My Lords, on this side we very much support these measures; it would be odd if we did not, as my noble friend Lord Bradshaw has been arguing for this move for pretty much as long as I have been in the House, which is over 20 years now. Civil enforcement of moving traffic offences is, as he has argued, really important in improving the flow of traffic generally and particularly for buses. Bringing the rest of England in line with London is a welcome step. I also agree with the Government that we need better enforcement for safety reasons for cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings, and so on.
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I very much agree with the Minister: we need to ensure that these penalties are a means to achieve those objectives on congestion and safety, not a revenue raiser. I welcome the protections that have been put in place. The AA has done a huge amount of work gathering data on all this. One of the things it has found is that most drivers faced with a penalty just pay up even where they do not believe that they have done anything wrong or think that they have a good mitigating reason; because they are afraid of the penalty going up if they do not pay immediately, they decide that it is easier to pay. That is concerning.
Similarly, in its data gathering, the AA has picked up locations where the volume of violations is such that it suggests there is a problem with either the layout or the signage. Clearly something should be done about that, not just simply issuing more and more fines. It argues for a sort of automatic review mechanism when particular locations reach a certain point. I wonder whether the department has thought about that. The AA also argues that first-time offenders should receive a warning letter no matter how long the
measures have been in place, not just within six months. Again, I wonder what the Government have thought about this.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I had a look at Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments’ report. The committee has some concerns. It highlighted two instances of defective drafting—I gather that those have been accepted by the department so I will not dwell on them—but there are also two instances of a difference of opinion between the JCSI and the department about whether some provisions are intra vires. One of them is on the question of what happens when a local authority fails to decide what to do with the proceeds of crime.
The second one troubles me a little more. The department asserts that the 15-minute period between the issue of a notice and clamping is a minimum period. The JSCI has argued that, in primary legislation, 15 minutes is the period and, if Parliament had wanted a 15-minute minimum, it would have legislated for that—but it did not and has given it as a definite period. So the committee does not accept that the department is correct. I am slightly troubled about this simply because, as the Minister will know, there is quite an industry in finding legal loopholes to get through fixed-penalty notices and various things. We need to be absolutely sure that we are confident that this will not become a loophole.