Clause 21 - Intervention orders
Traffic Management Bill
3:30 pm
Viscount John Thurso (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (And Transport), Scotland; Caithness, Sutherland and 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?