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Canterbury City Council Bill

The national legislation could make the necessary reconciliation in the Act, so I do not see any problem there whatever. Indeed, a key point on which I hope to command support across the House, is that the national legislation, when it comes, should respect the needs of individual local authorities to legislate through byelaws in a way that suits their areas, towns and city centres. I would hope that a one-size-fits-all approach would not emerge. That is very important. We have heard about the differences between circumstances in Canterbury and in Weston-super-Mare. I can confirm that the situation in the town centre of Kingston, in my constituency, is probably very different from that in Canterbury or in Weston-super-Mare. In Kingston, there are regularly street traders and pedlars—probably not as regularly as in Canterbury, but on most weekends and some weekdays. It would be a welcome new freedom for the local authority to be able to decide whether to take action on this matter, as long as that ability was not killed by some overarching, over-prescriptive, over-bureaucratic national framework; it must be an enabling framework. That could be advantageous. In Kingston, we had the experiment of having the first business improvement district in the country. There are now many other BIDs, but Kingston First was the first. I sat on the Committee that considered the Government Bill that introduced BIDs. The resulting legislation has enabled, with a number of different local authorities going ahead with measures, other authorities to work out what is right for them. One size has not fitted all with the BID approach to local economic management and development, and neither should one size fit all with this type of measure. The success of those initiatives suggests that we must be as flexible as possible if we go down the national framework route.