The House of Keys has voted to scrap a ‘divisive’ clause in the Local Government Bill.

Clause 5 would have empowered the Department of Infrastructure to require a local authority or joint board to perform specified functions.

Introduced as an amendment by Ramsey MHK Lawrie Hooper, it sparked outcry from local authorities who branded it a ‘threat to local democracy’.

They maintained that compelling them to provide particular services would create an ‘onerous financial burden’.

But the then Infrastructure Minister Michelle Haywood said it would prevent local authorities from ‘walking away’ from services as Bride Commissioners had done with the Northern Civic Amenity Site.

The Bill returned to the House of Keys this week for consideration of Legislative Council amendments which had introduced safeguards.

But new Infrastructure Minister Tim Crookall branded clause 5 ‘divisive’ and sought leave to suspend standing orders to allow it to be removed from the Bill altogether.

He explained that standing orders did not allow the House to reconsider previously agreed clauses.

Mr Crookall said he didn’t doubt that Mr Hooper had brought forward the amendment for what he believed were the right reasons.

But he said local authorities had serious concerns about clause 5.

He told MHKs he was seeking to remove the clause from the Bill in recognition of the strength of feeling against it.

The Minister said: ‘Every local authority we spoke to has that distrust of clause 5, “not only will you make us pay for this, that and the other” but when money gets tighter government will go “you can do that and you will pay for it”.

‘That’s what the worry is for them.’

Mr Hooper pointed out the Bill had been agreed ‘quite unanimously’ and LegCo had come back with some sensible amendments.

‘Now rather than following through the process we are now going to go back on ourselves with the intention of removing this additional clause and these powers from this Bill,’ he said.

He warned of the risk that LegCo reinstate the clause - and ‘you end up playing ping pong and bouncing back between branches, for an enabling provision that the department doesn’t have to use.’

Mr Hooper said if the clause was removed, the department and MHKs would be agreeing to fund the Northern Civic Amenity Site out of constituents’ taxes as ‘that is going to be the end result’.

But Chief Minister Alfred Cannan pointed out that the clause had not been in the Bill as originally drafted.

He told MHKs: ‘The Minister has come to a sensible solution.’

Mr Cannan asserted that Mr Hooper had moved clause 5 on a single issue for which there was a solution on the table, with a mechanism available to resolve the Northern Civic Amenity Site problem.

He said: ‘This catch-all clause really its operability, its effectiveness, in any case I would suggest is highly suspect.’

MHKs voted by 18 votes to two to allow standing orders to be suspended to allow clause 5 to be rescinded and the Bill as amended without the clause was subsequently approved by 19 votes to one.