The government has dropped provisions in the Localism Bill that would have enabled small local groups to call referendums.
Speaking as the House of Lords debated the Bill this week, local government minister Baroness Hanham said she had ‘listened to the concerns and anxieties that were raised… about the expense’ and decided ‘local referendums do not need to have a place within this Bill’.
The clauses would have allowed just 5% of voters in an electoral ward to trigger a non-binding local referendum on any subject.
Hanham’s climbdown followed objections from all the main parties.
Liberal Democrat Lord Greaves said holding such advisory referendums ‘would be very expensive in relation to its value’.
They could distort the outcome of local elections if they ran in tandem with them, or cause extra costs if held separately, Greaves added.
He also warned that they would be ‘open to abuse by extreme groups’, and that councils would find it hard to refuse to hold ‘large numbers of referendums on all kinds of things’.
Lord True, Conservative leader of the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, said referendums could ‘be a powerful and legitimate weapon of public power and authority’. But he added that the ease with which the Bill would have allowed polls to be called led to ‘problems of cost and potential abuse’.
Labour’s Lord Beecham, a former chair of the Local Government Association, said the Bill would have allowed small minorities to ‘engender petitions on any subject under the sun, at any time and at any cost’.
The withdrawal of the proposal does not affect referendums on the creation of elected mayors or on planning policies, which are dealt with elsewhere in the Bill.
