Clause 39 - Increase in penalties forsummary offences under 1991 act
Traffic Management Bill
9:30 am
Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)
No, they are not. I will most certainly accept the hon. Gentleman's advice. No doubt he will lend me his copy of the guidelines and point to the important parts. [Interruption.] I could ask my barrister son for help, perhaps.
Whether the level of the fine arises from the whim of the magistrates on a Tuesday morning or the Lord Chancellor's guidelines does not matter. It appears at the moment, from what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, that the level is 40 per cent. of the maximum. That is where the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller) torpedoes his own attempt to stop my train of thought. If the guidelines say that 40 to 50 per cent. of the maximum is the norm, it will have occurred to someone in the Treasury that yanking up the maximum to £5,000, and making 40 to 50 per cent. the guideline for that new maximum, would, lo and behold, produce five times as much money, as a stealth tax, from following the Lord Chancellor's guidelines. That does not really get us very far. If that is how the guidelines work, the higher the maximum, the greater the income, the bigger the stealth tax, and the more money taken out of society to be wasted by the Government. Those are the questions that the Minister has to answer about the existing situation.
Why are the increases necessary? I can only speculate as to what the Minister will say, but I suspect I will not be far short. He will say that the provision is necessary to stop offences. If the figures he produces are similar to 200 cases in 10 years, however,
it will do a fat lot of good in terms of traffic management. I assume that it is appropriate to discuss the details of the offences under schedule 1, or else the two issues will be rolled together, so I will stay away from some of the absurdities that I think lurk within schedule 1 until we get to it.
The general principle of introducing higher penalties can be sensibly justified in a way that the public will accept only if a demonstrable problem is created by people doing the things listed in schedule 1 and causing unnecessary and unjustifiable obstructions to traffic. The Minister must show that that is so. Unless he can shoot down the figure of 200 in 10 years, I shall take some persuading. If he cannot show a link between higher penalties and a reduction in the number of offences, he has only one argument—that this is a stealth tax to increase income. If there is no problem of traffic management, what is the justification of fines five times higher than at present?