Jeremy Leggett gave evidence.

For this evidence session, we have until 4.10 pm, so you could be answering questions for a very long time, Mr Leggett. Please could you introduce yourself for the record? Thank you for your flexibility.

Jeremy Leggett:

It is my pleasure. My name is Jeremy Leggett. I am a policy adviser for ACRE, which stands for Action with Communities in Rural England. Would you like me to explain who we are as an organisation, Chair? We may not be familiar to many of the Committee. We are an England-wide charity that supports rural life throughout England. We do so primarily through 38 county charities, broadly one in each shire county, each of which has a village halls adviser who provides advice, support and training to the village halls within their county. Some counties have up to 100 or 150 entirely voluntarily run village halls.

I should say that ACRE, as the national body, prepares model documents such as hiring agreements that are used by the majority of village halls throughout England. With adaptation, they are frequently used in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well by our sister organisations. Because of that, I should also add that, as this is a reserved matter, we have been in touch with our sister organisations in the other UK nations about the implications of the Bill in their areas. I can reasonably confidently speak for my colleagues in Scotland. However, the situation with community buildings in Northern Ireland is somewhat different and has some particular complications. As I believe there is not an MP from Northern Ireland on the Committee, that may be something we could pick up on, or I could recommend who could be contacted there.

I call the Minister.

I am happy to pass.

Okay. I call Tim Roca.

Q Mr Leggett, could you give your views on the change of the venue capacity threshold from 100 to 200?

Jeremy Leggett:

Yes. We welcome the threshold’s being raised, but I should go into a little bit of technical detail. When the threshold was set at 100, it would have included pretty much all the 10,000 or so village halls in England. That is largely to do with the village hall dimensions you need for short mat bowls and a badminton court, which give you a theatre-style capacity of a little over a hundred. Whether that capacity is ever used in that way is very questionable. So, certainly following the introduction of the Bill after the supplementary consultation on the standard tier, we welcomed the threshold’s being raised, but more because it took a lot of those village halls where the legislation would be most problematic out of scope. I am more than happy to go further into why it is problematic for them if you wish.

We have heard quite a lot today about the fiscal impact on businesses, the training and the timing, but many of the organisations the Bill will catch are run by volunteers. There certainly would have been more caught under the 100 threshold, but I am interested to hear your thoughts about the 200 threshold. What do you think the Bill will mean for those organisations? Do you have a sense of the challenges that might throw up?Q

Jeremy Leggett:

Having sat in on the discussion this morning, I obviously have some anxieties about the possibility of the threshold being dropped back down to 100, as well as about having a power in the Bill for the Secretary of State to bring the threshold back down to 100 anyway if that is seen to be required. The village halls that responded to the supplementary consultation on the standard tier did so thinking that the limit was going to be 100. If you recall, the supplementary consultation was carried out before a redraft of the Bill was made public so, as I understand it, there was some concern that a lot of village halls and similar organisations were responding quite negatively to the consultation because they thought the limit was going to be 100. Raising the threshold has taken quite a lot of those out, but it is probably worth at least thinking about why so many volunteer-run premises were so concerned about the standard tier when the lower threshold was 100. I can go further if you would like.

That would be helpful.

Jeremy Leggett:

Almost all the village halls of that size in England, Scotland and Wales are run as unincorporated associations. The charity itself is not a legal entity. The responsibilities for managing the charity are held personally and severally by the trustees, of which there might be between six and 10. So all the obligations under the Bill would fall to that group of people. Although the trustees of village halls voluntarily manage the halls for the benefit of their community, they are very seldom on site when it is being hired out. Therefore, the distinction between the people responsible for the building and the people responsible for the events is very clear.

Some of the provisions in the Bill for placing the responsibility on individuals who manage the building do not fit well with the constitutional structure of most village halls, although a small number are now becoming companies limited by guarantee and so on. Once we put in place the briefing, the support, the information and training, there is absolutely no guarantee that the people who have received that will be in the building if something happens. For those reasons, if no other, we have to think quite differently about how this legislation is going to be enacted in voluntarily run organisations.

It is worth saying that many of those we spoke to who responded to the standard tier consultation quite negatively are people who freely volunteer their time and their talents to provide a facility for their community—which they do, safely, 365 days of the year, for no pay. These are volunteers within their community. On speaking to many of them, they felt it was too heavy a stick to make this a legal obligation and that, in fact, rather more carrot would have been helpful in assisting them to do what they wanted to do anyway to keep their communities safe, rather than putting them at the risk of the law instead. That is one of the main reasons why the Home Office received such a negative response from that size and type of charities and buildings when doing the supplementary standard tier consultation.

What is your view on the enforcement powers of the regulator contained in the Bill?Q

Jeremy Leggett:

I have to say that we have not looked in great detail at that. We have been so concerned about the way the entire Bill will be perceived by volunteers, because of the risk of us losing a lot of village hall trustees—simply because they do not want to see this responsibility falling on them personally—that we have not looked very hard at the exact sanctions that might be placed on them if they do not do it properly.

Q So is it fair to say that, because you are satisfied with the increase from 100 to 200, a lot of those concerns have fallen away?

Jeremy Leggett:

Indeed. It was troubling this morning to hear quite so much pressure being placed on the Committee to bring the threshold back down, because that would bring a lot of those organisations we are most concerned about back into scope.

Q During its scrutiny of the previous draft Bill, the Home Affairs Committee argued that the purpose of the draft Bill was not clear. In your opinion, how clear is the purpose of the Bill in its current form?

Jeremy Leggett:

We feel that the Bill is better drafted now than the draft Bill that was consulted over last summer. As was said this morning, I think by the National Association of Local Councils, a lot of work will need to be done on the guidance and regulation process to make clear exactly how the responsibilities fall between premises’ owners and managers on the one hand and events organisers on the other. That guidance and those regulations will have to be tailored in a way that works for the situation as I have described it, with halls that are run by volunteers who are not on the premises.

Q On the point you made earlier about those volunteer-led organisations being safe 365 days a year, how confident are you that those volunteers and community venues would be sufficiently prepared in the event of an attack? I am thinking about the recent horrible attacks that we saw in Southport, and what would have happened if there were mechanisms in place then. How confident are you, in your experience of those venues, that they would be prepared and equipped in the event of a similar horrific incident?

Jeremy Leggett:

It is a very good question. Over the last 10 or 15 years, the standard by which voluntary, village hall, and community centre trustees have come up to the mark on things such as fire safety, food, and health and safety is remarkable. There has been quite a major change over the last 10 or 15 years. So when it comes to the physical preparedness of the building, I have absolutely no concerns about them coming up to that mark quite quickly.

I think the issue is the integration between what is physically there and the procedures and training for what people actually do when something happens. It is quite easy to talk about making a quick decision to lock in when something happens; as even a relatively small business, with a core staff who are trained to understand which way to jump when something happens, you could probably be confident of that. In the case of a village hall, the people who are on site running an event may not have had that training. Either that, or we are getting ourselves into a position where the village hall’s conditions of hire will have to say, “You are not going to be able to hire this building unless you have done that preparedness training.” That opens up a wider sweep of preparedness among other kinds of organisations, which I am not really qualified to talk about.

Thank you. If there are no further questions, I thank the witness for his evidence and his flexibility.