Clause 42 - Directions relating to
Traffic Management Bill
3:30 pm
Mr John Mann (Bassetlaw, Labour)
I have a slight concern, which relates to the intervention that I made on the Minister a few minutes ago, on the interrelationship between the local authority and the private contractor. My experience of the appropriate local authorities—indeed, it is the case with my own local authority in recent weeks—is that they are not necessarily too coherent in their own planning. One of the pressures is the expenditure of end-of-year budgets, which could lead to large amounts of street works being carried out by them in February and March. There is a danger that they may, on occasion, be tempted to overuse their position in being able to direct private operators who are carrying out street works. This danger of arbitrary decision-making by the local authority needs to be considered, especially as there will be no sanctions on the local authority. I would prefer to see the Minister have some sanctioning powers.
With public good will and business efficiency at stake when dealing with the movement of traffic, examples such as the closing of one of the major artery lanes in Worksop town centre as a result of an experiment undertaken by the local authority can have significant knock-on effects, and I would not want to be in a position whereby, having done that, the local authority attempts to use its powers to pressure any of the utilities in any way. I seek assurance from the Minister that those powers would not be there with this or any other clause.
The other example I could cite is much more recent. It is the removal of the road humps in Manton, a long-overdue process. If we were to consider notification of start dates and end dates, change to notification at the last minute, and failure to notify the general public or indeed anybody else of what was going on, it would be a classic case of a local authority trying to balance its available direct labour and sub-contractors to fit in with other priorities and to change what it was doing. That is precisely the problem that seems to have bedevilled private operators, and it may have led to the introduction of the Bill in the first place.
I seek an assurance that having wisely determined, as the example of the road humps illustrates, to execute works on the street, local authorities would not have any powers that could, by default, lead them to be prejudiced in their thinking over other powers that might be available.