secretary of State would order universal implementation. [HoN. MEMBERS: "Ah."] Well, not where it is not required.
        Mr. Luff: My hon. Friend makes a brave assertion, which I hope he is right to make. That lies at the heart of my concern. What guarantee can he give us that some future Secretary of State will not use the powers to make an all-embracing order that covers the whole country, where local authorities have not chosen voluntarily to use the powers that the Bill gives them?
        In another place, Lord Graham of Edmonton said:
        "I am trying to understand under what circumstances central Government would make an order against the wishes of the local community."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 June 1996; Vol. 572, c. 1982.]
        Why should central office—I mean central Government: I can understand why central office might do so—seek to make an order against the wishes of the local community?
        The amendment represents an uneasy compromise between hon. Members who want powers forced on local authorities and those who, like myself, would rather leave it to the authorities to decide what to do. It is a blank cheque for busybody Ministers to intervene in the affairs of local communities.
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        I am wary of local authority claims that excessive burdens are placed on them—under good Conservative management, councils can cope with all the burdens that the House imposes—but we must ensure that they have discretion to decide whether or not to act in respect of matters of local rather than national interest. The House ought to devolve more discretion to local authorities, not give the Secretary of State for the Environment the power to impose legislation that councils might not want to enforce.
        My constituency has two local authorities that would be given powers under the Bill. My hope is that Worcester city council—an urban area from which most night noise complaints originate—will use the Bill's powers and enforce them. I hope that the Secretary of State would not have to compel Worcester city council to implement the measure.
        Wychavon is a rural district council area with two or three centres of urban population—Pershore, Evesham and Droitwich. The council's environmental health officer told me yesterday that existing powers to issue statutory notices work well, and he reminded me that it was a criminal offence not to comply. Sadly—this is one reason for the Bill—people are less happy these days about resolving disputes locally. There is reluctance to knock on a neighbour's door and say, "I don't like the noise." People tend instead to rush to a statutory enforcement agency, which is an adverse trend.
        The EHO to whom I spoke thought that urban areas would need the legislation, but had reservations about whether permanent night noise patrols could be justified in rural areas. He does not want the Secretary of State to impose that requirement on him.
        Mr. Dennis Skinner: I agree that noise pollution is a growing problem, as evidenced by the increasing correspondence we receive from our constituents. I represent a lot of old pit villages. In one quiet little hamlet, a cockerel was crowing at 5 o'clock every morning—which is what it was supposed to do, but one resident did not like the noise. I could have invoked the powers of the local authority's environmental health officer, but instead had a novel idea. I offered to buy the cockerel and give it to the old-age pensioners for their Christmas dinner.
        I managed to resolve the problem, but there is no doubt that the Bill's powers will create problems for rural areas. I hope that it is passed but, judging from the number of Conservative Members present, I suspect that the Bill will have a torrid time. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) has done a deal with his friends, but otherwise his measure could have a rough passage.
        Mr. Luff: I welcome the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) to the ranks of pragmatists, and congratulate him on the way that he approached his constituency problem. Others have a more mundane way of dealing with such matters. I believe that I am right in thinking that a cock crowing would constitute a night noise nuisance in the terms of my hon. Friend's Bill.
        Mr. Harry Greenway indicated dissent.
        Mr. Luff: Its provisions would be in effect until 7 am.
        Mr. Greenway: I said in my opening remarks that barking dogs, peacocks, pea hens, cockerels and other animals are dealt with under existing legislation.
        Mr. Luff: It seems that they are dealt with also by the hon. Member for Bolsover, and those of us who have problems with crowing cockerels in our constituencies might hire his services—but as I know that the hon. Gentleman does not accept payment from outside interests, I am sure that he would give them pro bono publico.
        Mr. Greenway: One problem with the approach taken by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) is that, by the processes of nature, no cockerels would be left. That needs to be thought about.
        Mr. Luff: I think that I had better not respond to that point.
        Mr. Thomason: Does my hon. Friend agree that under clause 1(1), a decision of the local authority must apply to its whole area of jurisdiction? It follows that an order made by the Secretary of State under the amendment would also have to apply to the whole local authority area, with no discretion to apply the order only to parts of it.
        Mr. Luff: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for emphasising the point that I made in my earlier intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North—and one on which I would particularly appreciate the Minister's guidance. If orders are imposed in rural areas, they should be tightly defined, and not spread across the whole district.
        Mr. Clappison: If this will help my hon. Friend to develop his argument, an order to direct a local authority to apply the offence in its area would require application to the whole area.
        Mr. Luff: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's clarification, but it deepens my worries about the amendment, and it will certainly increase Wychavon district council's concerns. That local authority tells me that it already has pragmatic ways of dealing with noise nuisance locally.
        If the council encounters an urgent and unpleasant incident of night noise, which happens only rarely, an officer is sent out on a case-by-case basis, and that generally works. The officer is given a couple of hours off work in lieu, or receives some small recompense for his efforts.
        We do not want a future Secretary of State to impose responsibilities on local authorities by statute. There is no need in Wychavon for further legislation. I understand that one local authority—I believe that it was Woodspring—tried night patrols for three months, but found that they diverted too many resources from daytime duties, and abandoned the experiment.
        Why make the amendment? Why give such a power to the Secretary of State? How would a future Secretary of State use the power? My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North said that we have a sensible Secretary of
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        State for the Environment. I know that it is Labour's aspiration to have a silly Secretary of State, who might abuse the power.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: Not likely.
        Mr. Luff: I agree, but we must plan for even the most unlikely eventualities when considering legislation.
        What will be the content of the report that is sent to the Secretary of State? Why will three months be given to phase in an order? Why not make the period one, two or six months? A host of questions have been left unanswered, particularly those relating to the way that the Secretary of State would use his powers. A sensible, pragmatic Bill for local authorities could be transformed into a serious imposition—particularly for rural authorities.
        I look for reassurance from my hon. Friend the Minister as to the way that the Secretary of State could be expected to use the powers, particularly in rural areas.
        Mr. Edward Leigh: I support my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) as a Member of Parliament who represents a rural constituency—but in doing so I take nothing away from the excellent work of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) in bringing the Bill before the House.
        I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester that the Bill was sensible when it left this House. I suspect that it originated from the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North of representing an urban constituency. The strongest support that his speech received was that of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes), who also represents an urban constituency—but the problems of rural local authorities are quite different from my hon. Friend's experience of Ealing council.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North is an excellent, hard-working Conservative Member of Parliament, but he has been thwarted at every turn by Ealing council. He has become absolutely convinced that, even if this Bill were to become law, Ealing council—because of the gross mismanagement of its affairs and its inability to conduct itself properly—would simply not have the resources to implement it. He has therefore come to the conclusion that the Secretary of State must have the power to intervene to force Ealing council to take action.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: My hon. Friend may have had a slip of the tongue when he said that I might think that Ealing council does not have the resources to implement the Bill. I think that it has the resources, but it may not have the will or the integrity to do so.
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        Mr. Leigh: I am sure that that is right. As my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) said in another debate, if local authorities were as concerned about noise pollution as they are about food safety, we might have some better action from some of those Labour-controlled local councils. Ealing council, of course, has adequate resources provided to it by council taxpayers and through Government grants to act in a proper manner, but it will not do so.

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        This week, I took the opportunity to consult my own local authority, West Lindsey district council, and was told by people there that the problem is not very great. I should expand on that fact, and tell my hon. Friend that my constituency is one of six in Lincolnshire, and that it covers an area of 700 square miles. In square miles, it is larger than Greater London, which has 92 parliamentary constituencies. Is it really envisaged that noise patrols will go along lanes in my constituency? While my hon. Friend's constituency may be two or three square miles, it is a 60-mile journey between Gainsborough and Horncastle, which are the two largest towns in my constituency.
        Noise is, of course, a problem, and we have a right to quiet enjoyment of life. We become aware of some noise only when we think of it—such as other hon. Members' speeches when we are preparing our own. This Bill is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and Lords amendment No. 1, if it were to be passed in its current form, could be very dangerous. I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North to think again.
        I do not think that the Bill would deal with many of the real problems in rural areas: I assure him that bird scarers are a far greater problem in such areas. I am in the middle of an enormously involved correspondence with the Minister on bird scarers. In my own village, in the Lincolnshire wolds, one sometimes feels as though one were in the middle of the battle of the Somme. At one stage, five years ago, there were no fewer than 12 bird scarers ringed around the village going off at all times.
        Mr. Bernard Jenkin: Has my hon. Friend suggested to his local farmers that they might borrow the beast of Bolsover to circuit those villages to scare away the pigeons?
        Mr. Leigh: I thought that the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) made a very fair point. There is an enormous conflict in rural society between those who farm the land, who perhaps have done so for many years, and who believe that noise and disturbance such as bird scarers, smells from pigs and—as he mentioned—cockerels are a necessary part of rural life, and those with a more suburban mentality who moved into those villages and want a nice quiet life. They do not want all those country noises and smells.
        Not only bird scarers and agriculture make noise. I have been awakened on three successive weekends by noise from raves—in one of the most rural areas in England. Indeed, not far from me is the loneliest farmhouse in England. People come from urban areas, find a field and maintain an appalling, monotonous beat that can be heard for miles around. Unless my hon. Friend can advise me differently, I believe that this Bill will have no impact on people conducting raves in rural areas. As he is not intervening on my speech, I assume that the Bill will not affect raves or bird scarers.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: My hon. Friend is quite right. My Bill deals with neighbour-to-neighbour noise, and does not deal with raves, although other legislation does. If the police are not effectively implementing that legislation, he should contact them.
        Mr. Leigh: I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. My point is that we as Conservative Members should tackle the attitude that legislation can solve every problem in society. I do not believe it can. We know that there is an appalling and increasing problem with noise, particularly in urban areas. We know that we live in an increasingly selfish society, in which people are given increasingly more and in which they take ever more.
        However, do we think that the Singapore solution is the answer—that we should have legislation for everything, and that, if someone drops a bit of cigarette paper on the floor, he should be sent to prison? We cannot solve society's problems by legislating to order human behaviour in every respect. It simply does not work, it is not the Conservative way, and it is not what we should be about. We should be articulating values that can try to reinforce good behaviour, and not trying to enforce good behaviour by increasingly intrusive legislation. That is why I am very doubtful about this Bill.
        I wish the Bill well. It was a sensible compromise in the form in which it left this place. I urge my hon. Friend to reconsider this amendment.
        Mr. Viggers: I thought that I was the only hon. Member to have reservations about the Bill until I heard the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh). I was extremely pleased to hear his comments.
        I yield to no one in my admiration for my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway). Last night, I re-read the Committee stage of the Bill, and the speeches were unanimous in their praise for him. He deserves that praise, because he is a model constituency Member of Parliament. His presentation of a petition earlier today is merely one further example of his assiduous work on behalf of his constituents and of others, and on such issues as horse-riding safety. He is a noble hon. Member indeed. Some boroughs and cities have a Nelson Mandela drive. I hope that there is a Harry Greenway school, perhaps in Ealing, North. Perhaps the citizens there will think about that.
        My hon. Friend will no doubt go down in history, but not for this Bill. I think that single issue campaigns lead to bad law and to bad government, because they create excessive government. When I read George Orwell's "1984" as a schoolboy, I thought that the Orwellian society described could only be implemented through a soviet-style coup or putsch, leading to a Bolsover or Clay Cross situation, in which socialism or communism dominated. However, creeping and expanding government can also arise with the gradual spreading of the tentacles of the powers of local and national government, and with their interference in the normal activities of each human being.
        In the long run, such government, through the well-meaning intentions of those who seek to do good, can cause more damage than other forms of government. We have two very good examples of that in Bills to be considered today. There is a problem with noise, for example, so we shall give local authorities power to stop it. Energy is being wasted, so we shall give local authorities power to report on conservation. Government is continually growing, and no one seems to be prepared to stop it.

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        I am all in favour of local authorities being answerable to their electorates and doing what their electorates want. I am in favour of greater local democracy provided that it is genuine.
        When we had a system of rates and business rates., local authorities were able to carry through what they wished to do in their areas. That system became corrupt because of rotten boroughs—such as those in Manchester and Liverpool, in which only a small proportion of individuals paid domestic rates and no one cared about business rates.
        That is why a Conservative Government eventually found it necessary to clamp down on local government's power by imposing standard spending assessments and rate capping, which took away many of local government's powers. I regret that that happened, because it was an admission that local democracy could not be trusted, and that control had to be exercised from the centre.
        At least it was clear at an earlier stage in the Bill's passage that local authorities would not have to implement this noise control legislation. They had a choice whether to do so, and that was the one redeeming feature of the legislation. Now, the other place has produced a formula by which the scheme may become universal and give the Secretary of State powers to impose the scheme on local authorities, even if they do not wish to operate it.
        The Minister has no doubt been advised by his civil servants that the amendment is an ideal solution—a sensible compromise between the powers being voluntary and the powers being imposed on every local authority. The civil servants have no doubt said, "The amendment gives you, Minister, the power to implement the scheme if you think it wise. It is a perfect compromise, because you, Minister, have the responsibility and the power." From the civil service advisers' point of view, and from the point of view of the single interest group which has pushed for noise control legislation, the amendment is the ideal solution.
        The amendment is perfect from the civil servants' point of view, because they know that, after the election in May 1997, my hon. Friend the Minister will, as a result of his success in implementing legislation such as the Bill. move on to greater things and become an even more senior Minister. I have watched his progress since he came into the House—as recently as 1992—and I have seen him move with great speed up the ministerial ladder.
        Another Minister will then be advised by the civil servants. They will say to that Minister, "Now, Minister, you must impose this legislation on more and more local authority areas." The new Minister will, of course, find it difficult to stand up to his advisers. He will find it difficult to have the backbone we require of Conservative Ministers and to say, "Absolutely not. This is not a Conservative measure, and I will not implement it." The civil servants will get their way, and the powers will be spread across the whole country.
        Where will it all end? If my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North had had it put to him by the activists against noise—by the single interest group which has complained so effectively—that he should promote a law which gave draconian powers, he would, I am sure, have refused.
        Let us imagine that he had been asked to promote a Bill that gave local authorities powers of search and powers of arrest, and which imposed a duty on every local authority
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        to implement the law. After all, that is not enough, is it? One would have to make sure that local authorities imposed the law, so one would need fines on councillors who failed to implement the law, and surcharges and prison sentences for non-compliance. If my hon. Friend had been asked to implement such a law, he would, of course, have refused, but that is where it will all end.
        The light touch will not work. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North has mentioned the 131,153 complaints about noise in the year 1993–94, and has said that that figure is three times the figure for the previous year. He has also said that one in 10 people suffer from noise from neighbours; that is about 6 million people.
        I cannot see the figure stopping at 131,000; it may reach 6 million and go even beyond that, because, if there is a mechanism for complaints about neighbours, people will use it. A light touch will not work. There will be a small army of noise enforcement officers. Goodness me, there will be a chartered institute of noise control officers—it probably exists already. There will be yet more state control.
        When I first came into the House, I used to say that the day would come when no child would be allowed to climb a tree except under the control of a properly qualified tree-climbing instructor. I said that the other day at St. Vincent college in my constituency, of which I am chairman—it is a very fine college, to give it a boost.
        Someone from the college said, "Of course that is right. We could not allow children to climb trees if they were not under the control of properly qualified tree-climbing instructors." As chairman of the college, I had to sign certificates from time to time to say that the people who were taking children out on adventure holidays and adventure training were properly qualified. The small army of noise control specialists will grow, and we shall need a large army.
        Mr. Skinner: And legal aid.
        Mr. Viggers: Yes, people will seek legal aid. The job will be stressful, so the noise control specialists will need counselling and the councillors will find implementing the scheme stressful, so they too will need counselling.
        Mr. Leigh: Surely it is outrageous that people in this country should have to suffer more noise than is the case in other nation states in the European Union? I therefore believe that we should have a European directive on noise control, so that we can have equal levels of noise throughout our great European Union.
        Mr. Viggers: And we shall no doubt have an advisory committee to co-ordinate the legislation in this country with the legislation in Europe.
        I make one prediction of which I am totally certain, which is that, when my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) and I are sitting on the Government Benches in 2000, there will be at least 1 million complaints about noise. I make that prediction with absolute confidence.
        Why only noise control? Has my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North thought about smell control or light control—
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Not under these amendments.
        Mr. Viggers: I am looking ahead, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to what I am certain will happen, and I fear it. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to throw away the speech notes that have been prepared for him. I ask him to say to his civil servants, "Find another Minister to play Trilby to your Svengali. I will have none of it."
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        Mr. Piers Merchant: I support the Lords amendments to the Bill, but I have one or two minor queries which I will put through you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to the Minister.
        I have carefully followed the Bill during its passage through the House, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) knows, and I have made contributions at most stages. I am a strong supporter of the Bill, and I understand its purpose. More importantly, we are here to ensure that it operates in practice as it is intended to operate. That is the significance of the Lords amendments.
        On Report, I raised the question whether there should be more than just a discretionary power on local authorities. There was considerable debate about that, and my hon. Friend the Minister, in his winding-up speech, promised that he would look at the possibility of an amendment being introduced in the other place to try to achieve a balance between the people who wished to see a stronger law under which there was more than just a discretionary power on local authorities and those who argued, as many of my hon. Friends have argued eloquently this morning, against such a power.
        I believe that the Lords amendment just about gets the balance right. It has a light touch, which would enable my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, where necessary, to impose a requirement on local authorities to enforce the Act, as I hope it will become, but which would leave most local authorities with nothing more than a discretionary power.
        Our discussion this morning has revolved round the powers of local authorities and the stage at which the House should insist that a law is applied whether or not a local authority wishes to do so. I have a good deal of sympathy with those who argue that local authorities should have more discretionary powers. I believe in that, too, as a matter of principle and good justice.
        It would be excellent to have a system in which more power was devolved to local authorities, so that they had the right not only to take action as is proposed in the Bill—a right that they would not have without the Bill—but not to implement a law if they felt that that was appropriate.
        In many senses, the Bill is an ideal example. I readily accept what many of my hon. Friends have said—that, in their constituencies, there is generally no need for the Bill. Sadly, my constituency is different: it is an urban constituency, and there are severe problems of neighbourhood noise. The existing framework of law is clearly inadequate, so the Bill is welcome. It is an excellent Bill, which will address many of the problems.
        However, I must be fair: if I lived in Gainsborough, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh), I would probably take a similar approach. If I lived in the countryside where my next-door neighbour was two miles
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        down the road, as I believe is the case for my hon. Friend, I would know that I or my neighbour could jump up at three in the morning and rave, shout, play loud music and foam at the mouth—[Laughter] I am not suggesting for one moment that my hon. Friend does that: I hope that he did not mistake me for so doing. I merely use that as an illutstration of how an infernal noise could be created by my neighbour, and I would not know about it. So the law would simply not be relevant.
        My constituency is totally different. I live in an area where the houses are a little further apart. I cannot quite touch my neighbour's property from my front door, although it is not far away. In other parts of my constituency, however, the houses are extremely close together, and where there are blocks of flats, people live in even closer proximity, and even the slightest noise can cause a great deal of disturbance. That is the essential difference between different parts of the country.
        The reason why the amendment is necessary for areas such as my constituency is that people have a legitimate problem and good grounds for complaint. They need this Bill not only to be on the statute book but to be put into practice. If the power remains only discretionary, people will be crying out for action in some areas of the country where, for one reason or another, the local authority has not got around to using the power. That would be ridiculous. The Bill would be on the statute book, but the law would apply only in theory. The law would not only be an ass; justice would not only be blindfolded: the law would be a blindfolded ass.
        Mr. Leigh: My hon. Friend is advancing a very dangerous argument. We all accept that the Bill is necessary, but there is an argument between those who believe that the power placed on local authorities should be discretionary and those who believe that it should be mandatory. If the problem is so great in his constituency, or, indeed, in Ealing, public pressure on the council will build, and in the end the local authority will take action. That is what democracy is about. My hon. Friend is arguing that democracy should be overcome, which cannot be valid.
        Mr. Merchant: I wish that I shared my hon. Friend's optimism. He knows very well that the world is not quite that simple, and that local authorities do not necessarily respond that quickly to public opinion. My fear is that, even though public pressure may build, the nexus in which, in theory, he believes does not exist in practice. Because of the way elections work, decisions are rarely made on single issues, bureaucrats often hide behind walls some distance from the real problem, and there are financial pressures.
        With great respect, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle advanced the theory that the law could not solve all problems, and that basically we had to learn to get on with each other. It is a fine theory, and there is nothing wrong with it, but if it were true, we would not need to sit in this place very long, since we would not need to pass many laws. I believe in a law-based society and the rule of law.
        I challenge my hon. Friend. What would he do? Would he knock on the doors of people complaining about noisy neighbours and explain to them that we all had to be very nice to each other, get on with each other, and ask them

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        whether they would please turn the volume down? If he is willing to do that, I will invite him to my constituency. He would realise what happens.
        Would my hon. Friend the Member follow up the complaints by giving people a long philosophical lecture about the origin of conservatism and why we should all get on with each other in a responsible society? Does he think that, at 3 o'clock in the morning, that would persuade people to turn down the volume of the gramophone or whatever instrument they are using at their party? Such a wishy-washy approach to societal problems just does not work. It is very liberal-minded, but would not cure the problem.
        Mr. Thomason: Does my hon. Friend therefore believe that there should be no such thing as local authority discretion? It would appear to be his thrust that everything must be decided by central Government, because local government is incapable of making a decision until it makes one with which he happens to agree.
        Mr. Merchant: I was not saying that, and I hope that, if my hon. Friend reads my words in the Official Report, he will realise it. I was very careful to say that I strongly agreed with the principle of local authorities having discretion, and that I wished that it could be extended further. We must look at each measure at a time and decide whether it is relevant for such discretion. I am saying that there may be circumstances—that is all that the amendment would add—in which discretion would not work.
        My hon. Friend should not forget that the impact of the amendment is not to make the law mandatory on all local authorities. Discretion is being retained. My hon. Friend the Minister has fought off pressure from some of our hon. Friends who are not present, who wanted the Bill to be mandatory on all local authorities. The amendment will not make it so. It merely gives my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the right in extremis to intervene and make the power mandatory, where, I imagine, the local authority responsible is not operating the discretionary power properly.
        Mr. Viggers: A moment ago, my hon. Friend was talking about circumstances in which the noise complaint was being investigated and passed on by the local authority official. It is unlikely that, if someone is playing a radio or a record player rather loudly, and an official turns up and says, "Will you please turn down your noise?", the chap will do it.
        A policeman told me that, on a number of occasions, he has had to attend to a complaint about noise. He said that the events usually occur late at night, when people have been drinking, or perhaps drugs have been involved, and the noise is exorbitant. He told me that he has never yet not encountered violence or the threat of violence on such occasions. Can my hon. Friend envisage how much expense and complication will be involved if that is a frequent occurrence?
        Mr. Merchant: As I see it, the Bill will be a deterrent when it becomes law. The existence of the power and the knowledge that officials have an ability to impose a fixed penalty fine on those who are consistently causing night noise should be sufficient to act as a major deterrent. That is the most important part of the Bill.
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        My second response to my hon. Friend is that, although in some circumstances what he says is undoubtedly correct, I know of many occasions in my constituency that do not so easily fit into an overall picture. There are examples of noise being created negligently or recklessly but without intention, and once sufficient pressure is brought to bear by the authorities, the noise ends.
        On other occasions, noise is considered persistent—over not one or two evenings but a whole season—because of the different life styles of people making the noise and those complaining about it. It is often a generation problem. In such circumstances, too, knowledge among those who are making the noise that effective measures can be taken against them should be a strong deterrent and prevent them from repeating the noise.
        Mr. James Couchman: I had a letter the other day from one of my elderly constituents who is absolutely beside herself because her next-door neighbour has let his house to some young people who are totally anti-social. There is loud music, bad language, and the sort of anti-social behaviour that my hon. Friend would expect, including the throwing of rocks over the garden fence at her grandchildren. Does he envisage that the Bill will help my constituent in her predicament?
        Mr. Merchant: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks. The Bill will help people in such circumstances—although not entirely, because clearly other offences are involved. I hope that the Bill will help to diffuse the sort of neighbourhood problems that can mushroom out of all proportion. Examples have been given of people dying as a result of neighbourhood noise. Such examples are well documented—
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman should return to the subject of the amendment.
        Mr. Merchant: I am grateful for your admonition, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall draw my remarks to a close, as I do not wish to monopolise the debate; however, I should like to make just two more points.
        First, I shall give a example of a similar discretionary law that I consider to be inadequate. I cannot quote the Act concerned, but it provides a power by which local authorities can give financial support to those who wish to litigate on leasehold matters. Many of my constituents would like to exercise that right, as my constituency has a large proportion of leasehold properties.
        However, the local authority has decided not to use its discretionary power. Therefore, an area that was intended specifically to benefit from a particular measure cannot do so, because the local authority has chosen not to apply its discretionary power. That is one example of what can happen if a discretionary power is not implemented even where it is most needed. The local authority has chosen not to implement its power for the best and most understandable reason—the potential cost involved. I do not blame the local authority, because I understand its dilemma, but I empathise with my constituents.

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        I am concerned that the same may happen under the Noise Bill—that the local authorities with the worst problems will be the most reluctant to apply their discretionary power. They simply will not want to take on the task involved. That is why the reserve power provided by the Lords amendment should remain in the Bill. The amendment does not stray as far into the territory of extinguishing local authority discretion as many of my hon. Friends seem to think. It is a well balanced amendment and I support it.
        Many of my hon. Friends simply do not understand the seriousness and size of the problem in certain heavily urbanised areas. They represent pleasant rural or suburban constituencies, so they do not know how frustrating and severe the problem can be for my constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North.
        Finally, I seek clarification of the general power from my hon. Friend the Minister, as its implementation is crucial to the Bill. Under what circumstances would the Secretary of State be prepared to impose such an order, and what would be involved? What remedy would there be for our constituents who might face the severe problems I have outlined if his successors failed to impose an order? To what extent can they be induced to do so, and what would be the position of frustrated residents? I am simply trying to represent many of my constituents who have experienced severe difficulties.
        I want to be certain not just that the Bill passes into law, but, as we have all spent considerable time honing it and making sure that it addresses the problems experienced in our constituencies, that we do not end up with a vacuous, empty, theoretical measure. We need a measure with real, practical implications. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will go into a little more detail about the circumstances in which the power would be implemented, and that he will be able to convince me and many of my hon. Friends that our constituents will be properly protected if the need arises.
        Mr. Waterson: I regret to say that I oppose the amendments, because the powers in the new Bill should be mandatory and universally applied. However, I stress my considerable support for the Bill, and join other hon. Members in heaping well-deserved praise and congratulations on my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway). It is an important measure, which I strongly support.
        As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North said, the Bill enables local authorities by resolution to adopt the new night noise provisions. However, in addition to the power to make such a resolution, the amendments would enable the Secretary of State to make an order in respect of the new provisions. I do not think that they go far enough.
        There has been much discussion about urban local authorities. It is hardly surprising that the debate has concentrated on inner-city constituencies, but hon. Members should realise that noise can be a great problem in leafy suburbs or pleasant seaside resorts such as Eastbourne.
        The problem is almost endemic in blocks of flats and rows of houses in parts of my constituency. Every hon. Member who has spoken in this morning's debate has
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        testified to the fact that the problem is escalating. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Minister has given an undertaking to review the workings of the Bill after two years, so at least there is that long stop. However, my firm view is that the amendments should be rejected, as they do not go far enough, and the powers should be mandatory as soon as they are introduced.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North told the House that, in 1993–94, there were some 131,000 complaints about noise from domestic premises. Although the figures are not available today, I have a shrewd suspicion that those for last year or the current year are probably quite significantly higher, as there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence from our mailbags and surgeries that the problem is increasing rapidly.
        I have had a number of constituency cases mainly involving disputes between neighbours. Some of them have been concerned with the early stages of implementing care in the community, when people have been discharged from an institution and have stopped taking their medication and engaged in bizarre behaviour, including playing loud music late at night. Just one person behaving in that way, for whatever reason, can easily disrupt the peace and quiet of an entire community in a block of flats. We cannot overstate the genuine distress that is created in all our constituencies by problems which are often maliciously caused. We all know that neighbour disputes are the most intractable and distressing matters that come to us in our surgeries, and all too often they lead to these noise nuisances.
        Only last Friday night, I went on patrol with my local police in Eastbourne. One of the problems we have to face is the phenomenon of boy racers—young gentlemen who roar around the centre of town, particularly Devonshire place, in their souped-up cars, often with loud sound from their stereo equipment. I shall press my hon. Friend on the extent to which the Bill may or may not address that problem.
        On one occasion, we stopped a young man in a car that I doubt had even scrap value, but lurking within it was the most massive, expensive stereo than I have ever seen. It was certainly worth a great deal more than the vehicle that he was driving. That is just one example of a problem specific to my constituency. I am not aware whether such mobile nuisance, the use of stereo equipment, and so on, would be affected by the Bill as it stands.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: Perhaps I could clarify the matter a little for my hon. Friend and tell him that the Bill applies from dwelling house to dwelling house, which includes gardens. I suppose that if a car were in the garden of a dwelling-house making an unreasonable noise with stereophonic equipment, it would be caught by the Bill; but if it were in the street, there would be a problem. However, other legislation exists to address that problem.
        Mr. Waterson: I am grateful for that clarification. As I feared, unless by some mishap a car ended up in somebody's garden we would have to use other powers. Perhaps if we revisit the legislation in future, we could think again about that nuisance, which I suspect happens in other constituencies, too.
        Mr. Greenway: I do not want to intervene excessively, but I thank my hon. Friend for giving way to me again. The problem with stereo and other noise from cars is that, although it could be static, it is by definition almost always mobile. If a car were in the driveway of a garden area or in a garage, it would be caught by the Bill; if the car were mobile or on the street, other legislation would apply. I know that my hon. Friend accepts the fact that stronger legislation may be required—but legislation is already in place.
        Mr. Waterson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that further clarification. My fears that the Bill would not assist in the instance that I mentioned are justified. The cars that I described are typically driven around locations such as Devonshire place in Eastbourne, or they may be parked—
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could move on from the mobile side of the problem and return to the Lords amendment.
        Mr. Waterson: I was about to move on to the power of seizure of noise-making equipment, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I intervened during the opening speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North to ask whether the power of confiscation and forfeiture of noise-making equipment, which is clarified by the Bill, would be available to all local authorities with immediate effect when the Bill becomes an Act, or whether it was adoptive, as are some of the other powers in the Bill.
        Mr. Clappison: I think that I can assist my hon. Friend on that point. The powers of seizure, forfeiture, and so on will apply to all local authorities in connection with the present offence of statutory nuisance. That is not affected by the issue of whether other powers should be discretionary or mandatory, which we are now debating, and which will concern only the adoptive offence of noise at night. As I understand it, the powers of seizure and forfeiture will apply generally.
        Mr. Waterson: I am delighted to hear that; in view of that clarification, obviously it would not be in order for me to say anything more about the power, as it now transpires that it does not arise under the amendment.
        I am concerned, however, about the role of local authorities in general on such issues, as it would be affected by the amendments. I have had the benefit of talking to Jim Foster, Eastbourne borough council's senior officer responsible for dealing with environmental problems of that nature. Like many hard-pressed local authority officers, he still welcomes the principles behind the Bill, although he wanted me to raise several points.
        Mr. Harry Greenway: We expect the seizure provisions to be implemented within about three months of enactment. By the autumn, local authorities will have the powers to seek to confiscate and impose a £1,000 fine.
        Mr. Waterson: That is excellent news, which I know will be widely welcomed throughout the country.
        The role of local authorities is important, especially as I believe that there is some evidence of a retreat by the police from involvement in such matters. The other day,
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        I received a copy of a letter from Wealden district council, which covers the Willingdon and Polegate parts of my constituency, to the chairman of the police authority for Sussex, stressing the council's concern about the fact that the police are becoming less and less involved in dealing with such incidents. I hope that that difficulty will be resolved amicably between the district council and Sussex police. However, as Mr. Foster points out, environmental health departments in Sussex are
        "wary of these provisions from a practical and resource standpoint."
        I shall touch on two or three practical points that Mr. Foster raised with me. One of my hon. Friends has already mentioned that local authority staff often feel that they need police support when visiting offending premises. They therefore suspect that there will be resource implications for the police as well as for local councils.
        In Eastbourne, as in other places, there is
        "a health and safety duty to safeguard staff out late at night."
        The guidance in my borough is:
        "Where a potential risk exists staff are instructed not to proceed without Police presence."
        Mr. Foster feels that
        "There should be provision for adopting for part of the year only and for amending hours for special occasions such as New Year."
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. That is extremely interesting about Eastbourne, but it has absolutely nil relevance to the Lords amendment. We are discussing whether the Secretary of State should issue orders under the Bill, which has nothing to do with what the hon. Gentleman is talking about.
        11.15 am
        Mr. Waterson: Yes, of course, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am trying to put across the genuine practical concerns of my local authority about the idea of making the powers mandatory. I am arguing that we should bring in the powers on a mandatory basis straight away. As you know, the amendments would give the Secretary of State a power at some time in the future, which may or may not ever be exercised.
        Mr. Foster makes several points, which add up to the suggestion that local authorities would have to devote extra new resources to enforcement if the powers became mandatory.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend is coming to some important points. The discretionary or mandatory order-making powers are closely related to the review that we shall carry out, and when we do so we shall have regard to such matters as the level of complaints in local authority areas, and representations from those who live there. We shall try to take into account the sort of experiences that my hon. Friend has mentioned, too, and I hope that that will give him some assurance. I shall talk at greater length about resources in due course—that is another important issue—but I hope that my hon. Friend will bear in mind the fact that the representations that he has described are important, and will be important in future.
        Mr. Waterson: I am grateful to the Minister for that clarification. I know that, when the review takes place, it will be thorough, especially if he is in charge of it.

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        I was about to talk about the existing situation—the subject on which I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North. It seems that about one third of local authorities already have some form of night noise complaints service, although we must recognise that the extent of that service—the number of staff and the resources currently devoted to it—may vary dramatically from one part of the country to another.
        A recent survey by the National Society for Clean Air and Environmental Protection suggests that at least one third of authorities would wish to adopt the provisions in the Bill. Whether that one third coincides with the one third that I have just mentioned, we cannot know at this stage; but it seems to make sense that authorities that are already doing much of what the Bill will encourage and underpin are more likely to adopt its provisions. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North said, a backward-looking, unhelpful and whingeing local authority may seek all sorts of excuses not to implement the Bill. That raises a fundamental issue as to the law on the matter; whether one has protection as soon as the Bill becomes law will depend entirely on the vagaries of where one happens to live.
        On the subject of resources, I understand that the Government will take into account the cost of the implementation of the new power in the revenue support grant settlement, and I imagine that my hon. Friend the Minister will deal with that in more detail. Additional funding could well be allocated to all local authorities, whether or not they have an existing night noise service.
        Mr. Dykes: Does my hon. Friend feel that the amendments would take care of a problem that we have seen in other areas, as well as noise pollution? Where there is an overwhelming case, a local authority can reject a malevolent applicant's planning application because of noise pollution. The local authority will be helpful to the residents, but then, on appeal, a remote inspector—who can be miles away and have no knowledge of the local problems or the agonies that the local residents are suffering from excessive night noise—will turn down the decision. Does my hon. Friend feel that the Secretary of State's powers implanted in the Bill adequately take care of that likely problem?
        Mr. Waterson: My hon. Friend raises an interesting and novel point, and it is one against which all constituency Members of Parliament bump up from time to time. I would hope that the amendment will have the effect described by my hon. Friend. That may be an issue to which my hon. Friend the Minister will return in his speech. It is a very important facet of the problem.
        I wish to draw my remarks to a conclusion, as I am eager to see the Bill make rapid progress. It is right to have some flexibility, but I have two points arising from that. First, many local authorities—sadly, not under Conservative control—may protest too much about the Bill's resource implications. I have said that one third of authorities are probably doing much of what is required by the Bill anyway, and funding will be made available. But this is a high-profile matter which directly affects many constituents, and politically motivated local authorities may be tempted—I put it no higher than
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        that—to say that they will not implement the Bill's provisions, and then blame the Government. We can erase that possibility entirely by rejecting the amendments, and by making the scheme mandatory with immediate effect.
        Secondly, for whatever reason—perhaps for the best motives—some authorities may choose not to adopt the Bill's provisions. That would produce a regional variation in provision, which would be unfortunate. If a resident in a borough that decides not to adopt the Bill's provisions encounters noise problems, that will be extremely frustrating. I shall press Eastbourne borough council to go ahead and adopt the provisions come what may. My fervent hope is that it will implement and adopt the provisions in full when they become law. I believe that, like me, the council will look to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North with gratitude for having worked so hard in pushing this important Bill through its various stages.
        Mr. Jenkin: I do not wish to detain the House, because the amendments have been discussed at some length. Nor do I wish to detract from the achievements of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) in getting the Bill thus far. He is addressing an important concern, particularly for constituencies such as his own, as I made clear when I spoke on the matter on 10 May.
        I first became interested in noise—it is important to qualify our discussions on the amendments in this context—when I was a schoolboy, and I was given an essay as a punishment entitled "What noise does grass make when it is growing?" More particularly, another title, "What noise annoys an oyster most?", was most apposite for someone who became a Colchester Member of Parliament. Noise has been a preoccupation of mine for many years, and it is therefore a pleasure to support my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North in his overall objective of getting the Bill on to the statute book.
        I share the concerns of a great many hon. Friends who have spoken in this debate about the amendments. On 10 May, I made it clear that my support for the Bill was based on the fact that it was an enabling and decentralising measure. It gave powers to local authorities, not obligations. Over the past 20 or 30 years, we have centralised too much—perhaps to the detriment of good public administration and of the public accountability of local authorities.
        I thoroughly concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff), although I was disappointed that he did not quote from my speech at length, as I am far too modest to do so myself. However, I reiterate what I said on 10 May, and I refer my hon. Friends to those comments. I also agree entirely with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh), whose scepticism about the effectiveness of legislation to deal with every eventuality is entirely justified. The great strength of the Bill is that it gives local authorities discretion to use extra legal powers, rather than an obligation. That was reflected in the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) and for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson).
        I have great respect for what my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant) said about his frustration that local authorities do not do enough of what we want, but in a democracy in which we respect local

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        democracy, that is a matter for them. We must impose obligations and restraints on local authorities to fulfil certain criteria, not least those concerning matters of money, debt and taxation.
        Our constituents require protection from excesses in those respects that would upset the general conduct of the economy; but in a matter as localised as noise, even I become a strong supporter of the Delors concept of subsidiarity where there is clearly a strong argument for allowing decisions to be taken at a much more local level than that of a national Parliament or a Secretary of State. That is what draws me to discuss the amendment. I am very interested in the process of argument and decision that concludes with us discussing the amendments in the House today.
        Mr. Dykes: My hon. Friend raises an interesting point which, I think. is in order—the relationship between local and central Government as expressed in the amendment. Many people feel that, surprisingly, the previous Conservative Government interfered too much in local government and centralised too much, whereas we have always believed in decentralisation. Local authorities have been given an excessive burden in having to keep up with central Government edicts without the adequate financial resources to do so. We need a period of peace and calm in local government, and we should let it make more decisions—probably with less strident party politics. We should return to the good old traditions of British local government at its best.
        Mr. Jenkin: I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, as I was earlier this morning when he ticked me off in the Library for using a dictating machine. I apologise to him for that again. [HON. MEMBERS: "Noise pollution."] It was indeed a type of noise pollution, for which the rules and mores of the House have made provision. We did not need a policeman or a man coming around with a noise meter, and I am pleased to say that we managed to sort it out between us. I must say, however, that I find my hon. Friend's manner a little abrupt at times—but I am not in the least offended. Perhaps naturally, I feel admonished by my hon. Friend, but the matter is now on the record and I feel that I have got it off my chest. I have nothing more to complain about.
        11.30 am
        I wonder what process of discussion took place in the private offices of Ministers of the Department of the Environment when they were considering their reaction to the amendment. If my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary gives a welcome to it, as I fear he will, I suspect that he will do so with a little hesitation. He knows that further powers for Secretaries of State for the Environment over local government are un-Tory and should be taken only reluctantly.
        I suspect that my hon. Friend's initial reaction was that no further power should be taken and that some of the attractions of the Bill were its enabling and decentralising characteristics. But time passed and there was the drip, drip of the permanent secretary and his colleagues: "Minister, this power would never be exercised in any particular circumstances that we can now envisage, but it would be sensible to have a reserve power, something that we might rely on; otherwise, Minister, we would have to
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        introduce primary legislation, which would be of great inconvenience to you and your ministerial colleagues, and to your friends in the House." I can understand exactly how my hon. Friends' determination to be decentralising Ministers was whittled away and seduced from them by the purring noises of their civil servants.
        The danger is that we shall not always have—
        Mr. Clappison: I wish to reassure my hon. Friend that I have not been whittled away or worn down by any dripping. I have, however, listened to the voices—in some instances, siren voices—of some of those who sit around my hon. Friend on the Government Benches. I have tried to respond to their representations. My hon. Friend will appreciate, on the very basis of the argument that he is developing, that there have been two rather conflicting points of view advanced at different stages of the Bill's consideration.
        Mr. Jenkin: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention.
        The conflicting advice that my hon. Friend is receiving from my hon. Friends reflects the wide range of experience that individual Members have of their constituencies, ranging from the empire of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle to the pocket handkerchiefs of colleagues who represent London constituencies. I represent a constituency that is a mixture of the two, if anyone can imagine an empire tied to a pocket handkerchief. That, however, represents the urban and rural nature of my constituency. The Bill might apply appositely to part of the urban area of my constituency but with some discomfort to the rural areas. It is entirely appropriate that the matter should be left entirely to the discretion of local authorities.
        Mr. Couchman: I find it difficult to differentiate between noise created in the urban part of my hon. Friend's constituency and noise created in the rural part. It would seem that noise nuisance is noise nuisance wherever it takes place, and that there should be no differentiation.
        Mr. Jenkin: If that were the nature of the Bill, it would be taking much more wide-ranging powers than in fact it is. The Bill concentrates very much on neighbour-to-neighbour noise, domestic noise. We are not dealing with industrial noise or noise caused by farmers in rural areas. A farmer who uses a chainsaw in the middle of the night or a farmer's pigeon scarer making noise in the middle of the night would not be covered by the Bill. The Bill is confined to the problem of neighbour-to-neighbour noise, which tends to be a problem of the urban environment.
        Mr. Couchman: Does my hon. Friend say that no neighbours create neighbour-to-neighbour noise in rural areas? Are houses in the rural areas of his constituency so far apart from one another that noise cannot be heard from neighbour to neighbour?
        Mr. Jenkin: I am not saying that, of course. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination, however, to recognise the statistical probability of neighbour-to-neighbour noise in an area of high population density as opposed to one of low population density.

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        I think that we can safely say that the Bill is aimed at urban areas. It is interesting to note that hon. Members representing urban areas are the strongest champions of the Bill. Indeed, I champion the Bill on behalf of the urban areas in my constituency.
        The obligations that are to be placed on local authorities are of great concern to those who live in rural areas, where distances are much greater than in urban areas. Coverage of different pockets of urban populations in Gainsborough and Horncastle, for example, would be difficult without disproportionate expense. Local authorities in the area that I represent have complained about the possible expense of complying fully with the proposed legislation. Therefore, the voluntary nature of compliance is most important.
        I return to the substance of the amendments. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North seems to think that they are premised on the assurance that we shall always have a splendid Secretary of State for the Environment, and a no less Tory Secretary of State than my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). Have I got that right? It is—[Interruption.] I do not know why anyone is surprised. My right hon. Friend has been one of my very dear friends for many years, and a friend of the family. We are all Tories in the Conservative party.
        Mr. Clappison: I can assure my hon. Friend that I shall report back to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State what I construed to be a most gracious compliment. My hon. Friend will know that my right hon. Friend stands in a long line of distinguished Conservative Secretaries of State for the Environment.
        Mr. Jenkin: I am sure, however, that I would be forgiven for being the first to say that we have not always acted in a decentralising way, and that we must do our best at all times to decentralise. The great fear is that my right hon. Friend will not be Secretary of State for the Environment for ever. There are hon. Members who purport to offer themselves as stakeholding Secretaries of State. There is a great danger that the Bill will be used as an instrument by a Secretary of State to give us all a stake in each other's noise, rather than a stake in each other's peace and quiet. The Bill could be imposed on authorities with a political complexion different from that of the Secretary of State.
        I fear that stakeholding is rather an urban concept. I do not think that it has much rural relevance. We do not want a stakeholding society having the right to roam and trample on the English countryside in my constituency. The danger and cost of imposing extra obligations on local authorities in the name of stakeholding reflect a new danger represented by the new Labour party. On the other hand, is there a subtle plot? Perhaps we are setting a trap for the new Labour party. I fear, however, that we shall be giving yet more power to central authorities that could be abused by less worthy men than my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Therefore, I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider the entreaties that he has heard this morning and ensure that we remain on the high ground of Tory principles and legislate to take extra powers into the hands of Ministers only if that is absolutely necessary.
        Mr. Thomason: Like other colleagues, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) on introducing and taking this important measure through the House. It is noteworthy that there were no significant objections to the structure of the Bill during its passage. From time to time, we have expressed concerns about matters of detail, and I now express my concern about Lord's amendment No. 1.
        I shall not delay the House, for we have had a full debate, and the arguments covered many of the points that I had wished to make. There are, however, grave dangers in following the line suggested in the amendment.
        We have local authorities to reflect the diverse pattern of local communities and to introduce a form of government that is relevant to those communities. It is quite apparent from this morning's debate that the considerations that apply in a dense urban area such as Ealing are different from those that apply in sparse, urban areas such as Gainsborough—my hon. Friends the Members for Ealing, North and for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) made their points powerfully—or mixed areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) referred to it as the pocket handkerchief tied to the empire of rural sparsity.
        Each area is different. Each has different problems that need to be addressed by the local authority that represents that locality. Yet, apparently, the proposal is that we should introduce national uniformity to deal with the range of different objectives which the Bill should address. The amendment is fundamentally misconceived. I do not want to torpedo the Bill itself, which I welcome and want to see fully implemented.
        My hon. Friend the Minister may touch on this point in his reply, but I am concerned that the funding to support the infrastructure necessary to police noise, as envisaged in the Bill, will be distributed to local authorities through the revenue support grant mechanism—the formula that distributes money to local authorities. There will be no fine tuning, and as much money will go to the authority of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle as to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North. It will be distributed according to the factors that apply to the normal distribution of grant, not according to whether it is appropriate to introduce the measure in different areas. As a result, it will be difficult for Secretaries of State to resist pressure from authorities that do not want to implement the Noise Bill. It will be said that local authorities already have the necessary funding because it has gone into the revenue support grant.
        Ministers are opening a dangerous trap. They will come under pressure over something that should be a local issue. The problem of noise is clearly one that concerns localities, not the nation. Where local authorities determine that, because of funding problems or considered social pressures, they do not wish to implement the Bill, the complainants will beat a path to the door of the Secretary of State's office or, perhaps, that of the constituency Member of Parliament. The Secretary of State may find it extremely difficult to resist the pressure against implementation of the Bill, because he will be told that the local authority has already received part of the total funding that has been made available for its implementation. That is a dangerous trap for Secretaries of State, and they should have avoided it by not accepting the amendment.

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        If I heard my hon. Friend the Minister aright—I am sure that he will correct me later if I misunderstood—he said that, at the end of the two-year review period envisaged in the Bill, he will listen to the complaints from particular areas and determine whether local authorities have properly taken into account those complaints. It seems extraordinary that the Secretary of State should be required to police local authority performance based on the number of local complaints in the manner that he envisages. Perhaps I misheard him, because surely it is not the role of a Secretary of State to pass judgment on a detailed level about the performance of a local authority.
        11.45 am
        Where does the Secretary of State draw the line? If there have been six complaints from Gainsborough and five from Ealing, and neither local authority has implemented the measure, does he decide that it would be appropriate to implement it in Gainsborough, where there was an orchestrated campaign, and not in Ealing, North, where the problems may be far more severe but where no such campaign was organised? If so, we begin the silly situation where small campaigns can force the Secretary of State's hand if he lays down such criteria. All those are pitfalls, and the Secretary of State will find himself on a difficult road if the measure contained in the amendment is implemented.
        I presume that a series of orders will be required to implement the Bill's provisions locally. I imagine that they will be subject to negative resolution. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister will confirm that that is the nature of the subordinate legislation that he envisages as a result of enactment. If that is so, local authorities might ask their Members of Parliament to object to the orders, which could result in the House having to debate order after order arising from the Bill, because of concerns expressed locally about the availability of resources, the need to implement its provisions, or whatever. All those are further dangers of following this course of action.
        I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to think carefully about the wisdom of pursuing Lords amendment No. 1 to what is otherwise an extremely good measure.
        Mr. Vaz: I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) for his hard work in ensuring that the Bill has reached this stage. I have known him for a number of years. He and my sister, who was deputy leader of Ealing council, were frequently at odds with each other in the Ealing and Acton Gazette, which—I am sure he will take this as a compliment—should be renamed "The Greenway Gazette", so often do his photograph and activities appear in it.
        Before I finish, I shall speak about some of the things that he said about Ealing council, which, in the context of what he is trying to achieve, were a little unfair. It is, however, right to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, because it is extremely difficult first to win a place in the ballot, and then to get a Bill to this stage.
        I promoted a private Member's Bill a couple of years ago that cleared all its stages—Second Reading, Report and Third Reading—in 60 seconds. I had hoped at 9.30 this morning that the hon. Gentleman's Bill would be in a similar position, but, as we can see, many hon. Members have decided to participate in the debate. I found the contributions of all hon. Members fascinating, especially
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        the exchange between the hon. Members for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) and for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes). I have always found the hon. Gentleman to be such a quiet and reasonable person. I cannot believe that he or his dictating equipment—I am not quite sure what was being alleged—would make such a noise. I do not believe that any order could possibly be made to restrict the noise that emanates from the hon. Member for Harrow, East, so placid and reasonable is he.
        Mr. Dykes: It was the other way round.
        Mr. Vaz: If it was the other way round, I can understand that. I am grateful for that clarification.
        The Bill is important, because, as hon. Members have said, we see many examples in our surgeries—I certainly have over the past nine years—of constituents who have come to complain about noisy neighbours. That is why, when the subject of the hon. Gentleman's Bill was announced, there was such widespread acclaim from all those who have suffered as a result of noisy neighbours. Happily, I have never had to put up with noisy neighbours, but I know how miserable it must be for constituents who have to face such an awful ordeal.
        I have dealt with many cases of noise nuisance in my constituency, which I refer to the local council. I remember one lady who had been putting up with a noisy neighbour for five years. She kept a daily diary, for all those five years, of every incident, from the moment she got up at 6 am to when she tried to go to sleep at 10 pm. In the end, she had to sell her home and leave the city. People should not have to do that; they should have the protection of the law. Therefore, we support the principles underlying the Bill. I am sure that the hon. Member for Ealing, North has received many letters of support in his postbag.
        I understand why Baroness Gardner introduced the amendments in the other place, with the agreement of the hon. Member for Ealing, North. I understand the concerns. I wait with interest to hear what the Minister will say. I would not like the amendments to scupper the purpose of the Bill in any way. It is important that there is a Noise Bill at the end of today's proceedings—indeed, I hope much before the end, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) is keen to ensure that his worthy Bill is also debated and passed today. I hope that the Government and the hon. Member for Ealing, North will be flexible. We want to arrive at a compromise that serves their purpose, which I believe has been served to a large extent by the introduction of the Bill and the national debate that it has created on such an important subject.
        I hope that the hon. Gentleman will consider whether he really wishes to proceed with the amendments. It is essential that, out of those long deliberations—Second Reading was more than five months ago, followed by an interesting Committee stage—should come a Bill that protects people from those who, because of their life styles, make their lives difficult. We need to put something in place to meet that demand.
        I have had many dealings with the Minister over the past few weeks as we sat opposite each other during the Committee stage of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill. He is a reasonable person and I am sure that he has carefully considered the points made by

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        the hon. Member for Ealing, North. I hope that we will reach a compromise to ensure that the Bill clears its final stages.
        I have to say that the hon. Gentleman was rather unfair in his attack on Ealing council. I am aware that he holds his seat with a healthy majority. He won it in 1983—
        Mr. Harry Greenway: No, 1979.
        Mr. Vaz: I apologise; the hon. Gentleman has been here longer than I thought. He has certainly increased his majority over the years. Nevertheless, Ealing returns a Labour council with great regularity. At the last election, it returned more Labour councillors than ever before. It is an interesting point that, as the hon. Gentleman's majority goes up, the majority of the Labour group on the council also goes up.
        The council has done an enormous amount to help ordinary citizens in Ealing and I pay tribute to the work that it has done, despite great difficulties. A large amount of legislation has been passed by the Government restricting the powers and responsibilities of local councils. However, the hon. Gentleman has come to the House with a Bill that will allow Ealing council to satisfy one of its main objectives, which is to ensure that noise nuisance is brought under control.
        I hope that, in the spirit of the all-party support that the hon. Gentleman has received, we shall hear no more attacks on the council.
        Mr. Greenway: As the hon. Gentleman said, we are old sparring partners and old friends. I have great regard for his sister, who has been an outstanding councillor in Ealing in her time. I want briefly to respond to the hon. Gentleman's comments. Ealing council is about 50:50 Labour and Conservative, so the council is not under overwhelming Labour party control, as the hon. Gentleman would acknowledge.
        I did not wish to attack Ealing council, but I had to respond to what the chair, as he calls himself—I call him the chairman—said, which was that the Bill was not needed and that the council could deal with noise and its vexatious aspects under existing legislation. That is absolute nonsense. The Bill offers Ealing council a golden opportunity to improve the way that it deals with noise nuisance. I hope that it takes that opportunity, and in that warm spirit I invite the council to change its views.
        Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Perhaps we could return to the national scene.
        Mr. Vaz: Indeed, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I would like to finish the point as the hon. Member for Ealing, North intervened on me. I am sure that he can use his immense persuasive skills and his undoubted charm to persuade the chair of the environmental services committee that the Bill is necessary, if he feels that it is not.
        The Opposition warmly welcome the Bill. Its provisions are similar to ones that we would have introduced had we been in a position to do so. I just hope that the Minister realises that a huge number of people are desperately concerned about the issue. I realise that he has to be cautious on a number of points, but I ask him
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        not to be so cautious that he prevents the passage of the Bill. In that spirit, I give my full support to the hon. Member for Ealing, North in what he is seeking to do.
        Mr. Clappison: This has been a good debate on amendments that deal with important issues. Certainly they have emerged as important as the Bill has progressed through its stages. For example, the question whether the adoption of the power in the Bill to deal with the noise offence should be discretionary or mandatory arose during Second Reading, and we then dealt with it in Committee. It is appropriate that we should have a full debate on that this morning.
        This is a good Bill, and I have no intention of trying to scupper it. I welcome the fact, as I have done on previous occasions, that my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) chose this subject for his private Member's Bill when he was successful in the ballot. I congratulate him, as I have done on previous occasions, on the skilful way in which he has taken it through the House.
        My hon. Friend is aware that, when the Bill first came before the House, the power to adopt the offence was discretionary for local authorities. The amendment creates a power for the Secretary of State to order local authorities so to adopt. In that light, it would be helpful to look back at how the issue has developed as the Bill has progressed through its stages.
        On Report, there was a lively debate on whether the Bill should be made mandatory. Strong views were expressed by several hon. Members, especially those representing urban constituencies, about the need for it to be mandatory.
        Mr. Thomason: Does my hon. Friend accept that there is a fundamental difference between sparse rural authorities and dense urban authorities in looking at the problem of neighbour noise? Mixed areas have pockets of problems rather than a requirement for application of the powers to the whole of the area.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes an interesting and important point—indeed, I made it on Second Reading and at later stages. There is a difference in the position and the needs of rural local authorities compared with those in urban areas. That is why the Bill was originally framed on the basis of a discretionary power for local authorities.
        During progress on the Bill, increasing concern was expressed by hon. Members, many of them in urban areas, that local authorities would not adopt the offence where it was most needed. There are two schools of thought on that, but one is entitled to place at least some reliance on the expectation that local authorities will respond to the views of their residents and apply local democracy. The worry that local authorities would not listen and would not take appropriate action to deal with a problem that causes much misery and hardship to many people has been fully expressed. It is important to put those views when approaching the amendment.

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        12 noon
        My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North outlined the situation with his characteristic skill. I can confirm what he said about the powers for seizure and confiscation or in some cases forfeiture. Those powers will apply to all local authorities for all noise offences, whether the prosecution is brought under existing legislation on noise nuisance or under the provisions of the Bill. My hon. Friend also spoke about resources, which are important in view of the Bill's discretionary nature. Hon. Members clearly wonder how that discretion will work.
        The Government will take into account in the revenue support grant settlement the cost of implementing the new power, and additional funding will be allocated to local authorities. As I think my hon. Friend said, about one third of local authorities already have a night noise complaints service, and any extra cost to them should be minimal. Of course we expect other local authorities to adopt the power, and that will have revenue implications. Some hon. Members spoke about the way in which local authorities use resources.
        Mr. Thomason: I am concerned about the way in which money will be directed to local authorities which participate in this exercise. The Minister has confirmed that the money will be allocated through the revenue support grant mechanism, and will not go only to authorities who will implement the Bill's provisions but to all authorities. That will give rise to pressure on Ministers to implement the Bill at a later stage.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend has great experience of local government and of the way that its finance operates. He is right, and his intervention ties in with concerns that have been expressed by hon. Members about local authorities seeking to find an excuse not to implement the new power by saying that they have insufficient resources.
        An analysis of standard spending assessments for local authority services, including environmental health, per head of population shows that there is no correlation between the provision of Government funds and the level of noise service that is provided. One London borough offers a 24-hour noise service, and its SSA is substantially lower than that of other London boroughs.
        I do not want to go too deeply into the issue, especially in the context of Ealing, because there was understanding and warmth when we discussed that borough. I do not want to disrupt that by going over old ground.
        The analysis shows that Ealing has one of the highest SSAs in London, but does not provide a full out-of-hours noise service; whereas Bromley, whose SSA is more than £60 less, provides a full service. There should not be a way out for authorities that do not want to meet their obligations, and complain that they do not have the resources to do so.
        Mr. Dykes: Are the Minister's officials satisfied that the analysis shows that in some local authorities someone answers the phone, and that there is not just an answerphone?
        Mr. Clappison: A full service would mean that somebody responded to the complaint.
        Mr. Dykes: But not on the following day?
        Mr. Clappison: No. The full service would include manning during the relevant hours to provide a service.
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        My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North is kind-hearted, although at one point in his speech it was said that he was behaving ferociously. I find it hard to picture him being ferocious, but on the issue of noise I detected some ferocity, because he spoke with real feeling. He is responding to the concerns and problems of his constituents, and I again pay tribute to him for his skill in presenting the legislation.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) expressed the views of those who are concerned about the power being made mandatory. His constituency contains some rural areas, including Wychavon. He also spoke about the adoption of the power in part of a constituency. Perhaps he was trying to address the problems in constituencies which are part rural and trying to adapt it to provide the best possible service for constituents by taking account of different needs.
        Local authorities which adopt the power will do so for the whole of their areas. My hon. Friend is keen to adapt the power to the needs of constituents in different parts of his constituency, but that might be unfair: there would inevitably be a boundary, so that the power would be available for one set of residents but not for another.
        Mr. Luff: I understand the constraints placed on the Minister, but I am unhappy about what he has said. I appreciate that, if we reject the amendment, we will lose the Bill. Future Secretaries of State to whom the power will be entrusted must exercise it with the utmost discretion. Sparse rural areas do not need a massive diversion of resources to night noise patrols. They have pragmatic ways of dealing with that at present. The power must be used sparingly.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes a good point about sparsely populated rural areas. It is difficult enough to have a mandatory power, without taking account of different needs in different areas. It would be a shame to divert resources to an area in which they would not have the most beneficial effect. I shall shortly deal with how we shall review the operation of the power after two years.
        I take to heart what was said about busybody Ministers. Although we must take our responsibilities seriously, we should not poke our noses into people's lives. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester spoke about the differences between rural and urban areas. That was clearly illustrated by the comments of the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), who told us about his intervention in a noise dispute and how he solved the problem of a crowing cockerel, by providing it as a Christmas dinner for some of his constituents. I hope that, at the end of that dinner the constituents did not come to the conclusion that it was better to have a tough old bird as a Member of Parliament than a tough old bird for their Christmas dinner.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) was also concerned about rural authorities. He made some valuable points. He spoke about the problems of West Lindsey district council, which he had consulted, and which represents an area of some 700 square miles. He was concerned about his council's position, and he too wondered whether it was necessary to have a mandatory power for a local authority such as his, or whether a discretionary power would not be more appropriate. He was worried that the power could

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        be exercised in future in such a way as to impose its operation on his constituents. He felt, after consultation, that there was no need for it to be so imposed.
        I can tell my hon. Friend the Member that we take his concerns to heart. He, too, made the important point that we should not believe that legislation can solve every problem. He referred to particular problems within his constituency. He had come across the problem of raves. The provisions of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 provide assistance for those who are troubled by raves. They will not be covered by the provisions of the Bill, because those provisions cover noise between dwellings.
        The issue of bird scarers is serious. The National Farmers Union is concerned about it, and has been of great assistance to those who are worried about it. It has provided a code of practice for farmers who operate bird scarers. I am now trespassing a little far from the amendment, but I hope that I have answered the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle.
        Mr. Leigh: For the life of me, I cannot understand how this power would ever be used for local authority areas such as mine, consisting of towns and built-up areas in which perhaps 10 per cent. of the population lives, and a huge rural area. I presume that Ministers were responsible for framing the amendment. I cannot see why they did not frame it in such a way that the power to be held by the Secretary of State could apply only to authorities that covered wholly or largely urban areas. Why did Ministers seek to cover rural areas such as mine, where the power would be clearly unworkable?
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes a good point. The question of dividing up the power to operate only in urban areas has arisen in the past. There are considerable practical difficulties in taking that course. The argument that my hon. Friend makes is part of the reason why the Bill was framed originally as a discretionary power. It was thought that it should be left to local authorities to decide what their needs were and to respond to them.
        We recognise that the needs of urban and rural authorities are different. If it is decided that such a service is required in rural areas—that is a matter for the local people and their council—I suppose that the council will have to provide the service in the same way as it provides other services, bearing in mind the sparsity of population and rural needs.
        Mr. Bernard Jenkin: The more we consider the Bill, the more I conclude that it contains a real shortcoming, in that neither local authorities nor the Secretary of State has any power to designate certain areas and exclude others. It applies either to whole local authority areas or not at all.
        In mixed areas, there is a strong case for a power to designate certain areas to be covered by the Bill. The local authority would take the powers and obligations to cover areas which could be agreed between the Secretary of State and the local authority as appropriate, but excluding other areas as inappropriate. Will my hon. Friend consider, even at this late stage, whether it is possible to introduce an amendment to enable that to happen?
        Mr. Clappison: It would be difficult for residents within a local authority area to accept that their
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        neighbours were covered by a service whereas they were not, while all the residents were voters and paid their council tax in that local authority area. However, my hon. Friend's underlying point about the difference between urban and rural areas is important.
        Mr. Dykes: Could the Department assist the local authority by issuing guidance notes? If a local authority, in its council resolution at a full council meeting, designated its entire area under the powers, it could designate specific areas as outside the framework of the legislation.
        Mr. Clappison: That course could be taken, but it would still leave the problem of local residents who were excluded from use of the power.
        I assure both my hon. Friends and other hon. Friends who are worried about this that the existing powers of local authorities to deal with noise under the statutory nuisance regime will remain available to all residents, and will have to be enforced by environmental health officers within local authorities. The Bill does not alter those legal powers. That is an important point to bear in mind, although the Bill represents a considerable improvement in terms of night-time noise problems.
        12.15 pm
        My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) made some important points along the same lines. He was worried that the Bill went too far, and that we could end up with too much protection. He was worried that we could be moving towards a further extension of the nanny state, with more bureaucracy and more powers.
        It is incumbent on Government, particularly a Conservative Government, to be alive to the points that my hon. Friend makes. We do not want to create powers to deal with every issue, to be too draconian in our approach or to create unnecessary bureaucracy. At the same time, where there is a growing problem, which I believe the problem of noise is, it is important that we respond to people's concerns.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant) is familiar with the passage of the Bill, since he served on the Committee. His comments about the amendments and the need to strike a balance between the needs of different local authorities and take account of their different needs reflected his experience.
        He was right when he said that a great deal depended on where one lived. My hon. Friend put his finger on it. Obviously, hon. Members seeking to reflect the views of their constituents from rural and urban areas will come to different conclusions. However, my hon. Friend knows from the proceedings on the Bill the strong representations that were made by hon. Members from urban areas, who wanted the Bill to be mandatory from the start. They could not conceive of any circumstances in which the power should remain discretionary.
        The comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport were balanced, and germane to the amendments. He was right when he said that some local authorities that would be reluctant to take up the amendment might need it most. We know that not all local authorities are as good as others at responding to the concerns of their constituents.

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        My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham asked under what circumstances the Secretary of State would be prepared to make an order. He was also concerned about guaranteeing the nature of future Secretaries of State. We cannot give an guarantee about exactly who will be the Secretary of State. It will certainly be a Conservative Secretary of State, I believe.
        Whoever is the Secretary of State will approach the issue on the basis of what has been said today. If it assists my hon. Friend, I am happy to repeat the undertaking that I gave on Report. It may also assist other hon. Members. I said:
        "I give them an undertaking that the Government will review the workings and take-up of the new noise offence after it has been operating for two years."
        I should like to make it clear to my hon. Friends and to hon. Members that, as I said:
        "At that stage, we shall be able to see the effect that the introduction of the new offence has had and whether its coverage should be extended. If the weight of opinion is that the new offence should be applied more widely, I can see a case for requiring local authorities to take up the new powers."—[Official Report, 10 May 1996; Vol. 277, c. 553.]
        We will want to review progress in the first two years and take into account the level of complaints, representations and all other relevant factors.
        Mr. Thomason: Among other relevant factors, will my hon. Friend take into account the nature of the population, and whether an area is essentially urban or rural? Can he give local authorities some indication at an early stage—not necessarily now, but before the two-year review period expires—of the issues that the Department will consider?
        Mr. Clappison: The broad concern is that powers should be available where needed. From our debates, there does seem to be a difference between the needs of rural and urban areas, but it is important that the powers should be brought to bear where needed, for the relief of residents who suffer noise problems. We do not want people to suffer in silence while terrible noise is taking place all around them.
        There are clearly two separate but complementary strands of thinking.
        Mr. Merchant: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's response to my questions. I am left with but a scintilla of doubt. If, after the passage of a few years, a large number of residents felt aggrieved because their local authority was not responding to a genuine problem that they could quantify, could they approach the Secretary of State in the knowledge that he would examine the matter, and, if necessary, follow up with an order? Would there be an open door? If not, what remedy would be available to those residents? The Government will have the initiative to take action, but I am concerned about the need for an initiative to remain with aggrieved residents.
        Mr. Clappison: We hope that local authorities will listen to their residents and adopt the power if necessary. We recognise that there may be circumstances in which it would be desirable to make the order mandatory, where a local authority has not used its discretionary powers. We would want to listen to anything that local residents might
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        have to tell us about that aspect. I am sure that the amendments have taken into account the fact that some councils do not respond to residents' concerns.
        Mr. Luff: Local councils are better placed to assess their residents' concerns than central Government. If a small group of aggrieved residents tells the Secretary of State, "We want you to impose an order," how will he satisfy himself that their view is genuinely representative? What consultation would he have with the wider community? I still believe that local authorities are best placed to make a judgment.
        Mr. Clappison: That view was taken when the Bill was originally drafted, when it did not include the power to make an offence mandatory. I remind the House of the views of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, which wrote to me to support the creation of the new offence, but only if it were discretionary. It is worth quoting again the institute's view, as I did on Report:
        "it must be up to individual local authorities to tailor their noise service in accordance with the needs of the community."—[Official Report, 10 May 1996; Vol. 277, c. 552.]
        It is reasonable to assume that, in all such cases, councils will respond to local pressures and views. In Committee, Conservative Members strongly made the point that many local authorities fail to do so, quoting chapter and verse examples of councils that have not responded to their residents' wishes but remain oblivious to them. We thought it would be appropriate to include the reserve power in response.
        Mr. Bernard Jenkin: I have great faith in the order-making powers of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), but we should not place too much faith in the Secretary of State's ability to make local authorities use the powers at their disposal efficiently. The Government have been trying to do that with many councils throughout the land ever since they took office 17 years ago. Giving the Secretary of State an order-making power will not solve all the problems that many residents encounter with delinquent Labour local authorities.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes a valuable point of general application. There have been several distinguished Secretaries of State for the Environment over many years of Conservative government. Every effort has been made to encourage local authorities to be efficient and to provide good value for money, but some laggards remain in many respects—not just in the provision of a noise control service, which is why it is all the more important to have a power to require councils that do not listen to their residents' views to adopt a noise offence.
        Mr. Luff: Surely the correct response of a community dissatisfied with its council is not to come whingeing to the Secretary of State to override local democratic decisions, but to change its council at the next election.
        Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes a good point, but even after all the workings of local democracy, we have detailed evidence of local authorities that have remained in power a considerable time, but which still remain oblivious to the needs and concerns of their

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        residents. I spoke earlier about the way that resources are applied in different London boroughs, reflecting the fact that problems are dealt with in a less than satisfactory way by some of them.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) said that he opposed the amendments but supported the Bill. He wants the powers to be mandatory as soon as they are introduced. He will have heard the concerns expressed by other hon. Members, some of whom want the power to be decentralised and to place their trust in local authorities, while others do not want the power extended inappropriately to rural authorities. I hope that my hon. Friend sees the need for balance, and accepts that we have broadly achieved it with the power introduced by the amendments.
        My hon. Friend expressed concern also about car stereos and boy racers. I assure him that there are already powers for dealing with those problems, and I understand that the Department of Transport is also taking an interest in them.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) most eloquently expressed the case for decentralisation and for trusting local authorities. He described it as the "Delors concept of subsidiarity." I was a little surprised to hear him cite that particular authority in support of his arguments, but it made them all the more interesting.
        I concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North about stakeholding. I am sure that he is right that no one will be more suspicious about the idea of stakeholding than farmers and other members of the rural community, who are traditionally people of such good common sense. If someone turns up on their doorstep with claims about stakeholding, they will be the first to suspect that the first stakeholding to be made will be one in their pockets. I join my hon. Friend in his doubts on that topic.
        I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North and all my other hon. Friends will realise that there is a need for balance in this matter.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham has played a most active part in this debate, and he is clearly very concerned about noise problems in his constituency. His comments were absolutely to the point about the need for balance. We believe that these amendments strike the right balance.
        Hon. Members have expressed a variety of concerns, and I hope that I have been able to assure them about the way in which we shall approach the issue, and to persuade them of the importance of allowing these amendments to remain in the Bill.
        This is a good Bill, and it will provide relief to many people who suffer from noise. I hope that the fact that it contains a fixed penalty of £100 and the possibility of prosecution, confiscation and, in some cases, forfeiture will become known by those who are apt to cause the type of noise problems that the Bill is meant to deal with; and that it will make a great difference to the quality of life of those who suffer from noise.
        I am sure that all those who will be helped will feel that our hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North is to be thanked for providing that relief in their lives, allowing them to have a bit of peace and quiet at night, and to get a decent night's sleep.
        12.30 pm
        Mr. Harry Greenway: With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister, and colleagues on both side of the House for their kind personal remarks, which are greatly appreciated. I thank the officials of the Department of the Environment with whom I have worked on the Bill for all that they have done. Again I thank Baroness Gardner and others in another place for their strong support and hardy efforts on this Bill.
        This debate has been extremely good, and the Bill is strengthened by the thought that so many colleagues have given to these amendments. The amendments are central to the debate, and raise the fundamental issues that the Bill is seeking to deal with. There has been vivid and well expressed opposition to the amendments, and to the fact that the Secretary of State will be given a very great power. However, I warmly welcome my colleagues' underlying support for the Bill, which will be fundamental to its success.
        My postbag has been mentioned in this debate. My postbag, like that of other hon. Members who introduced Bills of real importance, has been absolutely full of letters from all parts of the country. I can think of only one or two missives that were opposed to the Bill, so I am in no doubt that there is very widespread support for it, across the country and from all sections of society. There is particularly widespread support for these amendments, because the legion of supporters of the Bill do not want it to fail through a lack of implementation in certain areas where its provisions really are needed. The amendments go to the heart of what people want.
        It has been said that I am ferocious on noise, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh)—who is on the Lords and Commons hockey team with me—said that I am ferocious on the team as well. I take those as great tributes, because I think that there are moments in life when ferocity of the right type is necessary and right.
        I thank the Minister for the way in which he has replied to the debate, and particularly for his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff), who said that the Bill was in danger of being draconian. I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester to accept there are times when law must be draconian. It is draconian in every sense, because it requires people to do what they may not want to do, or to stop doing what they are doing wantonly. That is a proper interpretation of the adjective "draconian", and I invite my hon. Friend to accept it.
        The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) made an entertaining speech, although it was not really relevant to the Bill. It was not entertaining for the cockerel, which was taken away and put on the Christmas dinner table of some of the hon. Gentleman's friends. I am glad that he gave them that nice present. However, the hon. Gentleman's speech was not really relevant to our discussion—I am sure he forgives me for saying that.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) rightly pointed out that legislation cannot solve everything; I accept that. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) understands that I cannot accept that the Bill is Stalinist, although his argument to the House was powerful and persuasive. I do not know whether he actually used the word "Stalinist", but we seem to be coming back to

        719
        terminology—discussing whether the Bill is draconian, Stalinist or whatever. The Bill is certainly strong, and I believe that it requires to be so. I ask my hon. Friend to accept that point.
        Mr. Viggers: The point I sought to make was that a Government do not have to be Stalinist to impose the kind of life envisaged by George Orwell in his book "1984". It is often well-meaning do-gooders who encourage Government and local government to extend their powers, which may result in the world of "1984". Such people are not necessarily Stalinist.
        Mr. Greenway: I would be glad to get into a discussion on "1984" with my hon. Friend; I taught it as an O-level set book many times. We could discuss whether the Bill was Stalinist in the sense of "1984". I do not think that the book was preaching Stalinism; I do not think that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, would allow me to go far down that road. I simply say to my hon. Friend that I quite understand his point. The Bill seeks to regulate social and neighbourly behaviour. In that sense, one cannot avoid censuring people's bad behaviour. The amendments will ensure that.
        I realise that time is short, but I want to respond to my hon. Friends who have taken the trouble to attend this morning.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant) has been answered by the Minister on his point about the circumstances in which the new powers would be taken up. I hope that the Minister's answer was satisfactory to him.
        My hon. Friend the Member for Eastboume (Mr. Waterson) said that the Bill did not go far enough, and he wanted universality. I also want universality, in the sense that I want the Bill to apply everywhere it is required. I hope and believe that the amendments will ensure that. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes) supported me on that point in a number of interventions, and I am grateful to him for that.
        Mr. Waterson: I hope and believe that my local authority, although it does not always get things right—far from it—will see the sense of adopting the provisions, so, in the context of Eastbourne, the Lords amendments are neither here nor there. However, there are people in the grip of maverick authorities, such as Ealing, who may not benefit from the Bill.
        Mr. Greenway: My hon. Friend is making the point that I thought he was making. I am happy with what he says.
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        My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin), who is not in his place at present, said that legislative powers should be limited. As a principle, I strongly agree. I believe, however, that my hon. Friend accepts the importance of the Bill, and I am grateful to him for that.
        I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) for flushing out the way in which the proposals will be financed in local authority terms when the Bill becomes law, as I hope and believe it will.
        I very much thank the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) for the consensus on the Bill. It is very important to the Bill, to me and to everyone. For the record, I am in my 18th year as the hon. Member for Ealing, North—
        Mr. Vaz: It does not show.
        Mr. Greenway: As he kindly says, it does not show, and long may that continue.
        I could not, however, allow him to give the impression that Ealing council is dominated by the Labour party. During my 17-plus years, it has been controlled by the Conservative party for 11, and the Labour party for six. There is no sense in which the Labour party has run Ealing council all the time.
        I thank my hon. Friend the Minister again for his response to this very good debate, and for his explanation of the way in which his Department views the implementation of the amendments, which we have debated so thoroughly.
        Lords amendment agreed to.
        Lords amendment No. 2 agreed to.

      Clause 11

        INTERPRETATION AND SUBORDINATE LEGISLATION
        Lords amendment: No. 3, in page 7, line 19, leave out subsection (3).
        Mr. Greenway: I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.
        The amendment is purely technical, but I should explain it to the House. The subsection was required when the Bill contained a regulation-making power in the schedule. When amendments removed that power, the subsection should also have been removed. I am grateful to their Lordships and their Delegated Powers Scrutiny Committee for noting that, and making the necessary amendment, which I commend to the House.
        Lords amendment agreed to.

      Energy Conservation Bill
      Lords amendments considered.
      Clause 1

        AMENDMENT OF HOME ENERGY CONSERVATION ACT 1995
        Lords amendment:No. 1, in page 1, line 7, leave out ("1") and insert ("1(1)")
        12.42 Pm
        Mr. Alan Simpson: I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.
        Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): With this, it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments Nos. 2 to 4.
        Mr. Simpson: I thank the Minister, his staff, hon. Members on both sides of the House and the staff of the Association for the Conservation of Energy who helped to put the Bill together. I am pleased to support the amendments because they, along with those moved in Committee, came from the Government and only strengthen the Bill's provisions.
        I remind the House that the intention behind the Bill is to fill in gaps of which we were aware following the passage of the Home Energy Conservation Bill. We brought that Bill before the House on the clear understanding that we waste energy amounting to £1 billion a year in home energy bills mainly or entirely because of the fuel inefficiency of housing. By far the most distressing aspect of that are the 50,000 avoidable winter deaths from fuel poverty in Britain every year.
        The Bill was originally introduced to recognise that one of the most important omissions from the 1995 Act was the failure to include houses in multiple occupation in its scope. The Lords amendments add to that recognition the need to incorporate provision for houseboats.
        I initially read the Lords amendments with a certain amusement, as I had an immediate vision of a film that I saw as a child. It was called "The Bargee" and portrayed a splendid life style that was fresh and free from complications. However, my subsequent discussions with Shelter made me see life in houseboats in a different context. I am aware that tens of thousands of households live on houseboats.
        Mr. Peter Luff: This is the first opportunity that the House has had to debate houseboats and the first intimation—in either the House or in legislation—of the size of the problem. However, my information differs from that provided by the hon. Gentleman. Where are those tens of thousands of houseboats located?
        Mr. Simpson: I cannot produce a map, but I can provide the hon. Gentleman with the information that Shelter gave me. Shelter estimates that some 10,000 people in Britain live on unsatisfactorily insulated houseboats. That is the scale of the omission from the original legislation. My original concern was that the Bill should meet the needs of the 1 million people living in
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        houses of multiple occupation. I am pleased, however, that the Lords amendments will ensure that the 10,000 people who live in unsatisfactory conditions on houseboats are similarly covered by its provisions.
        I now turn to the reason why people live on houseboats. It is not necessarily a positive choice. According to Shelter, the majority of those households do so because of a lack of choice rather than a positive choice. It is not a matter of people seeking to associate themselves with the nautical traditions of the great explorers of our time. The Lords amendments specifically discount that possibility, as they stipulate that the houseboats must have no means or capability of being readily adapted for self-propulsion, so the Bill does not allow for an exploration context in the nature of that accommodation.
        The Bill applies to those who live in poor housing conditions on houseboats. Shelter pointed out that many of those people live in extreme damp and cold. The amendments would bring within the scope of the Bill the possibility of assisting those households to raise the standards of home insulation to the level that they have a right to expect.
        The Bill also covers a grey area in existing law. At present, it is not clear to what extent environmental health inspections apply to houseboats. By incorporating them into the Bill, the amendments will ensure that they are dealt with on the same basis as any other permanent accommodation.
        Shelter brought home to me the fact that the amendments do not seek to add a trivial element to our discussions.
        Mr. Roy Thomason: The hon. Gentleman said that the Bill was not a trivial measure. I understand his point; however, I understand that only some 600 residential boats are registered on general waterways in the manner covered by the measure and there may be another 500 in the Norfolk broads. Therefore, only some 1,000 houseboats can fall within the definition in the Bill. Does that not make it relatively trivial?
        Mr. Simpson: The issue that the hon. Gentleman is raising may involve the definition of what is required for registration. What he says certainly does not square with the information that Shelter provided about the number of people that it considers would be affected by the Lords amendment. I simply suggest that as an item for us to consider as we go along.
        The argument should not necessarily be conducted on the basis of numbers and head counts. The question is whether people living in permanent accommodation, whether in houseboats, in houses in multiple occupation or in single residences, should all be covered by the provisions in the Home Energy Conservation Act. The broad support for that Act as an all-embracing piece of legislation should be given to the amendments, too.
        However many households may be directly affected by the amendments, the amendments will ensure that the conditions that those people currently have to put up with are brought within the scope of the legislation. We should ensure that such households can, in both a physical and a metaphorical sense, be brought in from the cold. I am sure that they would all welcome such a measure.
        Mr. Peter Viggers: The most sensible place to live is, of course, in a block of flats in the centre of a city. All the facilities are available—transport, shopping and schools—and a flat is also sound in terms of energy conservation. People can share their energy source and have good insulation.
        However, many people do not want to live in flats in the middle of cities. They like to live in a different way, with gardens. They like to get out into the country, and to have their own patch of earth and some contact with the natural world. Some people go further, and live on boats. The overwhelming majority of those who live on boats do so from choice. It is their decision. I declare an interest: I am on their side, as one would expect of the Member of Parliament for Gosport, a seaside location.
        We have houseboats in the Gosport area, and if have been on board some of them. I know that they are not the most convenient places to live; in some ways, they are most inconvenient, and they can be uncomfortable. But anyone who has slept on a boat—I mean a proper boat, not those floating shoeboxes that transport people and cars between England and France—knows that the feeling of the salt air, and the wind in one's hair in the early morning, is absolutely marvellous. People who live on boats are independent souls. They have opted for a way of life which gives them pleasure and a feeling of freedom—freedom from the regimentation that affects most people.
        What is the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 all about? According to the background notes, it laid a duty to
        "prepare, publish and submit … an energy conservation report"
        on each local authority. It was introduced by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mrs. Maddock), who is a Liberal Democrat, and when I think about such legislation, I sometimes think that there may now be a Lib-Con pact, rather like the Lib-Lab pact in 1978 and 1979, which was notorious.
        The Lib-Lab pact produced some of our worst legislation, and just about the worst legislation ever to pass through the House was the homeless persons legislation which emerged from the pact. That queue-jumpers charter enabled someone who could demonstrate that he was homeless to jump the council housing queue ahead of people from the area who could
        not prove homelessness in the same way. Thai was monstrous.
        The Lib-Lab pact produced some bad legislation, and I sometimes wonder whether the apparent Lib-Con pact is producing something similar. The energy conservation plan which has to be produced by every local authority will presumably mean that there will be an energy conservation adviser in every town hall, with an office between that of the dog warden and that of the noise control officer, whom we have been discussing in our debate on the Noise Bill. There will be three of them side by side—the energy conservation adviser, the dog warden and the noise control officer.
        How will it all work? According to the Department, the point of the Home Energy Conservation Act was to arrange for the provision of common-sense advice on measures, such as switching off lights and appliances and not using more heating than necessary. If that is not the nanny state, what is?
        The hon. Member for Nottingham, South has been piloting a private Member's Bill on the matter through the House, and I must tell him that I have no objection to
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        extending this legislation to houses in multiple occupation. The Act is there—it might as well apply to HMOs. If there is any validity in the original Act, which I doubt, it should apply equally to HMOs. But let us at least save houseboat owners from this.
        Mr. Thomason: How does my hon. Friend envisage the legislation applying to houseboats, of which he clearly has great knowledge? Are there schemes of energy conservation that can apply to all houseboats? Are the boats all broadly of the same design? Do they all have similar energy losses? Or is there such a wide variety of boats that energy schemes could not easily be implemented that could apply to them all? Would not the degree of supervision and preparation of such a scheme for houseboats be greater than would apply to ordinary houses?
        Mr. Viggers: My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I want to refer to a related matter. After many years of involvement in sailing and yachting interests—including the House of Commons yacht club—I have concluded that the Whitehall machine does not really like the yachting and sailing interests, because it cannot control them as much as it would like. We do not know exactly how many houseboats there are, and we heard conflicting numbers from both sides of the House—the hon. Member for Nottingham, South said 10,000, while my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) said 1,000. The briefing notes which I have read lead me to believe that the Government do not know exactly how many houseboats are used for domestic occupation.
        What is the first thing that a civil servant will advise a Minister to do? It will be to have a survey to find out how many houseboats there are and, no doubt, local authorities will be instructed to carry that out. We have been here before on a piece of legislation indirectly related to this matter. The Government were minded to impose domestic rates on boats that are on swinging moorings. For those who are not conversant with boating, one can either tie up a boat alongside a quay or one can have it on a swinging mooring. Most of the yachts, dinghies and sailing boats in my constituency are on swinging moorings, which means that they swing on the tide.
        The Government did not how many boats were on swinging moorings, and they wanted to impose general rates on the swinging mooring itself in an attempt indirectly to impose a tax on the boat. It became clear that the Government wished to establish a register of boats and yachts. I am certain that the same thing will happen to yachts and other boats as happened to motor cars, which is that, as soon as a register exists, there will be an ability to tax and the Government will start taxing boats and yachts. If the legislation is passed, I am certain that there will be register of houseboats. Greater control was implied by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, who stated that environmental health officers do not have as much control over houseboats as they would like. Here come the Government inspectors.
        Mr. Michael Stern: I can understand my hon. Friend's fears, but I can offer him some reassurance. I shall be referring to this matter if I am lucky enough to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. In making up a register of houseboats, the Government will inevitably rely on local authorities, and we know that

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        that will be an excuse for extra local authority spending. Judging from the experiences of councils such as Bristol with the poll tax, one way of not getting an accurate register is to make sure that the local authority collects the information. That is particularly so when the authority is not keen on collecting it in the first place. That should go some way towards reassuring my hon. Friend.
        Mr. Viggers: I am not sure how reassured I ought to be, but I am grateful to my hon. Friend, whose intentions are always interesting.
        We must exempt houseboats from this legislation. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Nottingham, South said, I believe that those who live in such boats do so from choice. They are free souls, and the last thing they want is someone from the town hall coming up the gangplank to advise them on turning off lights and choosing electrical appliances. If that happens, I hope that the houseboat resident will tell the man from town hall in salty language to take a long walk off a short pier.
        1 pm
        Mr. Luff: I respect the views of the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) and the sincerity with which he introduced the amendment, but I do not share his views. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers), I am deeply sceptical about the Act that the Bill would amend. I accept, however, that, if we are to have an Act, it should be made effective. Therefore, I accept the case for including houses in multiple occupation in the Bill. At the same time, I do not accept the logic of including houseboats. I am also concerned about the way in which it is proposed to do that.
        I recognise the difficulty that I face. If I oppose the amendment—I am tempted to do so by forcing a Division—I risk throwing out the entire Bill. The time that is available in this place and the other place extends only to the end of the Session. Therefore, I find myself in an invidious position. At the same time, I believe that it would be a serious error of judgment to include houseboats within the provisions of the Bill.
        It is a pleasure to be able to speak on these matters. When I was the parliamentary private secretary to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Industry and Energy, I was not able to express my views. Freed from that constraint, I can say frankly what I think.
        I doubt the need for the amendment because of the limited scale of the problem. I shall deal with that in more detail. I doubt the effectiveness of the amendment because it does not reflect a proper understanding of the sort of houseboat that should be caught by the proposed legislation, if a houseboat needs to be caught in the first place. I have serious worries also about the inconsistency of legislation bearing on houseboats. There are different and competing definitions on the statute book, and in this instance we are using the wrong approach.
        It is important to remember that the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995, which the Bill would amend, imposes a duty on every energy conservation authority to prepare a report. Every local authority that had to implement the Bill, when enacted, would have to prepare a register of houseboats. It would have to be satisfied how many such boats were in its area. That would be a huge duty for small gain. Section 2(2) states:
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        "The report shall set out energy conservation measures that the authority considers practicable, cost-effective and likely to result in significant improvement in the energy efficiency of residential accommodation in its area."
        Whatever measure is used, including even the large figure used by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, the numbers of houseboats throughout the country are not great. The amendment is not orderly when set against the 1995 Act. It cannot possibly be claimed that it would deliver a significant improvement in energy efficiency in residential accommodation.
        What will the amendment do for houseboat owners? The Act does not do much for ordinary home owners. The Act does not confer any grant-making powers. Those who live in fuel poverty in houseboats will not be able to obtain grants to improve their situation, even if there are the 10,000 that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South talked about. No money will be conferred on them. They will merely have the comfort of knowing that the local authority can help them take such steps as it "considers desirable", under section 3(2)(b),
        "in order to assist with and to encourage other persons to assist with the measures set out in any such report."
        The Act is weak and inconsequential in any event. Against that background, why put a huge duty on local authorities by including houseboats within its ambit?
        I can reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport that local authority officers will have no power of entry. Salty sea dogs will not be confronted by local authority
        officers demanding entry to their houseboats.
        I was happy to go along with the proposition that we should amend the 1995 Act to include houses in multiple occupation. In this instance, however, we are faced with a dramatic amendment and little gain. The issue has not been debated by the House in considering the Bill. We suddenly find ourselves presented with an amendment at the 11 th hour. In my view, it is ill thought through. The amendment defines a houseboat in a particular way. It is extraordinary that, under clause 2(3), the Secretary of State
        "may, in particular, make such adaptations of sections 2 to 4 of the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 as are necessary to enable an energy conservation authority to prepare a separate report under section 2 on houses in multiple occupation"—
        as are houseboats. So we shall have separate reports from every authority in the land on whether houseboats have been included in their analysis of energy requirements and energy inefficiency problems in their areas. That is madness. There would be separate reports on the tiny numbers of houseboats in the United Kingdom.
        Is it necessary to include houseboats? I think not. We have no realistic or reliable estimate of the number of houseboats to be found in the United Kingdom. I suspect that there are very few. I go along with the lower estimates that have been provided by my hon. Friends. In certain London boroughs, and perhaps in some coastal areas, there are a few more, but on the whole they are few and far between. It will be a huge increase in effort for local authorities to track them down, and for very little benefit.

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        The figures that I have obtained from British Waterways for houseboats on inland waterways are interesting. I am told:
        "The number of Houseboats which are registered as such by British Waterways is 309…In addition there is a further group of about 350 boats which are covered by the Houseboat Moratorium. These are boats which are lived on by their owners and would normally carry a licence for a Houseboat but their status is covered by a moratorium and they are licensed as Pleasure Craft…The consensus in the office is that those without their own means of propulsion would be a small proportion of the total."
        In other words, the amendment would not catch those houseboats because they have their own means of propulsion.
        The letter continues:
        "In addition there are a significant number of boats on which people live and which may form their home but who would not be covered by the categories above. These are people who are `Continuously Cruising'. That is they don't stay in any one place for more than 14 days and as the term suggests they move around the system."
        I think that they are entitled to the same assistance as those whom the hon. Member for Nottingham, South and Shelter identified, but there is no provision in the Bill to catch them. The amendment is simply inadequate.
        There is one other telling fact. We debated the inclusion of houseboats when the House considered the Home Energy Conservation Bill. Last year, the Minister said:
        "I do not think that most canal boats are energy inefficient because of their wooden structure and the fact that their windows are small in comparison with the general surface area. I suspect that they might turn out to be more energy efficient than many permanent and non-moored homes. In any case, it is simply not possible to apply the Bill's provisions to them. How is a local authority to draw up a strategy for boats which might well move from place to place during the year? When they retire, many pensioners choose to spend a few years sailing around the country, spending a few weeks here and there. There are practical difficulties in including boats in the Bill's provisions."—[Official Report, 17 March 1995; Vol. 256, c. 1182.]
        Mr. Piers Merchant: Does my hon. Friend agree that, if there is a serious need to assess energy losses and the conservation measures that are needed in these craft, surely the way to do that is simply by studying it nationally? There is no need for every local authority to take on the responsibility for repeating the operation.
        Mr. Luff: I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. We know that the problem is relatively small. We think that the craft are relatively energy efficient. We have to be wary—shades of our last debate—of imposing unnecessary duties on local authorities.
        When the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mrs. Maddock) introduced her Bill, she recognised the need to be reasonable. She was anxious to avoid imposing unnecessary burdens on local authorities, and spoke about the issue relating to nitrogen and sulphur dioxide emissions and the fact that reports on that would be voluntary on local authorities. She said:
        "However, I recognise the limited financial resources that we are trying to work with, so to minimise the cost to local authorities, I have conceded on that point."—[Official Report, 20 January 1995; Vol. 252, c. 9141]
        The same argument applies here. If the hon. Lady were here, I hope that she would concede this point, too. I do not believe that it makes any sense to include houseboats in the proposed legislation, for precisely the reasons that she set out so cogently last year.
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        In last year's debate, on 17 March, houseboats were mentioned. I think that it was my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Fabricant) who introduced them first. He made a strong argument. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Hendry) resisted that argument. Others sought to clarify the issue. What my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Clifton-Brown) said was particularly interesting. He drew attention to the licensing requirements under the British Waterways legislation on houseboats and explained that the Private Bill Committee had spent weeks
        "trying to tighten the licensing system to differentiate precisely between houseboats and pleasure boats. Does my hon. Friend agree that my hon. Friend the Minister could deal with that difference in guidance under clause 4 to include houseboats which are static?"—[Official Report, 17 March 1995; Vol. 256, c. 1177.]
        He was starting to introduce the idea of static as opposed to moving houseboats. I believe that that was a flawed idea that he should not have pursued, for reasons that I shall explore. I have serious doubts about the scale of the need, and about the need to monitor the energy efficiency of those boats at all.
        What is a houseboat? I recently travelled on a narrowboat, which belongs to a great friend of mine in Worcestershire. It is his home and he moors it at Hanbury wharf on the Worcester to Birmingham canal. He pays council tax and is on the electoral register for the Mid-Worcestershire constituency, but he would not be caught by the Bill. The boat is in every sense a houseboat as it is his home, but under the proposed amendment he would not come within the ambit of the Bill. That seems madness to me.
        My friend has moved all his physical possessions on to the boat. He spends most of his time moored at Hanbury wharf, but he also spends a few weeks each year cruising. Indeed, I spoke to him by mobile phone last night in an attempt to clarify matters. He was at Wootton Warren in Warwickshire, having a short cruise. The boat is his house. If the Bill is to be comprehensive and sensible, it should include boats like my friend's. Indeed, the British Waterways Board tells me that there is a significant number of houseboats.
        The proponents of the amendment have not understood the problem or tried to get their minds around what constitutes a houseboat. That is not surprising because in this year's debate, on this Bill, the issue has not been raised. The Bill quite properly, in terms of the original Act, deals with houses in multiple occupation. The hon. Member for Nottingham, South told us during our debate on 10 May that there were 638,000 houses in multiple occupation in England alone. Unlike the tangential side issue of houseboats, that is clearly a significant factor that needs to be taken into account.
        The amendments were recommended to the other place by Lord Lucas, but he provided no justification for them. He simply said rather lamely that it was right in principle that attention should be paid to certain needs. There was no discussion of the size of the problem and no attempt to set out the intellectual case for including the amendments in the Bill. I do not think that the amendments need to be included. However, if they are to

        729
        be included, let there at least be a definition that works.
        It is my understanding that the amendment uses a definition of a houseboat that is implicit in tax law.
        Mr. Stern: That is wrong. I hope to deal with those points later. One of the problems with the definition is that it does not adopt the definition in the Taxes Act 1988.
        Mr. Luff: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I did not have the time to look through past Acts. If there is not a consistent application of that definition, my concern mounts.
        Other definitions of houseboats are available on the statute book. For example, the British Waterways Act 1971 differentiates between a hire pleasure boat and a houseboat. I agree that a hire pleasure boat should be exempted from the Bill. A large company in my constituency hires out pleasure boats and I do not see why it should have this bureaucracy imposed on it.
        The BWB defines a hire pleasure boat as
        "any pleasure boat which is let, lent, hired or engaged for gift, pay, hire or reward or promise of payment or carries or conveys passengers for charge or payment".
        We could have used that definition to exempt hire pleasure boats. However, a houseboat is defined as
        "any boat or barge or any vessel or structure or any part, remains or wreckage thereof whether or not the same shall be used or intended to be used for human habitation, but does not include any boat, barge, vessel or structure…which is bona fide used for navigation".
        That definition of a houseboat might have worked. That is interpreted by the British Waterways Board together with a definition of continuous cruising. I shall not weary the House with that further definition, as it is on the record. Nevertheless, the definitions are important because they provide an opportunity to define a houseboat—unlike the amendment.
        The really strange irony is that, only this week, the House debated houseboats and incorporated into what will become an Act of Parliament a much better definition than the one on offer today. That occurred when the House was debating the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill—indeed, my hon. Friend the Minister moved the amendment, so he should be familiar with it.
        In Committee, the hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Raynsford) expressed a concern about houseboats.
        He said:
        "Many houseboat owners occupy the same site but change their individual moorings because they need to do so from time to time. It may be necessary to move to allow adjustments in a marina or other location for the houseboat. At other times, there may technical reasons to move.
        An individual houseboat owner has written to me with interesting evidence that only a minority of moorings are provided with mains water and electricity and that very few boats are directly connected to sewage disposal systems. They must, therefore, run their engines to recharge their batteries and must move from their moorings to replenish their water supplies and dispose of sewage and rubbish. They may then return to a different mooring."—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 11 June 1996; c. 226.]
        That was the Labour spokesman in Committee describing how houseboats have to move. The amendment is flawed because it excludes houseboats that have to move.
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        1.15 pm
        On Monday, the Minister moved an amendment to the definition in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill. That is the real answer to the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, because people who live on houseboats that are inadequate in some way, through lack of fuel efficiency or in other ways, will be able to apply for grants like any other home owner. Their needs are being addressed in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill.
        There are three definitions of houseboats, but if my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) is right about tax law, there is a fourth. The definition that we are being asked to put on the statute book states:
        "The residence requirement in the case of a houseboat is that the local housing authority are satisfied that—

        (a) the applicant has occupied the boat as his only or main residence for a period of at least three years immediately preceding the date of the application;

        (b) the boat has had as its only or main mooring for that period…an inland waterway or in marine waters within the boundary of the authority; and

        (c) the applicant has a right to moor his boat there."

        That is the clause as amended and it is a tremendous definition. It would have been much better to put that into the Bill. We have a definition drawn from a dictionary.
        I am sorry to draw the Minister's attention to inconsistency, but on Monday he said:
        "We now accept that the Bill, as drafted, unintentionally restricted the mobility of a houseboat in seeking to define the prior qualifying period for grant assistance. The amendment allows houseboats and their owners to moor happily."—[Official Report, 8 July 1996; Vol.281, c.65.]
        On Monday, the Minister said that houseboats move around, but we are being invited to approve an amendment that states that they are static. There is inconsistency. I sense that the Minister wants to intervene.
        The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. James Clappison): My hon. Friend makes detailed comparisons of amendments. I may not have the proper answer to his question but I shall have a stab at one. The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill and the Bill that we are debating serve somewhat different purposes. The former sought to qualify a houseboat for the purpose of a home repair assistance grant. The latter relates to the preparation of reports by the local authority and, in that context, the issue of whether the houseboat moves around is important. The original definition in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill is somewhat—
        Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. The Minister is making a miniature speech rather than an intervention. It would be better for him to restrain himself and speak at a later stage.
        Mr. Luff: The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill definition is vastly superior to the one that we are debating because it would include more houseboats and go further towards meeting the objectives of the hon. Member for Nottingham, South. The amendment is unnecessary and would create a huge burden for local authorities. I wish that I could oppose the amendment without destroying the Bill.
        Mr. Keith Vaz: I remember the speeches that the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) made at Cambridge university Conservative association. He should change his speech writers, because his speeches have got worse over the years. It is shocking that an hon. Member who seeks to promote a private Member's Bill should filibuster for more than 20 minutes on the definition of houseboats.
        Mr. Luff: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the hon. Gentleman to accuse an hon. Member of filibustering when I was simply debating a detailed amendment to important legislation that is legitimately on the Order Paper?
        Madam Deputy Speaker: If, in my opinion, it had been a filibuster, the hon. Gentleman would not have been allowed to continue.
        Mr. Vaz: The Bill is excellent and the amendment was moved just yesterday in the other place by the Government. The Bill has been presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) and I pay tribute to him for his work in bringing the Bill to this stage. He is one of the most urgent and hard-working Members of the House. He was right to pick this important subject for his Bill. I am certain that what he has done will mean that many people throughout the country can work together to conserve energy.
        I do not wish to detain the House much longer because there are other important matters before the House. Mr. Nelson Mandela is about to enter South Africa house for the first time. There are important national events going on. We support the Bill. We wish my hon. Friend luck in taking it through to the end of its stages today. I hope that the Minister will respond equally swiftly and support it.
        Mr. Bernard Jenkin: I am grateful to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I can remain in the House for only a short time because I have to attend to matters in my constituency. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) in the matter that he raised. It is a disgrace that the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) has spoken and walked out of the Chamber. It is obvious that he does not want to be here and wants to go off and do something else. It is a disgrace that he did not respond to any of the points made by my hon. Friend in his speech.
        Mr. Stern: Will my hon. Friend give way?
        Mr. Jenkin: It is incumbent on me to be as brief as possible, especially as I cannot stay in the Chamber long, for which I apologise.
        Legislation such as this raises my suspicions at the best of times. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester described houseboats as having their own means of propulsion and said that they cruised around. Legislation of this nature tends to have a similar propensity. It takes on a life of its own. The logic of such legislation becomes hairier and hairier as it is extrapolated.
        I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) for his diligence in introducing the measure, but the issue of houseboats underlines how difficult it is to evaluate the benefits of what it seeks to
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        achieve. The easy way to evaluate the benefit of energy conservation is to measure how much money it saves in the long run. What is the return on the investment in terms of reduced energy cost? Such evaluation is a pattern of behaviour that every individual and business follows. I have never understood why it does not apply to home owners or why we need legislation to encourage home owners to carry out that natural process, which must be in their interest.
        The matter becomes a little more difficult when we seek to evaluate the activities and expenditure of local authorities in energy conservation. Every time officials spend time and effort, moving their cars around, switching on their computers and burning the midnight oil, they use energy to conserve energy. That does not go into the equation. We are discussing an amendment here with all the lights switched on. I can feel a cool waft from the air conditioning system. The whole Palace is geared up to discuss this tiny amendment which seeks to save energy in a few thousand dwellings.
        We do not have a clue how houseboats may be constructed. I have taken a holiday on a longboat on a canal.
        Mr. Luff: A narrowboat. Vikings had longboats.
        Mr. Jenkin: I am sorry. My celtic background is obviously seeping into my buttresses.
        Most narrowboats are constructed of steel these days. They have large windows. I have no idea how one evaluates the benefit of energy conservation measures retrofitted to such a boat. As canals are out-of-the-way places, my guess is that it would be hugely inefficient to spend too much time and effort applying energy conservation measures. We should rely on the medium of exchange—money—to evaluate conservation measures, because that is the medium by which we evaluate the cost of materials, labour and everything else.
        I enter a small plea to resort to a rational system of evaluating what we do and why we do it, and to use the natural messages that the price mechanism sends to individuals, corporations and local authorities to demonstrate their efficiency. Resorting to legislation and grants is, you can bet your life, less efficient than if the thing had been left alone—as the amendment graphically illustrates.
        Mr. Stern: I follow the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) on the action of the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz). There used to be a convention, particularly on Friday, that if an hon. Member—particularly a Front Bencher—had to leave before the end of a debate, he would apologise in advance to the others present. It is regrettable that that convention seems to be departing from the House.
        Mr. Ian McCartney: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) advised other hon. Members behind the Chair that, as a consequence of attempts by Conservative Members to extend the proceedings longer than expected, he had to leave to represent my party at another function. My hon. Friend did not intend to cause any embarrassment to Government Members or to my hon. Friends. The House should accept in good faith that my hon. Friend left to represent the House elsewhere.
        Mr. Stern: Unlike many of my hon. Friends, I broadly welcome the amendment, but I have some doubts. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) dealt with definition. We seem to be getting ourselves into a horrible tangle by introducing a particular definition.
        In an intervention, I referred to the definition of a houseboat contained in tax legislation. It appears in the Finance Act 1988 but originates in the 1960s, when a houseboat had to be defined for the purpose of what has become mortgage interest tax relief. In those days, the Committee stage of a Finance Bill was held on the Floor of the House, and hon. Members debated at length how to define a houseboat. They ended by throwing up their hands in horror and saying that it was virtually impossible to define a houseboat by structure—as the amendment attempts.
        Therefore, for the purpose of tax legislation, a houseboat was defined by use rather than structure, as someone's principal private residence. That is at least a workable definition, but my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester rightly pointed out that the amendment's limited definition is likely to create considerable legislative difficulty—which will lead to more money being made by lawyers, which is invariably a bad thing.
        The amendment's definition of a houseboat relies on the craft
        "not having means of, or capable of being readily adapted for, self-propulsion".
        My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester pointed out that boats have engines or generators for the purpose of producing power. Unlike my hon. Friend, I am not an expert on narrowboats, but I am told that it would be possible for a sail to be attached to the chimney stack of a narrowboat and, if the wind were in the right direction, for the craft to be capable of self-propulsion. I am quite sure that even the engine without a sail can be adapted, with the addition of an outboard motor, to move the houseboat in a particular direction. So we have a definition that cannot work by demonstration if challenged in the courts.
        1.30 pm
        What should we being doing about the difficulty? It is up to the House to give very clear guidance to the courts, through Hansard, in as much time as is necessary, as to our exact intentions in this legislation. I take the point that the House is very keen for this legislation to be passed. We are stuck with an amendment that seems to be very dodgy, but we must try to ensure that, in questioning it, we do not endanger the legislation.
        The issue of associated costs has been mentioned by one or two colleagues. I have a residual worry that they have not dealt with. We are told that the amendment is designed to limit to a very small number—a matter of hundreds—the houseboats that come within the purview of the Act. However, when we pass the duty to local authorities to define which houseboats come within the Act, we are also trying to pass to those local authorities the duty of defining which houseboats do not come within the Act.
        Every local authority will be obliged to produce a report. A local authority such as South Gloucestershire—part of which I represent—which is unlikely to have that many houseboats because it does not have that many
        734
        permanent moorings, will still have to go through the expense of establishing that the houseboats in that authority area do not come within the Act.
        The problem will be very much greater in Bristol. I have already mentioned that such definitional problems as what is registerable under the Act are not problems that Bristol has shown itself capable of handling in the past. By choosing the wrong definition for a houseboat, I fear that we are in great danger of producing additional costs, legislative uncertainty and, by and large, of over-complicating legislation that hon. Members very much want to pass.
        I shall give an example from Bristol of the type of problem that this clause will create. Bristol is very proud of the fact that, by a combination of public and private finance, it is constructing in its city harbour a re-creation of the Matthew, the ship in which John Cabot sailed in 1497. In the opinion of Bristolians and others, he sailed to discover the American continent and to name it after a Mr. Emmerick, the Bristol customs collector who provided a great deal of finance for the voyage.
        The Matthew is being constructed as a long-term project in Bristol harbour. I believe that people are already living on it, while it is being built. It is currently not capable of self-propulsion because it is still only a hull to which much still needs to be added. Is it a houseboat under this definition? Will it cease to be a houseboat when the first engine is added?
        Mr. Thomason: I am concerned about other aspects of this provision, but it seems that the definition in the clause, which refers back to local government taxation provisions in the Local Government Finance Act 1992, is sufficient to identify whether it is a houseboat to determine whether council tax is payable on it. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) have any views on that matter and its relevance to the point that he is making?
        Mr. Stern: As my hon. Friend will have heard me say before, one difficultly in using a council tax definition in the context of authorities such as that in Bristol is that they were never very good at collecting the poll tax, and they still do not have a brilliant record on the council tax either. So to rely on such a definition is to put responsibility into a department in the local authority that itself has a somewhat dodgy record.
        I am not sure that the comment by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) has answered my query in the context of the project that I was referring to. The argument could go either way of whether the Matthew, sitting in Bristol harbour with people living on it, should be subject to council tax. Everybody in Bristol hopes that it will not be. What concerns me is that an historic project of loving restoration, which is designed to re-create Cabot's historic voyage, is in danger of being unnecessarily complicated because, under the Lords amendment, work would have to stop while energy conservation measures were planned. I would find that wholly regrettable.
        I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to deal with the doubts that many of us have expressed about the Lords amendment. We all wish the Bill well and we hope that the Minister will be able to encourage us to support the amendment, but those doubts will still exist.
        Mr. Merchant: I am not happy with the Lords amendments. I do not blame the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson), because he is, I am sure, entirely well motivated in promoting the Bill. However, I believe that we are in danger of seeing the fairly worthless Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 taken to the point of absurdity. My hon. Friends the Members for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) and for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern), in their somewhat erudite debate on the definition of a houseboat, have illustrated that point.
        Frankly, the Bill is legislation for the sake of legislation and will create bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. The problem with legislation that regulates and defines is that one never comes to an end because there are always subjects that have not been thought of and that need to be included at some point in the definition. That is precisely what has happened here. Some of us felt that that was the case when we took part in various debates on the 1995 Act, which the Bill would amend. We felt then that, if legislation was really necessary—we had considerable doubts about that—the lightest possible touch should be applied in carrying out the rather pointless energy audit.
        The Bill would take away the light touch and make the approach heavier and heavier. Houseboats are a separate issue from homes and houses in multiple occupation. There is a good point there, because the provisions will cover many homes as a result. The Lords amendment goes into detail on houseboats. Where on earth are we going to end up? Next year, will we include narrowboats? No clear line can be drawn between houseboats and narrowboats, as my hon. Friends have explained. What about ocean-going yachts?
        I have a constituent, a man whom I know, who lives in my constituency for only six months of the year. He spends the rest of the year on board his no doubt pleasant yacht, travelling around the world. It is all right for some. However, no doubt he is burning up energy, and if we take the amendment to its logical conclusion, ocean-going yachts should be assessed in terms of energy loss.
        Some truckers, often one-man companies, live in lorries. I know such a man as well; he spends his working week sleeping and living in his truck. Will we add trucks to the Bill next year? I even know somebody who, for a period, lived in the back of a van—not a very pleasant place to live. Some bright spark will say that we ought to audit vans as well to see how much energy is lost through the roof and the back, and to see what we can do to prevent energy loss. No. The Lords amendment would take the Bill to ridiculous levels.
        Why not houseboats? The answer is simple: the amendment would achieve nothing. We shall gain nothing by including houseboats in the Bill. I said that the 1995 Act was fairly worthless, because—some hon. Members seem to have missed this point—it does not actually do anything. It does not improve energy conservation and energy use one iota. All it does is require local authorities to produce a report. That is the end of the story—except that the report is sent to the Secretary of State and then, no doubt, gathers dust in a huge pile of reports.
        I believe strongly in energy conservation and 'want measures to be taken to improve the efficiency of energy use. I do not want long reports that tell us what we already know. We know what measures need to be taken to prevent energy loss and improve its use. I want action, Bills and Acts of Parliament rather than turgid reports that tell us nothing new.
        736
        I had great sympathy with what my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin)— unfortunately, he has had to leave the Chamber—said about market mechanisms, because they achieve much in this respect. If energy prices are expensive and there are obvious, often cheap, means of saving costs by insulation, we should be following such things.
        Publicity is of the essence, too. If we were proposing to publicise to people who live in a variety of places, including houseboats, the means by which they could improve energy use, I would object far less, but we are not; instead, we are encouraging the indulgence of bureaucrats in a pointless exercise of petty information gathering.
        As I said in an intervention, if we really feel that it is necessary to have some sort of report drawn up to tell us what measures can be specifically applied to houseboats to improve energy use—I have no objection to that—the answer is to ask one official in the Department of the Environment to spend a couple of weeks investigating the issue and to write a report. I have no doubt that the report would conclude that the measures that needed to be applied were little different from those that needed to be applied elsewhere, except, of course, they would have to be skewed to take account of particular materials used in the construction of houseboats. That would solve the problem. We do not have to ask every local authority in Britain to search for houseboats in their area and recommend what should be done. If that is not making work and reinventing the wheel a hundredfold, I do not know what is.
        Instead of agreeing to the amendment and encouraging more paperwork, we could encourage self-help. It is in the interests of people who live in houseboats or any other place to minimise energy use because of cost. Indeed, I am constructing a solar water heating panel for my house, which will help to cut my electricity bill. It is half-built. I am making it by recycling an old radiator, so I am also helping by turning waste into something useful rather than disposing of it. I hope that that shows that I have a genuine interest in, and commitment to, energy conservation. However, I do not believe that the Bill will achieve anything in that direction.
        When we discussed the Home Energy Conservation Bill last year, I remember talking about the march of the thermal thought police. This Bill makes that march a little louder and the Lords amendment turns it into a splash. It seems that we are to expect our thermal thought police to wade into the rivers and streams of this land looking for houseboats and measuring their energy conservation. I, for one, would rather employ officials and local government officers in more worthwhile, practical tasks, and not have them spending more time gathering information to write into reports that will simply gather dust on shelves in various government buildings in the capital.
        Mr. Edward Leigh: Like my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant), I spoke in the debate last year on the Home Energy Conservation Bill which was introduced by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mrs. Maddock). I struck a somewhat discordant note in that debate, as most hon. Members were very much in favour of the measure.

        737
        I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham now appears to have some concerns about that legislation. Although he took me to task this morning, I remind him that, last year, he said:
        "I strongly support the thrust of the Bill, and…the amendment…it has a light touch and yet goes to the heart of the problem."—[Official Report, 17 March 1995; Vol. 256, c. 1139.]
        However, my hon. Friend now acknowledges that, since the Bill was enacted, some of the problems to which I referred last year have transpired, although the House did not accept my arguments at the time. I was speaking to an amendment in respect of mobile homes.
        Mr. Merchant: For the sake of clarity, let me assure my hon. Friend that I oppose the Lords amendment, not the Bill. However, I have always considered the Bill to have a limited purpose, and I referred to its light touch at the beginning of my speech.
        1.45 pm
        Mr. Leigh: I am grateful for that clarification from my hon. Friend. If the amendment were not accepted, the Bill would apply only to homes in multiple occupation. I suspect that many of the arguments expressed by my hon. Friend and others this morning would apply—albeit less forcefully—to homes in multiple occupation. To repeat a point that I made last year, whether the Bill relates to houseboats, mobile homes or houses in multiple occupation, it is fundamentally a worthless approach to home energy conservation.
        As my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) made clear, the best way to encourage people to conserve energy is through the price mechanism. That is why we all conserve energy. We cannot encourage people to conserve energy merely by compiling reports that will gather dust in local authority offices. The burden placed on rural authorities with limited resources by central Government and the legislature in requiring them to compile increasing numbers of reports—on houseboats, mobile homes or anything else—is becoming increasingly significant. Authorities such as West Lindsey district council employs not thousands of staff, as some London boroughs do, but hundreds. The proposed activity which we are discussing would place significant burdens on them.
        As has been said, the amendment is fairly worthless. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Fabricant) tabled a similar one last year. He argued cogently that the legislation should cover houseboats and he made the fair point that houseboats were potentially dangerous because people relied on paraffin heaters and often there was insufficient ventilation. He pleaded with the Minister to include houseboats, but at the time the Minister, in a devastating response, argued that the Government could not accept his amendment and that there was a good case for not including houseboats because they were made of wood, had very small windows and were difficult and extremely expensive to adapt, even if there was a waste of energy; therefore, such a requirement would place too great a burden on houseboat owners.
        The amendment covers a matter that was addressed satisfactorily last year by my hon. Friend the Minister, so there is absolutely no need for us to accept it. I very much
        738
        hope that the Minister will not find it necessary to accept the amendment. However, the procedures of the House probably mean that we shall be lumbered with it, on the Bill will probably not become law, although I suspect that that would not matter very much in any case.
        Mr. Clappison: I support the motion and the amendment. I intend to be brief, but given some comments about the Bill, and the definitions within it, and particularly bearing in mind that the amendments were moved by my noble Friend Lord Lucas in another place, it is appropriate that I say something about them.
        Let me first thank the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) for the remarks at the beginning of his speech. I am sure that my officials are most grateful to him for his kind comments.
        As we know, the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 requires local authorities to prepare, publish and submit an energy conservation report setting out measures that would lead to a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of residential accommodation in their areas. The Bill is about widening the definition of residential accommodation to include houses in multiple occupation. The amendment would bring houseboats within the scope of the 1995 Act.
        Some of my hon. Friends have commented on what was said in Committee by my hon. Friend the Minister for Construction, Planning and Energy Efficiency. My hon. Friends the Members for Worcester (Mr. Luff) and for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) referred to that. There was a discussion on houseboats when an amendment on caravans was debated.
        I understand that, during that debate, one of my hon. Friends suggested that houseboats, too, should be brought within the legislation. That did not immediately commend itself to my hon. Friend the Minister, but the Bill now gives us the opportunity to think again about whether other improvements, as well as that originally suggested by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, could be made to the definition of residential accommodation in the 1995 Act.
        Having heard the debate, I see no reason in principle why houseboats should be treated differently from other sorts of accommodation that are people's permanent homes, and I am sure that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South shares that view.
        Lords amendments Nos. 1 and 2 are purely drafting amendments which would pave the way for the substantial change to the Bill made by Lords amendment No. 3. When we were drawing up the wording of amendment No. 3, we took care to ensure that it was workable and would not place a significant burden on local authorities.
        The definition of a houseboat in the amendment ensures that pleasure boats are excluded. We have heard a lot about definitions in the debate. I do not want to speak at length on the subject, but as I said in my intervention—I apologise if it was rather long—I should like to draw to the attention of the House one or two points that immediately strike me. I do not, however, seek to give a concluded and considered account of the differences between the definitions. As hon. Members will realise, they are of a technical nature.
        Given the comparison made between the definition in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill, with which we dealt earlier this week, and the definition

        739
        now before the House, it would be appropriate for me to make a few comments. For the benefit of my hon. Friends who have drawn attention to the difference between the two definitions, I shall examine the definition in section 78(5) of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill, which says that a
        "house-boat means a boat or similar structure designed or adapted for use as a place of permanent habitation".
        My hon. Friends will realise that that bears some similarity to the definition of a houseboat in Lords amendment No. 3, which defines a houseboat as:
        "a boat or other floating decked structure—
        (i) designed or adapted for use solely as a place of permanent habitation".
        There is an additional qualification to that definition, because sub-paragraph (ii) adds:
        "not having means of, or capable of being readily adapted for, self-propulsion".
        It is that second point that seems different from the original definition in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill. When the definition was debated in Committee, concern was expressed by Opposition Members, who suggested that the definition was technically defective and would prevent people who owned and lived in houseboats from applying for a grant if their houseboat could change its moorings.
        We did not wish that to happen. We saw no reason why the fact that a boat could be moored in different places should deprive its owner of the opportunity of applying for a home repair assistance grant, so we tabled amendments to give effect to that wish on Report, earlier this week.
        The problem arose especially in connection with the three-year residential requirement, which is an important qualification for the home repair assistance grant. As I suggested in my intervention, different considerations arise under the other Bill, under which the intention was to provide for houseboat owners to receive home repair assistance grant, from those that arise under this Bill.
        It is obviously important for local authorities to prepare reports and to carry out their other work, and having to follow houseboats from place to place would be a burden. That might be the reason for the qualification contained in subparagraph (ii), which excludes boats adapted for self-propulsion. It seems to me that the difference between the two regimes is sufficient, and I do not think that the definitional problems to which some of my hon. Friends referred exist.
        The underlying definitions are the same, although the qualification reflects the different purposes of the two Bills. In the case of the renovation grants legislation, the purpose is to provide for houseboat owners to receive a grant. In this case, the purpose is to have reports prepared by local authorities. On the face of it—and without giving a concluded version—I believe that that is an important difference, to which I draw the attention of my hon. Friends who are concerned about definition.
        In addition, we have followed for England, Wales and Northern Ireland the pattern of definition of a mobile home in the Act by requiring that a houseboat that is to be regarded as a dwelling for the purposes of the Home Energy Conservation Act should also be regarded as a dwelling for the purposes of council tax, or the equivalent in Northern Ireland. The same linkage cannot be made in
        740
        Scotland because of differences in the council tax legislation that applies north of the border, but the other conditions will of course apply.
        Some differences were expressed on the question of how many houseboats were likely to come within this definition, and I heard the different estimates that were made. It is difficult to be precise, but my information is that there are unlikely to be more than a few hundred. Hon. Members will be interested to know that we believe that in Scotland there will be 50 at most, and in Northern Ireland it will be in single figures. For the rest of the country, there are apparently some 600 residential boats registered with British Waterways and the Environment Agency. and another 500 in the Norfolk broads and tidal navigations such as the Thames.
        There may be others that are not registered. However, many of these houseboats will be excluded because they are capable of, or readily adapted to, self-propulsion. The link to the council tax definition, to which I have already referred, will help local authorities with identification, although many authorities will not have any houseboats in their area.
        Mr. Thomason: Does my hon. Friend consider that the approximately 1,100 houseboats to which he referred in England are the total number on which council tax is payable? Does he believe that there might be a substantial additional number, given that there has been some disagreement about the numbers during the debate?
        Mr. Clappison: I would have to reflect on those matters, as I want to be careful and not give a hasty or unconsidered answer. It would be fair to say on all the questions of definition and numbers that those concerned are valuable members of the community—they are all important floating voters.
        Lords amendment No. 4 is a consequential amendment to the transitional provisions in clause 2. The reasoning behind clause 2(3) is that there may need to be special arrangements for energy conservation reports on the new categories of residential accommodation that would be added to the 1995 Act by the Bill.
        In England, the first energy conservation reports are due at the end of November. Should the Bill become law, as I hope it will, there would be very little time for authorities to take account of the wider definition of residential accommodation in those reports. Clause 2, as it left this House, achieved this result for houses in. multiple occupation, and Lords amendment No. 4 would put houseboats in the same position. I should add that there is nothing in the amendment that would prevent one separate report from covering both houses in multiple occupation and houseboats.
        Measures of the kind that the Act envisages to encourage changes in behaviour and the use of appliances that are energy efficient are as relevant to people who live on houseboats as to those in other kinds of accommodation. It seems right in principle that attention should be paid to the energy efficiency of boats that are people's homes, as well as to the energy efficiency of more conventional homes. Of course there are special considerations that need to be kept in mind in dealing with houseboats, particularly with regard to safety. But much good advice is as applicable to houseboat residents as to anyone else, and common-sense measures, such as

        741
        switching off unnecessary lights and appliances, not heating more than is necessary and considering energy consumption when buying new appliances, apply to houseboat owners as well as to residents of other dwellings.
        2 pm
        Mr. Merchant: What my hon. Friend says is correct, but we know that already. Why is it necessary to carry out an audit of houseboats at local authority level when the answers will be those that my hon. Friend has already given, of which we are aware? Advice, yes, but why is study necessary?
        Mr. Clappison: It is necessary for the same reason that we are bringing other categories of accommodation into the ambit of the Act. I accept, of course, that not as many people live in houseboats as in houses in multiple occupation. Those living in HMOs comprise a substantial sector, and HMOs are the main thrust of the Bill. Nevertheless, it is still justified that houseboat owners should be included.
        In a recent debate, the hon. Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth) talked about the availability of resources for the implementation of the 1995 Act with my hon. Friend the Minister for Construction, Planning and Energy Efficiency. I understand that local authorities will be concerned about the possible effects of the Bill, and especially of these amendments. I hope that I can provide some reassurance. The only new duty placed on authorities by the 1995 Act is the preparation of energy conservation reports identifying measures significantly to improve the energy efficiency of residential accommodation in their areas. Extending or
        742
        supplementing such reports to include houseboats, given the modest numbers of boats involved, is likely to be a commensurately modest task, especially given that many measures are likely to be equally applicable to all residents. The further call on resources will therefore be negligible.
        I commend the amendments to the House. I believe that they will assist in making the Bill a worthwhile measure.
        Lords amendment agreed to.
        Lords amendments Nos. 2 to 4 agreed to.
        2.2 pm
        Mr. Alfred Morris: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Has there been any sign from the Leader of the House that he will be responding to the urgent plea sent to him by Lord Rix not to block the Disabled Persons and Carers (Short-Term Breaks) Bill? The noble Lord took the Bill through all its stages in the House of Lords and I am delighted to have been asked to sponsor it in this place. The Bill is of considerable importance to many of the most hard-pressed and admirable people in this country.
        Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): I have had no notification, but there are occupants of the Treasury Bench who will no doubt be aware of the situation.
        The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. John M. Taylor): Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. So far as it is within my power, and in good faith to the right hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Morris), I shall try to ensure that his remarks are relayed to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House.

  Public Interest Disclosure Bill
  As amended, in the Standing Committee, considered.
  Public Interest Disclosure Bill
    Clause 1

      MEANING OF "PUBLIC INTEREST DISCLOSURE"
      2.3 pm
      The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. John M. Taylor): I beg to move amendment No. 2, in page 1, line 7, after 'not' insert
      `in the exercise of any existing jurisdiction'.
      Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 3, in page 1, line 8, leave out `(apart from this Act)'.
      No. 5, in page 1, line 14, at end insert—
      `( ) In this section "existing jurisdiction" means any jurisdiction as it is exercisable immediately before the commencement of this Act'.
      No. 6, in page 1, line 14, at end insert—
      `( ) The Secretary of State may by order made by statutory instrument vary the definition of "public interest disclosure" in this section but no such order shall be made unless a draft of the order has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament'.
      No. 8, in clause 2, page 1, line 20, leave out from 'not' to `payment' and insert 'obtained'.
      No. 9, in page 1, line 21, after 'gain' insert
      `as a result of making the disclosure'.
      No. 10, in page 1, line 22, leave out from 'had' to `taken' in line 23.
      No. 11, in page 1, line 25, at end insert 'and
      (e) has complied with the requirement in subsection (1A) below.
      (1A) That requirement is that, before the employee makes the disclosure, the employer has had a reasonable opportunity—

      (a) to investigate the matter for such a period as he considers appropriate bearing in mind—

      (i) the nature of the alleged misconduct or malpractice,

      (ii) the seriousness of the consequences which could ensue if such misconduct or malpractice were occurring or were to occur, and

      (iii) when such misconduct or malpractice might occur or reoccur; and

      (b) unless the employer reasonably concludes that no misconduct or malpractice has occurred, is occurring or is likely to occur, to take within a reasonable period such steps as are reasonably practicable—

      (i) to remedy any significant consequences of the misconduct or malpractice, and

      (ii) to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of the misconduct or malpractice,
      bearing in mind the matters mentioned in paragraph (a) above'.

      No. 12, in page 1, line 25, at end insert—
      `(1B) If the employer has carried out the procedures mentioned in subsection (I A)(a) and (b), any disclosure relating to the matter in question which is subsequently made by the employee is not a protected disclosure'.
      No. 13, in page 2, leave out lines 1 to 3.
      Mr. Taylor: A number of hon. Members have registered their apologies for early departure, but I shall not be following them in doing that.
      744
      The amendments go very much to the heart of the Bill, which the Government consider to be flawed. I want to put it on record that the Government are not in favour of the Bill. That is a collective view that is not directed in any personal way to the hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), or to his integrity or good faith, which are unquestioned. It would be candid for me to make it clear that I do not intend to give the hon. Gentleman his Bill, and I intend to speak to the amendments.
      Mr. Ian McCartney: The Minister has shown his part in the conspiracy to prevent the Bill going through today. If the Bill falls, how do the Government intend to deal with internal company fraud and commercial fraud? If the Bill were passed, that could be easily identified and action could be taken. If the Bill is not passed, there will be a considerable number of criminal actions to undermine companies in this country, which will now go undetected. What measures do to Government intend to introduce?
      Mr. Taylor: First, I am not aware of any conspiracy. I have tried to be open in my dealings at all times on the Bill. The Government do not like the Bill. They genuinely think it flawed, and I am with the Government in that judgment.
      Secondly, the Government have, not least in the Department of Trade and Industry, an almost non-stop task of trying to identify malpractice and fraud in the City and elsewhere, and to provide mechanisms for redress, some of which are criminal in nature; others are regulatory, with disciplinary sanctions from supervisory bodies. The Nolan report has strongly recommended and fortified the in-house complaints procedure route so that good employers have mechanisms in place, as codes, with confidential cover for employees who wish to report to a specified officer within the organisation, without redress, to say what it is they are worried about or what they think is irregular or harmful.
      Mr. Don Touhig: The Minister said that he is not going to give us the Bill. I very much regret that. Will he explain therefore why he and the Government are not prepared to extend to the citizens of the United Kingdom a privilege that Members of Parliament enjoy—being able to expose something in the public interest without fear of reprisal?
      Mr. Taylor: The House, as we have been made uncomfortably aware recently, is in a unique position constitutionally, going back to the Bill of Rights in the 17th century. It would not be fruitful or useful for me to try to go down the avenue of why the entire country is not like the House of Commons. The entire country cannot be like the House. The House of Commons is the unique focus of the whole country, with a special set of rules enshrined constitutionally or by convention that are simply not capable of wider application in any practical or realistic sense.
      Dr. Tony Wright: Will the Minister just take a moment to explain why the Government are not going to give us the Bill? As the House and the country will know, the Bill has wide cross-party support. It won overwhelming support. Indeed, there was no opposition at all on Second Reading.

      745
      It went through Committee. At that point, the Government had not tabled rafts of amendments, and the Bill came back to the House. The Bill has had the widest consultation outside the House, including the business community, and there was wide—
      Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman is making a speech rather than an intervention.
      Mr. Taylor: I thank the hon. Gentleman, but I remind the House that I opposed the Bill on Second Reading and in Committee. I have always tried to table amendments that would improve the Bill. At no stage have I said other than that I am fundamentally opposed to it. I shall try to do justice to the hon. Gentleman, who has followed the proceedings acutely throughout. His credentials as a sponsor of the Bill are beyond question. There are real flaws, but I do not think hon. Members want me to engage in a litany of flaws, although I could do so. I do not say that in any deprecating way because I know that the Bill was brought to the House, and has been sustained throughout, in good faith.
      One of the difficulties is to be found in clause 1(a) which, in referring to a public interest disclosure, says that it means a disclosure of information
      "which, because of the public interest, a court would not restrain".
      That invites the impossible—the use of a crystal ball to say at the time of a disclosure that, if subsequently tested in a court, that disclosure would be sanctioned. However, that decision of the court is not known at the time of the disclosure. It is a great difficulty with the Bill, which I have not been able to remedy or regularise by amendment.
      Mr. Roy Thomason: Can my hon. Friend confirm that the Bill is riddled with uncertainties? Even in amendment No. 11, the word "reasonable" is used four separate times, in one form or another. There is no clear definition of many of the requirements in the Bill. Is not an uncertain law a bad law?
      Mr. Ian McCartney: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Should not the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) declare an interest relating to his business arrangements, given that there has been a great deal of effort to secure for the public domain a number of issues relating to his companies and activities?
      Madam Deputy Speaker: I must make it clear that it is up to the Member concerned to decide whether he or she feels that there is an interest to declare.
      Mr. Thomason: Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have absolutely no interest to declare in relation to the Bill. I can assure the House of that. It was a disgraceful intervention.
      Mr. McCartney: Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It was a genuine point of order because there are people, including creditors, who very much want
      746
      to get into the public domain matters relating to the hon. Gentleman's companies—which, presumably, would have been covered by this Bill had it been in force.
      Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. We cannot take that matter further now.
      Mr. Taylor: I almost lost my place in that flurry of points of order. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Thomason) in his strictures about the original point of order. He has expressed himself entirely appropriately.
      My hon. Friend was critical of the uncertainty in the Bill and I agree with his view. Long ago, it was cynically said by a learned judge in England—I am not sure that I whole-heartedly subscribe to his view, but we get the point—"It is not so important that the law be fair, but that the law be certain." My hon. Friend used a more critical idiom than I have used. I have spent a lot of flying hours with Labour Members and I am aware of their good faith in these matters, so I possibly express myself in a more gentle idiom. We have spent many hours together and, rather like hostages and captors, there comes a time when we begin to understand the other man's point of view.
      Mr. Touhig: I thank the Minister for his kind remarks about me. The whole House knows that there is no personal animosity between us on this matter. He has referred to his attempts to improve the Bill. I have made repeated attempts to meet the Minister and his officials—even before the first draft was completed—so that we might work together to produce useful legislation. The Government failed to respond to all the overtures made by me and other hon. Members, including Conservative Members such as the hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan Smith), who are all desperately keen to see the measure enacted.
      Mr. Taylor: I do not think that I am unavailable or not contactable. The hon. Gentleman came to see me at an early stage in the passage of the Bill. I am sorry that he does not feel that the liaison between us has been sufficiently productive. I am afraid that the Government do not think that the Bill as it stands, and in view of its origins, is perfectible. The flaw in clause 1(a) is perhaps not the least insurmountable obstacle.
      2.15 pm
      Dr. Wright: The Minister's answer to my hon. Friend is inadequate. The Minister's raft of amendments is designed to point to inadequacies and imperfections, but from the beginning the Government have resisted consultation and that makes the Minister's position quite indefensible. Do not this morning's proceedings bring the House into massive disrepute?
      Mr. Taylor: I do not agree with any of that. I do not think that anything that I say in the next 15 minutes will satisfy the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Dr. Wright). He and I have different views about this. One of the virtues of this place are that views can be exchanged. I do not think that he will come round to my point of view or that I will come round to his.
      Mr. Paul Flynn: Does the Minister agree that we are falling into bad habits on Fridays? Hon. Members have set themselves up as Friday assassins and have made speeches of stunning insignificance. There are 53 Bills on the Order Paper. We have spent four hours discussing two of them, leaving about half an hour to discuss the other 51.
      Mr. Taylor: Somebody more authoritative than l will have to rectify human nature or redeem original sin. I cannot do that. I do not often attend on Friday mornings but I know what happens then. Here I am with my amendments and I intend to speak to them, although so far I have not been given much chance to do that. I hope that no one will say that I have been reluctant in giving way.
      Mr. Ian McCartney: Perhaps we could put in proper context the reason for the amendments. Will the Minister confirm that in Committee on 17 April he did not formally oppose the clause, which was passed unanimously? I assume that in Committee he was satisfied that the clause met the needs of the Government and the Committee. Why has he now tabled amendments?
      Mr. Taylor: I am again in the same pass and I shall not be able to satisfy the hon. Gentleman. I have said from the outset that the Government are not happy with the Bill. I may not have sought to amend every jot and tittle at every stage, but I have constantly reflected on what the Government should do to make the Bill better. In trying to do that through the amendments, I cannot avoid the conclusion that the Bill is fundamentally flawed and the Government do not wish to accept it. I do not have total recall about whether I put down amendments at any specific stage in the Bill's proceedings.
      Mr. Touhig: I have asked the President of the Board of Trade a couple of times about consultations that the Government have had on the Bill. How many representations has the Minister had about his amendments?
      Mr. Taylor: I do not have the representations in front of me, but within the past 48 hours I replied to a written question from the hon. Gentleman asking how many representations I have received. From memory—I urge the House to believe that I offer this answer in good faith—I have received about 11, perhaps nine one way and two the other. I do not know, but if it is material,I will check. I do not have the information with me.
      I really should say something about the amendments. The Bill is essentially designed to protect employees from being victimised by their employers for making a public interest disclosure. The term "public interest disclosure" is defined in clause 1 as a disclosure of confidential information acquired in the course of employment
      "which tends to show that significant misconduct or malpractice…has occurred, is occurring or is likely to occur"
      and
      "which, because of the public interest, a court would not restrain".
      Significant misconduct or malpractice is described in the schedule as:

      "(i) an offence or a breach of any statutory requirement or legal obligation;

      748

      (ii) improper or unauthorised use of public or other funds;

      (iii) miscarriage of justice;

      (iv) danger to the health and safety of any individual or to the environment."

      The amendments that I tabled to clause 1, and that were accepted in Committee, achieved a number of things. They made it clear that the definition of public interest disclosure referred to the existing case law on cases in which the courts declined to restrain the disclosure of confidential information. They made the test of what constituted a disclosure in the public interest an objective rather than a subjective one. They extended the coverage of the Bill to cases such as breach of contract cases, where previously it had been limited to formal actions for breach of confidence.
      My amendments established that, in line with the Bill's stated aims, its protection would apply only where the information disclosed was confidential at the time when the disclosure was made. They restricted the coverage of the Bill to information acquired in the course of employment and they limited the significant misconduct or malpractice covered by the Bill to the matters set out in the schedule, which originally constituted simply an illustrative list.
      In addition, the schedule was amended to remove some terms that were unacceptably vague and open to misinterpretation. Without question, clause 1 is a much better drafted provision than when the Bill was first introduced. However, that said, in the Government's view, the Bill is still seriously flawed in such a fundamental way that nothing short of a complete rethink of its underlying principles could possibly rectify it.
      Mr. Touhig: In view of the Minister's most recent remarks, what would he say to Lord Nolan, who at the launch of his most recent report said that he strongly endorsed the approach of the Bill?
      Mr. Taylor: I am advised that the second report of Lord Nolan, far from endorsing the Bill's approach, fortified, encouraged and emphasised the overriding importance of employers putting in place confidential channels and a designated appropriate officer to receive internal complaints. That was the thrust and emphasis of Nolan, and I think that he was right in that regard.
      Dr. Wright: Has the Minister had an opportunity to see a recent survey carried out by the reader in law at Middlesex university, who surveyed The Times top 500 companies to find out whether they had such procedures in place? He found that 83 per cent. did not. His conclusion was that companies would put such procedures in place only if there was an underpinning of legal requirement, that is to say that the law and the good practice would go together. Does that not undermine what he has just told the House?
      Mr. Taylor: No, I do not think that it undermines it. I must be honest with the hon. Gentleman and confess that I have not read the article to which he refers. Perhaps it would be to my advantage to make early time to do so. We all receive tremendous amounts of paper to read these days and one has to be selective. I am sorry that I did not see the survey to which the hon. Gentleman refers. I join

      749
      him in saying that the more that can be done to ensure that the procedures are regarded as the correct, proper, orthodox and expected thing, the better. I support that.
      In response to the hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney), I should like to add that the letters that I received did not point to specific amendments tabled for discussion today. However, informal contacts and careful consideration of the issues led to the amendments, which would materially improve the Bill.
      Mr. Ian McCartney: For the record, let me say that my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) put that question. Is not the Minister really saying in gentlemanly language that nobody in the business community supports the proposals in the amendments?
      Mr. Taylor: No, I stop far short of that. In a plural, free and eclectic society there will be support for almost any proposition at certain times. No doubt the hon. Gentleman could provide me with a litany of highly reputable institutions and companies that, on first reading the intentions of the Bill's sponsors, might say that they favour them in principle.
      Dr. Wright: It devalues consultation on the Bill for it to be described so casually. There has been extensive consultation. Even in the last week, the Confederation of British Industry told us that it finds no reason for opposing the Bill. The overwhelming evidence from the business community is that the Bill is moving in the right direction. There is sheer incomprehension outside the House that the Government, at the last minute, should feel the need to wreck a Bill that is wanted by everyone else.
      Mr. Taylor: That is all very well, but I do not accept that we have taken a casual approach. I was reflecting earlier today how much time and resource costs the Department has devoted to assisting me in trying to overcome the Bill's fundamental flaws. I honestly doubt that the hon. Gentleman would argue when I say that it is one thing to express an opinion on a broad principle but that the devil is in the detail. When one gets down to the detail of the Bill, one discovers great difficulties. While the Bill is unquestionably born of good intention, it has all the potential for failing both the employer and the employee.
      Dr. Wright: I will respond to the Minister's invitation for a further exchange. The measure began as a ten-minute Bill in my name, then progressed in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig). In the interim, it was the subject of extensive consultation with business and financial interests, as a result of which
      750
      amendments were made. It is not true to say that that process did not happen and that it is suddenly important to make amendments. The Government decided at the outset that they did not want the Bill and have used disreputable tactics to make sure that it wold not progress.
      Mr. Taylor: I do not doubt that the hon. Gentleman has put his heart into his side of the argument, as I and those who advise me have put our hearts into our side of the argument. Ultimately, the Government of the day are responsible for what is put on the statute book. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove said, if the Bill is left imperfect or unworkable it will not be its sponsors who are blamed but, as ever, the Government. It would be said that we were carried away with what seemed to be an attractive idea, did not address the details and fudged.
      Mr. Touhig: Other organisations, such as the Campaign for Freedom of Information and Public Concern at Work, have also done a great deal of work on the Bill. It is a good measure. It offers protection to the individual who discovers something that is going wrong and exposes it in the public interest. After the next inevitable financial scandal, tragedy, child abuse case or abuse of an elderly person in care case, what will the Government say when the inquiry reveals that somebody knew what was happening but was afraid to speak up? The Bill could prevent that happening.
      Mr. Taylor: I dare say that, on face value, it could. I should tell the hon. Member for Islwyn that if we are going to enact legislation to deal with the situation that he is concerned about, it must be good, it must be workable and it must be certain.
      Mr. Ian McCartney: My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn has raised the issue of child abuse, and, some weeks ago, the Government announced an inquiry into child abuse. Hon. Members from both sides of the House are concerned about the lack of measures to protect people who discover child abuse at an early or a later stage and attempt to put that information into the public domain. If the Bill is not passed, the problem will remain. Will the Minister give the House a commitment today that he will refer the proceedings of the debate and of the Bill's Committee stage to that inquiry so that it can consider the procedures in—
      It being half-past Two o'clock, further consideration stood adjourned.
      Madam Deputy Speaker: Debate to be resumed what day?
      Mr. Touhig: The Government will give no day, so I offer none.

  Remaining Private Members' Bills

    WILDLIFE BILL
    As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.
    Order for Third Reading read.
    Bill read the Third time, and passed.

    PERIODICALS (PROTECTION OF CHILDREN) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Not moved.

    CIVIL AVIATION (AMENDMENT) BILL [Lords]
    As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.
    Order for Third Reading read.
    Bill read the Third time, and passed.

    COMMONWEALTH OF BRITAIN BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    COMMONWEALTH OF EUROPE BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    PREVENTION OF BREAST CANCER BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    CHILDMINDERS BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    LEASEHOLD (REFORM) BILL
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [8 March].
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    REGISTRATION OF IMMIGRATION ADVICE PRACTITIONERS BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    ROAD TRAFFIC (REDUCTION) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    CYPRUS (COMMISSION OF ENQUIRY INTO MISSING PERSONS) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Second Reading deferred till Monday 15 July.

    BULL BARS (PROHIBITION) BILL
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [29 March].
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Debate further adjourned till Monday 15 July.

    EMPLOYMENT (UPPER AGE LIMITS IN ADVERTISEMENTS) BILL
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [9 February].
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    ELECTED HEAD OF STATE (REFERENDUMS) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Second Reading deferred till Monday 15 July.

    WATER (CONSERVATION AND CONSUMER CHOICE) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    JOURNALISTIC CORRUPT PRACTICES BILL
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [10 May].
    Madam Speaker: Not moved.

    REGISTRATION OF DOMICILIARY CARE AGENCIES BILL
    Order for Second Reading read. Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    WATER CHARGES (AMENDMENT) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    HOUSE OF COMMONS (REFORM) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    STALKING BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    SEXUAL OFFENCES AGAINST CHILDREN (REGISTERS OF OFFENDERS) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    ADOPTION LEAVE ARRANGEMENTS BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    DISABLED PERSONS (SERVICES, CONSULTATION AND REPRESENTATION) IMPLEMENTATION BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    REGULATION OF FUNDING OF POLITICAL PARTIES
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [19 April].
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    REGULATION OF DIET INDUSTRY BILL
    Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [22 March].
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    ACCESS TO THE COUNTRYSIDE BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    WELFARE OF BROILER CHICKENS BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    HOSTAGE RECOVERY BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    TOBACCO (PROTECTION OF CHILDREN AND RESTRICTION OF PROMOTION) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    LOCAL AUTHORITIES (TRADING AND COMPETITION POWERS) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    DANGEROUS DOGS (AMENDMENT) BILL [Lords]
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Second Reading deferred till Tuesday 23 July.
    Mr. Roger Gale: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It has always been the duty and the privilege of the Chair of this House to protect the interests of Back Benchers. You know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the late Lord Houghton's Dangerous Dogs (Amendment) Bill has been through all its stages in another place, and has been the subject of a House of Lords Select Committee. It is, nevertheless, possible under the procedures of this House to kill the Bill stone dead on the shout of "Object".
    I should be grateful if you, Madam Deputy Speaker, would be kind enough to ask Madam Speaker to seek an urgent meeting with the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House, to consider the possibility that, at the very least, Bills that have been through all their stages in another place should, as a courtesy and as part of our democracy, be afforded a Second Reading in this House. That should be done by the reinstatement of the non-sitting Fridays.
    Mr. Dennis Skinner: Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It will be placed on the record that the reason why the Bill has been scuppered is that a Tory Government Whip shouted "Object".
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Strictly speaking, the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) should have recourse to the Procedure Committee. I will, of course, ensure that Madam Speaker is acquainted with his views.

    SEXUAL OFFENCES (AMENDMENT) BILL [Lords]
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Second Reading deferred till Friday 19 July.
    Mr. David Alton: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Given that the Bill has gone through all its stages in another place, given that there is widespread support in the House from all parties and in the country too, and given that it would introduce provisions that would prevent the abuse of children overseas and allow the prosecution of offenders when they return to this country, may we ask through you that Madam Speaker requests from Home Office Ministers a statement on when the Government will introduce proposals to ensure that the provisions in the Bill are legislated on?
    Madam Deputy Speaker: I can only ensure that Madam Speaker is made acquainted with the hon. Gentleman's views.

    FISHERY LIMITS (AMENDMENT) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    NATIONAL SAVINGS PENSION BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE (AMENDMENT) (NO. 2) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object
    Second Reading deferred till Tuesday 23 July.

    DISABLED PERSONS AND CARERS (SHORT-TERM BREAKS) BILL [Lords]
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.
    Second Reading deferred till Wednesday 24 July.

    SEXUAL OFFENCES AGAINST CHILDREN (SUPERVISION OF OFFENDERS) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    REFERENDUM BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    PENSIONER TRUSTEES BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    PARTY WALL ETC. BILL [Lords]
    Read a Second time.
    Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Sir S. Chapman.]
    Bill immediately considered in Committee; reported, without amendment.
    Order for Third Reading read.—[Queen's Consent, on behalf of the Crown, and Prince of Wales's Consent, on behalf of the Duchy of Cornwall, signified.]
    Bill read the Third time.
    Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

    PUBLIC ORDER (AMENDMENT) BILL
    Read a Second time.
    Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Ms E. Morris.]
    Bill immediately considered in Committee; reported, without amendment.
    Bill read the Third time.
    Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed, without amendment.

    DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    SEXUAL ORIENTATION DISCRIMINATION BILL [Lords]
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    ENERGY CONSERVATION (PROVISION OF INFORMATION) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    CHARTER TRUSTEES BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    INTENSIVE ANIMAL HUSBANDRY (REVIEW) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    HONG KONG (WAR WIVES AND WIDOWS) (No. 2) BILL [Lords]
    Read a Second time.
    Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Renton.]
    Bill immediately considered in Committee; reported, without amendment.
    Motion made, and Question, That the Bill be now read the Third time, put forthwith pursuant to Standing Order No. 75 (Third Reading), and agreed to.
    Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

    ENERGY CONSERVATION (FIFTEEN-YEAR PROGRAMME) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    SCHOOL TRANSPORT (PARENTAL CHOICE) BILL
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

    STALKING (No. 2) BILL [Lords]
    Order for Second Reading read.
    Hon. Members: Object.

  War Crimes Tribunal
  Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Bates.]
  2.45 pm
  Mr. William Powell: At the end of an intensive afternoon of legislation, it is a privilege to have the opportunity to debate the war crimes tribunal that is now sitting in The Hague and the future of an international permanent criminal court. I have raised the issue many times before, although this is the first time in the presence of my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor) since he assumed his responsibilities in the Foreign Office just under a year ago. I make no apology for doing so again, as it is a fundamentally important matter.
  It is worth recalling that, 12 months ago today, the world had to come to terms with one of the United Nations' greatest operational failures that led to the fall of Srebrenica. As we speak, investigators working on behalf of the prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague are excavating areas around Srebrenica in Bosnia. Unfortunately, they are uncovering horrific evidence that may well lead to the prosecution of those responsible for the massacres that occurred a year ago.
  While that vital work is taking place in Bosnia, it is worth recalling that the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague is also at work, and that warrants have been issued for the arrests of two of the most wanted war criminals—Mr. Radovan Karadzic and General Mladic. It is right that we should pursue all those who are responsible for unspeakable acts of wickedness in the former Yugoslavia. Although I shall concentrate for a moment on what has happened there, it should not be interpreted as meaning that I am overlooking the events that occurred in Rwanda, which are being addressed by a separate war crimes tribunal in Tanzania.
  I start by paying tribute to all those who have worked so hard to enable the war crimes tribunal to begin its work in The Hague, and praising Mr. Arthur Robinson, the Deputy Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He is a former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and he was the first international statesman to raise at international level the need for machinery to deal with international and transnational crime.
  Throughout his career in public life, Mr. Robinson has pursued the issue and placed it firmly on the international agenda. As a result of his leadership, many others have taken it up and have worked hard to ensure that we have some machinery for dealing with fundamental breaches of international conventions such as the Geneva convention, dealing with war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and so forth.
  I also praise the institute of international criminal law at De Paul university in Chicago, under the leadership of Professor M. Cherif Bassioni. There is no question but that, if it were not for his extraordinary and dedicated leadership, much of the necessary work to allow that to happen would not have taken place. Professor Bassioni became chairman of the council of experts established by the United Nations under the direction of the Secretary-General, and that led to the uncovering of a huge amount of evidence of war crimes from the early years of the conflict in former Yugoslavia.

  759
  One thing that became plain, both to the Council of Experts and to others, was that, unless we have permanent machinery, we are likely to lose the opportunity of bringing to justice those who are responsible for many acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Although I am now talking about the events around Srebrenica and the investigations there, the line has gone cold for events that took place in Osijek, Vukovar and other areas in the early years of the Yugoslavian civil war.
  Without a permanent mechanism for handling such events, many outrageous and wicked acts are bound to go without prosecution before an authoritative international tribunal. That gives rise to the danger that, if such actions are brought before domestic tribunals only, they may lack the authority that the world requires in dealing with such matters.
  I also pay tribute to Professor Crawford, of Cambridge university, who has done an enormous amount, both in the academic world and in advising the Government, as to ensure that the proposals which have been made and are still being made for a permanent international court are practicable and capable of realisation. I pay tribute, too, to Amnesty International, which has given an enormous amount of its sponsorship, and has helped to ensure that a growing number of people throughout the world recognise the obvious deficiencies in our methods of dealing with such matters.
  I am glad to say that a new body is being established in New York—a special body dedicated to bringing about a new permanent international court. I am delighted to say that the British Government too have played their part in the admirable 'work now taking place. We have provided a legal officer., investigators, cash and equipment, and I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that he will do what he can to ensure that the tribunal in The Hague has the necessary resources to carry out its responsibilities under the United Nations resolution.
  I do not mean that Britain must do that alone; obviously we must do it in partnership with other members of the United Nations. I am delighted to say that many countries, including some of the leading Commonwealth nations, are playing a significant part in ensuring that the tribunal has the resources and the means to honour its responsibilities.
  I pay tribute to Judge Goldstone, the special prosecutor, and his staff, some of whom are British, for the remarkable work that they too are doing to ensure that the tribunal in The Hague can fulfil its responsibility to uphold a standard of criminal justice that the world can respect and admire. The work of his staff is remarkable, and deserves the support and admiration of hon. Members.
  I pay tribute to the 73 hon. Members who signed my early-day motion 613, all of whom have helped to bring before the public and our Parliament the need to ensure that this issue is not allowed to wither and die, but rather is able to pick up momentum and, in due course, come to a successful conclusion.
  My hon. Friend the Minister is aware that, over the years in which I have pursued the matter, I have not always been as encouraged by the stance of the British Government as I might have wished. Fortunately—not least since my hon. Friend assumed his responsibilities—I can say with some pride and satisfaction that the Government are now playing an excellent role, not only in the Hague and with the assistance that they have been
  760
  giving to the tribunal dealing with events in Rwanda, but in the campaign being carried out at the UN to ensure a permanent international court.
  One thing is perfectly plain—we cannot move from adhoc courts to ad hoc tribunals. The absence of permanent machinery to enforce the international conventions that outlaw outrageous forms of criminal activity has been one of the substantial deficiencies of the international order and of the UN in the generation since its founding. We can be reassured by the responsible and respected way in which The Hague has carried out its work that there are real grounds for supposing not only that the court is needed, but that it can work to the kind of standards of which all of us who are used to democratic procedures and a proper criminal trial process can feel proud.
  The Government's action in the sixth committee of the UN last autumn, and the positive statement made there on behalf of the Government, reassures and encourages me that Britain will play a substantial part in encouraging other nations with whom we have dealings—not only in Europe and the Commonwealth, but throughout the world—that the time is coming when we ought to be creating by UN statute a permanent court.
  Before the Minister has the opportunity of saying a few words in reply to the matters that I have raised, I want to underline some of the most positive aspects of what the representative of the Government said in the sixth committee when it met in New York last year. The important points about a permanent international court are these: it must be established by treaty under the United Nations; it must have the authority that comes from the UN itself; and it will be therefore necessary for us to move to treaty-creating, promoting and concluding conference as early as possible; and the court must be a permanent institution.
  As I have said, we dealt with the outrage to world, and particularly European, public opinion by what television screens were showing of events in the former Yugoslavia, by establishing an ad hoc court to deal only with Yugoslavia. It was apparent at the same time that events in Rwanda were leading to exactly the same kind of anxieties about breaches of fundamental international statutes and conventions.
  I say with some reluctance—but with realism—that, somewhere in the world, there will be future Yugoslavias and Rwandas. The way in which we can handle them is to have a permanent institution, and not merely a succession of ad hoc ones, with all the disadvantages that such institutions are likely to have.
  There is a massive amount of relevant literature, and there has been a huge amount of argument, especially in international legal circles. The world is indebted to the leadership of Professor Bassioni. All of us who are genuinely interested in seeing a permanent international court want to stress that the purpose of such a court is to be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions or national criminal systems.
  We do not want to create a supranational institution that can, as it were, take over the responsibilities that all nation states have to ensure that the rule of law and criminal justice is properly and effectively enforced. I have little doubt, however, that there is a real place for an international court that is complementary to national jurisdictions and has the authority and responsibility of handling the limited categories of offence that are defined

  761
  either in customary international criminal law or in the Geneva conventions, which proscribe and outlaw certain types of conduct, but for which, when the conventions were written, no international means of enforcement were established.
  Unless we can have a system of international criminal justice that deals with the really dreadful cases of human rights abuse, we shall find that the deterrent effect of an effective system of criminal justice will be absent from the world order, and that future Yugoslavias and Rwandas will be much more likely.
  I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister and the Government generally now feel that they are in a position, as a result of the encouraging remarks made in the sixth committee, to welcome an international conference to discuss a draft convention—a draft treaty—and to try to move that forward as quickly as the machinery of the United Nations will allow. Obviously that process will involve a great deal of consultation. Completion cannot be achieved as quickly as some of the legislation that we have been considering this afternoon, which has had a remarkably swift parliamentary passage.
  I do not expect the same speed for an international criminal court, but I stress that there is a need for such a body, and that Great Britain can play a role in promoting one. Great Britain can also play a role in encouraging other states to fulfil their obligations, which they have accepted under the United Nations, for the existing tribunals in the Hague and in Africa, and to accept the realistic idea that the time has come for us to proceed to a better means of enforcing international criminal justice in the limited category of supreme crimes against humanity, by the establishment of an international criminal court.
  3.2 pm
  The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Sir Nicholas Bonsor): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Mr. Powell). It is a privilege and a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to reply to the debate that he has initiated. I am sorry that it has to proceed in such an empty Chamber. My hon. Friend has raised an extremely important issue, and one that the House must treat with the utmost seriousness.
  The past 10 years, unfortunately, have seen a disturbing increase in the number of war crimes. Thirty or more armed conflicts, most of them internal, are being fought in different parts of the world today. The main victims, more often than not, comprise the civilian population. Indeed, in some cases, the dispersal or even the wholesale destruction of opposing civilian populations seems to have become the objective of many conflicts. The need to protect the victims of conflict remains as pressing as ever.
  The Government have consistently supported initiatives aimed at bringing war criminals to justice. In that context, we supported the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals to deal with the atrocities that took place in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Indeed, we were co-sponsors of Security Council resolutions 827 and 935, which established those tribunals.
  My hon. Friend raised three specific issues: the Yugoslav tribunal, the Rwanda tribunal and the permanent court. In the few moments that remain, I shall try to deal with those issues.
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  Some of the worst war crimes that we have had to deal with in recent years have taken place in the former Yugoslavia. Before taking on my present job, I was, as the House knows, Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, so I have had the unfortunate experience of visiting the war zone about a dozen times since the conflict began. I have seen the full horror of what human nature is capable of, and what I have seen in that unhappy land has filled me with gloom.
  I believe that all those, of whatever ethnic background, who committed war crimes in the recent conflict should—indeed, must—be brought to justice. Prosecuting those who are guilty of committing war crimes will send a clear signal that guilt is based not on ethnic origin but on the actions of individuals. I believe that it will help the peace process to take hold, and will promote reconciliation—reconciliation that would be extremely difficult.
  I was in Mostar three weeks ago, and I asked one of the leading Muslim citizens about the chances of reconciliation between the Muslim and Croat communities in that town. The rather chilling response was, "The trouble, Minister, is that 2,000 of our people have been murdered, and we know the individuals responsible for those crimes." In those circumstances and against that background, it will be an extremely difficult task for the international community to re-establish peace, but that is our purpose, and we must not fail in helping to achieve that end.
  We have therefore given the Yugoslav tribunal considerable political, financial and practical support to ensure that it succeeds in its important work. In particular, we have given £1.3 million in assessed contributions, and have made voluntary contributions worth almost £500,000 more to second investigators to the office of the prosecutor. We have contributed £75,000-worth of equipment for the office of the prosecutor and the tribunal's forensic activities.
  We have made United Kingdom service men available to the tribunal for interview on their return from serving in Bosnia. Indeed, we are one of the largest providers of intelligence materials to the tribunal. On 15 March this year, the United Nations (International Tribunal) (Former Yugoslavia) Order came into force, enabling the United Kingdom to arrest and transfer indicted individuals to the tribunal. We are one of only a dozen or so states so far to have taken that action.
  As a result of the support given by the United Kingdom and others, and the hard work of the prosecutor's office, the tribunal has made significant and welcome progress. For example, it has indicted 75 people for crimes committed against all three ethnic groups. Seven people are already in custody, including the chief of staff of the Bosnian Croat armed forces, and a member of the Bosnian Serb army who has confessed to taking part in the massacre of Bosnian civilians after the fall of Srebrenica, to which my hon. Friend referred. Another indicted Bosnian Croat has been arrested and awaits transfer to the tribunal.
  The first trial started on 7 May, and several others are expected to take place this year. We expect more progress as a result of the exhumations that are currently taking place in Srebrenica—and appalling they are.
  We accept that many problems still exist. Prime responsibility to deliver indicted prisoners to the tribunal rests with the parties, and we must emphasise that.

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  We strongly condemn the failure of those who have not co-operated fully with the tribunal. We have been active in the Security Council, supporting recent presidential statements that have called on all parties to comply with their international obligations, and to arrest and transfer those indicted to the tribunal. We have also applied pressure on the parties to ensure compliance. I am glad to give my hon. Friend the assurance that we shall continue to do so, and that we shall use our best endeavours in that regard.
  Time presses, so I shall move on to the Rwanda tribunal, for which our support is just as unequivocal as our support for the Bosnian and former Yugoslavia tribunal. No one could fail to be horrified by the extent of the genocide that took place in Rwanda. I believe that more than 700,000 people have been massacred in the course of that operation. I believe that, if we are to help those who are promoting reconciliation and rebuilding the social fabric of Rwanda, it is essential that the organisers of the genocide be brought to account for their crimes.
  We have made substantial financial and logistical contributions. Last year, we seconded three policemen to help establish the office of the prosecutor in Kigali. At the tribunal's request, we extended the secondment of one of them for a further 18 months. In addition, we have made contributions of more than £100,000 to fund the procurement of vehicles and office equipment and to hire a translator.
  We are encouraged by the progress that the tribunal has made recently. It has indicted 11 individuals to date, and is currently investigating others in custody in Belgium, Switzerland, Zambia, Cameroon and Ethiopia. The first trials are expected to start around October.
  The Government endorse and encourage the establishment of an international criminal court. Indeed, our support is shown by the action we have taken. My hon. Friend mentioned the background essentials that must be addressed in making sure that the court we set up is the one we ultimately want to be responsible for trying international crime. My hon. Friend rightly said that the court must be established by treaty, and must have a strong link with, and be under the control of, the United Nations.
  In order to ensure that the court has sufficiently widespread support, there would have to be a requirement for a relatively high number of ratifications and accessions to the treaty before it came into force. A treaty that did not have adequate international support would not in itself be adequate, and the court would therefore not be effective.
  As my hon. Friend said, it would be a permanent institution, but in order to give it the necessary flexibility, cost-effectiveness and ability to cope with its different tasks, the judges of the court and its staff would be permanently available rather than permanently engaged. They would act only when required to do so to consider a case submitted to the court.
  In today's difficult financial climate, we must adopt imaginative and flexible arrangements for this unique court. I am afraid that history does not give us much
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  encouragement when it comes to being sure that the United Nations will get adequate financial support for its operations, in that all too many countries are already in default of their payments to the UN. I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that we must be realistic about the sort and extent of court that we wish to set up, and that we must limit the cost of doing so.
  The court must be staffed by judges with the highest qualifications. It is essential that the candidates for appointment have judicial and criminal trial experience. Again, that is a lesson we have learnt from other international forums. The choice of the prosecutor is also of the utmost importance, and we consider it essential to find someone for the job with the necessary experience in conducting investigations and prosecutions of criminal cases.
  A fundamental characteristic of the court, also mentioned by my hon. Friend, would be that it was complementary to national criminal justice systems. Resort would be made to it only where national systems were not available or were ineffective. Provisions on this so-called complementarity principle should be included in the statute setting up the court, and procedures laid down for it to take the necessary decisions on whether the complementarity conditions were met.
  We favour limiting the jurisdiction of the court to a few core crimes. These are the crimes which represent the most serious offences of concern to the international community as a whole, because of their magnitude and the situations in which they occur.
  Any system of criminal law—in any jurisdiction—requires that there be substantive and procedural law as clear and precise as possible in order that individuals may know exactly where they stand. A new international court would be no different in that respect.
  One aspect that my hon. Friend did not mention is the importance that the rights of the accused are protected. He must be sure that he will be tried under the proper process of law, and that his rights as an individual against being wrongly prosecuted are fully protected. There must be satisfactory arrangements for co-operation between states' parties and the court in respect of investigations, and the effective and speedy transfer of individuals, taking account of existing structures of judicial co-operation.
  The United Kingdom has a proud tradition of upholding the rule of law and of seeking to bring war criminals to justice. We will continue to support the efforts of the international tribunals at this vital stage in their work. We will also work hard to ensure that the negotiations on a statute for an international criminal court are brought to a satisfactory conclusion, as soon as that can properly be done.
  In those ways, we will work with the international community to bring home to the perpetrators of war crimes that they cannot and will not remain unpunished.
  Question put and agreed to.
  Adjourned accordingly at fourteen minutes past Three o'clock.