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Canterbury City Council Bill, Leeds City Council Bill, Nottingham City Council Bill and Reading Borough Council Bill

My hon. Friend has made a good point. Some of us have been involved in extensive debates on these Bills. The Second Reading debates on the Manchester City Council and Bournemouth Borough Council Bills took place in June last year, were adjourned, and were resumed in October. Those of us who were involved in those debates may like to take some credit for the fact that our actions deterred a lot of the other councils, to which my hon. Friend refers, from bringing forward their private Bills, no doubt much to the relief of the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Private Bill Office, because they wanted to reflect on what was happening, not least in terms of the Durham university report, the response of this House to that report, and now the Government response. Therefore, my hon. Friend's point is important. We are concerned about piecemeal legislation making the situation unsatisfactory for the genuine pedlar, who would not know whether different rules will apply in different parts of the country if different regimes operate in different places. Concern has also been expressed about the impact on adjoining boroughs and local authority areas, and there is a general desire to have some common practice again in the way in which the police licence pedlars so that those licences apply throughout the country. At present, each individual police force is responsible for licensing shotguns that can then be used anywhere in the country, but they have a common system for doing that, and I think there is a lot to be said for having a similarly common system for the licensing of pedlars. I hope there will be a response from the promoters of some of these Bills that will help steer us past this difficult dilemma to do with whether or not we should show our sympathy for Reading and Leeds by saying we should either abstain or support the revival motion, or whether we should display our displeasure at Nottingham and therefore say we should oppose the revival motion. The jury will be out on that, but I hope that we will get some responses to help us reach a conclusion.