Viscount John Thurso (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (And Transport), Scotland; Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move amendment No. 103, in

page 9, line 13, at end insert—

'(1A) An intervention order must specify the failures of the local traffic authority properly to perform a duty under sections 16 and 17 and require the authority to comply with that duty within the stated period of time.

(1B) An intervention order may make provision for or in connection with the replacement of the local traffic authority's traffic manager appointed under section 17(2)'.

Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen South, Labour)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment No. 102, in

page 9, line 14, leave out subsections (2) to (9).

Amendment No. 104, in

page 9, line 22, leave out 'and'.

Amendment No. 105, in

page 9, line 24, at end insert—

'(da) give particulars of the expected period for which the traffic officer will be appointed

(db) set out details of the process by which the intervention order will be removed'.

Amendment No. 180, in

page 9, line 38, at end insert—

'(5A) All reports produced in furtherance of subsection (5) above must be published in full within 3 months.'.

Amendment No. 181, in

page 9, line 44, at end insert

'provided that they do not exceed the powers capable of being conferred on a traffic manager under the provisions of this Act.'.

New clause 19—Report to parliament—

'The Secretary of State shall present a report on an annual basis to Parliament on the number and nature of intervention notices and orders issued in the previous year and their effects on local traffic authority performance with specific references to improvements in road safety.'.

Viscount John Thurso (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (And Transport), Scotland; Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, Liberal Democrat)

The amendments follow directly from the debate that we have just had. I confess that if amendments Nos. 103 and 102 were accepted as they stand, they would not make any sense because they require amendment No. 101, which was not selected, to make them work. However, with your leave, Miss Begg, I will put forward the argument none the less.

The purpose of the amendments is to look at the role of the traffic director, to accept that there may be times when intervention is appropriate and necessary, to look beyond the point at which a power is reserved to make an intervention, and to ask why the intervention must be made in the particular way prescribed in the Bill. There is no challenge to the right to intervene to correct and remedy what is not happening or what may be going wrong.

It seems to me that there are only two circumstances in which the Government may wish to intervene. One is when a local authority has failed in its duty to appoint a traffic manager. The other is when a traffic manager has been appointed but is failing to deliver. There is a simple remedy for that which does not require the appointment of a traffic director or any other of the remedies in the Bill. In the case of no traffic manager being appointed, if the Government took to themselves the power to make such an appointment, that would correct the problem.

If a traffic manager is failing, surely it is not necessary to impose above him another layer of authority that, even if it were not a whole team, would require support, offices and all the things that go with a growing bureaucracy. The objective could be achieved by the removal of the offending individual, and his replacement with a traffic manager acceptable to the Government. Clauses 22 to 30 provide an extremely complex, very costly, highly bureaucratic

remedy, when a simple solution would be to permit the Government to intervene either by appointing a traffic manager where none exists or replacing an existing traffic manager who is deemed to have failed.

It is interesting that the powers given to the traffic director, who has been referred to as a tsar or tsarina, are considerably greater than those granted to the traffic manager. If the traffic manager can successfully do the job with the powers that we have dealt with so far, why does the traffic director need all sorts of supplementary powers to enable him to ensure that the traffic manager's job is done successfully? That seems like a vast sledgehammer to crack a pretty small and simple nut.

Finally, I come to finance. The powers, the support team and all the things that it is deemed necessary for the traffic director to undertake have to be funded. Where will the funding come from? The Government have decided that it will be from the local authority. The local authority, therefore, not only has to pay the traffic manager that it already has, and to support the network required for that job, but to pay for a second, complete set of bureaucracy. That is wholly inappropriate.

Were the Government to adopt my very simple remedy, which would do everything that they seek to achieve in terms of intervention, we could delete clauses 22 to 30, as they would have no relevance. If they could accept that approach, they would dramatically shorten our time in Committee. I ask the Minister why we need the complicated business of a traffic director to solve the essentially simple problem of needing either to remedy the fact that there is no traffic manager or to replace a failing one with an individual who can do the job and is approved by the Minister and his colleagues?

Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)

I do not wish to repeat what the hon. Gentleman has said. He made constructive and sensible suggestions, and I commend them to the Minister and hope that he will respond positively.

Mr Brian White (North East Milton Keynes, Labour)

I shall speak to new clause 19, which concerns one of my hobby-horse subjects, which is how this place works. We are reasonably good at the process of putting Bills through Parliament, and we are getting better at pre-legislative scrutiny. However, what is often missing is post-implementation scrutiny. One of my reasons for tabling the amendment is that we ought to consider, as a matter of course, how we review whether Bills work. I appreciate that this is an anorak subject; I have discussed it with the Minister in the Tea Room before now. However, it is important to get right the balance between the Executive and Parliament.

The aim of the new clause is to ensure that Parliament has an opportunity to scrutinise whether intervention orders are working and, consequentially, to consider whether road safety has been improved. If the Minister will not accept the new clause—I suspect that he will give us reasonable arguments why he will not—will he consider making such information available as a matter of course under his Department's publication schemes, which are now

under review in the context of freedom of information legislation?

Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)

I shall speak briefly to amendments Nos. 180 and 181. The Minister might be able to help by saying that neither is necessary, but I have a view on subsection (5)(b), which states:

''The general powers which may be conferred on the traffic director are powers authorising him . . . to report on any matter''.

That means that any report made by somebody who is appointed to overrule other people needs to be made public so that the public can see that the power taken to appoint such a person to wield such powers is being used sensibly. Perhaps the Minister can persuade me that amendment No. 180 is not necessary by saying that, in this case, to report on any matter means that the report is public.

Amendment No. 181—hobby-horses have been ridden round this Committee Room, and I shall ride another one for a moment—concerns subsection (7)(b):

''An order may . . . confer ancillary powers on the traffic director''.

I hope that the Minister can assure us that specifying ancillary powers rules out the possibility of giving powers that go beyond the powers in the Bill—it is not a means of extending the provisions by diktat. The amendment—probably clumsily, because I am neither a parliamentary draftsman nor a lawyer—says that if there are to be powers to confer ancillary powers on the traffic director, they should be conferred only if they do not exceed the powers capable of being conferred on the traffic manager within the terms of the legislation. That is what I am driving at, and it is possible that the Minister can put me out of my misery.

Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Harrow East, Labour)

I am not sure that I can put the hon. Gentleman out of his general misery, but I shall try in this specific case. Many of the points that have been made are reasonable. I do not agree with them but, as I have said, the measures need to be seen in the context of there being a stepped approach to intervention. We are still stuck in the mode of considering either everything going on tickety-boo locally or intervention, with nothing in between.

Amendments Nos. 103 and 102 aim to change the provisions for structured and proportionate intervention. As the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) was honest enough to say, they are complemented by amendment No. 101 and others that would go much further in containing powers, even to the extent of deleting references to the traffic directors. Although those were not selected—the hon. Gentleman is playing with half a hand rather than a full one—I get the import of what he suggests.

Amendment No. 103 would create a requirement that an intervention order must give an authority time to improve performance in specified areas and makes provision for the authority's traffic manager to be replaced. As I have indicated already, that is precisely what we shall say in guidance. There is a series of steps

to go through before the last notion of intervention. Even when an intervention order is issued, that will be done in the context of what needs to be done to prevent the appointment of a traffic director. This is not about somebody in the Department for Transport waking up and thinking, ''We have a host of bureaucrats who are twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do, so let us make them traffic directors who can take over the functions of a range of authorities.'' The phased element will be in the guidance, and all local authorities will have to refer to it when considering how they will go about implementation.

Viscount John Thurso (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (And Transport), Scotland; Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, Liberal Democrat)

For the purposes of the argument that I put forward, I am quite happy to accept that intervention is necessary, and, however imperfectly my amendments were drafted, the intention was not to suggest that it should not take place. The need for intervention is accepted. Everything that the Minister says after that—for instance, about a gradual approach—can therefore be accepted. Indeed, everything can be accepted up to the point of the issuing of the intervention order. My question is, why does the remedy have to be putting in a traffic director, rather than simply putting in a traffic manager, if there is not one already there, or replacing a failing traffic manager with an approved one?

Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Harrow East, Labour)

Principally because the way in which we have designed the Bill means that the traffic manager belongs to and is part of the local authority. The traffic director would be someone from outside imposed on the authority as a matter of last resort. We are talking about not two elements of the same thing, but distinct roles involving different relationships.

As astute members of the Committee will have noticed, there are no powers afforded to traffic managers under the Bill. Amendment No. 181 therefore makes no sense because it would insert the phrase

''provided that they do not exceed the powers capable of being conferred on a traffic manager under the provisions of this Act.''

Perhaps the amendment is terribly cunning and the hon. Member for Spelthorne has noticed that there are no powers conferred on a traffic manager. We simply want a designated officer at the local authority to perform the duty. In the spirit of local devolution, we leave the powers, and the question of how things are to be achieved, to local authorities.

The hon. Gentleman may have spotted that and his intention may be to ensure that traffic directors have the same powers as traffic managers—in other words, none. It is possible that this is a subtle and clever wrecking amendment, but I am not sure about that. I take the point about the balance between the traffic manager and the traffic director, but amendment No. 181 would not achieve anything.

We have had arguments before about reporting within three months or otherwise. The report is about responding to what is in the intervention order and about how the recovery plan, or action plan—whatever people want to call it—in the order is to be achieved. Many of the points made by the hon.

Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross will be laid out in the order.

The intervention order will be specific to the local authority that is failing. If I have not made that clear, I apologise. As part of the intervention process, the order will bring with it a series of tasks that need to be carried out to enable the authority to get back on the road to achieving its statutory duty. It will be full of the particulars necessary to achieve that end.

I do not want to dwell unduly on the specifics, but the Bill mentions the ''particulars'', ''objectives'' and ''general powers'' necessary to get the authority into a position of recovery. Together with the guidance, the provisions are intended to cover everything that the hon. Gentleman suggests, including the expected period within which the traffic officer will be appointed and the details of the process by which the intervention order will be removed. I am talking about amendments Nos. 104 and 105. The order will be specific to the authority and will feature all the elements in question, including the recovery plan and the exit route for when the authority is on the road to success.

Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)

I want to take the Minister back to amendment No. 180. He dealt with the question of three months. We have had that debate before, and I do not want to have it again, but he did not make his views clear on my point about publishing the report and putting it in the public domain—whether that happens within three months. That is the other part of amendment No. 180. I would be interested to hear his views on publishing the reports.

Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Harrow East, Labour)

My view is that, when possible, the reports should be published and put in the public domain. I cannot give an absolute assurance that that will happen because there may be reasons why it cannot. I am speculating now, but a local authority could be failing partly because of an issue of financial probity involving two or three large projects. Recovery by a traffic director or an intervention order could involve a host of things, such as reports relating to specific commercial information on those projects. That is pure speculation, but there could be areas in which either commercial sensitivity or confidentiality should prevail for those reasons. I cannot give a universal commitment to the reports all being in the public domain, but I start from the premise that they should be unless there is a good reason for them not to be, as the hon. Gentleman suggests.

I think that I have broadly covered most of the points on the amendments. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East will not be surprised that I am not minded to accept the ''anorak point''—his words, not mine—on new clause 19. Although I agree generally about matters being reported to Parliament, to do so in this case would be a replication.

I do not want to pre-empt discussions with local government and others on guidance and regulations, but it might be appropriate to report local interventions in performance reviews. We will have a

local transport plan, which will be a five-year plan with annual performance reviews, involving every highway authority. Given the number of local authorities, there might be 40 or 50 interventions in a terrible year, although I would hope not, as there should be no interventions if we are doing our job properly.

A cumulative report to Parliament of 40 or 50 reports individual to each highway authority would not be very informative. The annual performance reviews, which are public documents, might be the appropriate place for each highway authority to report whether there have been any interventions. That would be a more appropriate vehicle than that suggested in the ''anorak point'' made by my hon. Friend.

Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)

The Minister refers to the prospect of using the annual performance review in the local transport plan as a performance indicator. Will it definitely be one of the performance indicators?

Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Harrow East, Labour)

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again if he does not listen. I clearly made that point. I added the caveat that, without pre-empting any subsequent discussions with local government or other authorities in terms of performance indicators or the network management duty, the annual performance review might be an appropriate model. It is certainly more appropriate than an annual review to Parliament of what is necessarily a locally focused intervention order. Therefore, it is not possible to give that guarantee.

Viscount John Thurso (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (And Transport), Scotland; Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, Liberal Democrat)

I understand the Minister, but I am unconvinced by his argument. Let me check that I have understood correctly. He argues that clause 16 puts a duty on a local traffic authority to manage its road network. Clause 17(2), which refers to the arrangements, states that it must have a traffic manager who may or may not be employed by the local authority, according to what we have already agreed.

The traffic director will therefore be imposed on the local authority and will take with him a whole panoply of power. That situation will be worse than I had imagined: it will interfere further with local authorities, and it cuts against the grain of the fact that we elect local authorities and, if they fail, our remedy is to vote them out. Imperfect though local authorities are, and in light of the Minister's answer, I am minded to ask the Committee for its opinion.

Question put, That the amendment be made:—

The Committee divided: Ayes 4, Noes 6.

Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)

I hope that the Committee will reject the clause. As became apparent in our debate on the amendments, this is a centralising, bureaucratic measure, which has not been properly thought through. We had an indication earlier that the Government would use the intervention power only in extreme circumstances, but the Minister said in a throwaway line that there could be 40 or 50 interventions a year, adding that that was why it would not be appropriate to make an annual report to Parliament.

The Minister talked about 40 or 50 interventions a year, yet he was rather impatient with us for asking about performance indicators. Surely, Parliament's role is to consider whether it would be appropriate and reasonable for the Government to take such enormous powers, and one way of testing that proposition is to examine how robust performance indicators would be. There are already performance indicators and annual performance reviews for local transport plans, so one would have expected the Minister to be able to tell us whether he would regard them as a key indicator of whether a local authority was performing its network management duties. However, he cannot even tell us that and simply says that he would like to discuss the matter privately outside Parliament. That is a very unsatisfactory way of proceeding, because it is for Parliament to decide whether the Government should have the powers that are before us, and it is for the Government to persuade Parliament that they should. However, they have not persuaded me that they need those powers, which are totally over the top.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill:—

The Committee divided: Ayes 6, Noes 4.