Clause 3 - Jurisdiction of traffic officers
Traffic Management Bill
3:15 pm
Mr David Jamieson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Plymouth, Devonport, Labour)
I was not puzzled; I was concentrating carefully on what the hon. Gentleman was saying. He said that his amendment would abbreviate the clause, and I would be happy if we could find some way of abbreviating the Bill without changing its effect. Brevity can be a virtue.
However, the original wording is safer because the policy behind the clause is that traffic officers should generally have jurisdiction over the entire national network, with flexibility reserved to limit that in certain cases, some of which we discussed earlier. The amendment would mean that the wording would not unambiguously correspond to that policy or make it clear that there is contemplated a designation applying across the entire national network. It would also carry the additional administrative implication that all designations would have to identify geographic extent expressly and that service managers would have to check officers' designations before deployment around the network more often than would otherwise be the case.