Schedule 3 - Schedule 4B to the New Roads and
Traffic Management Bill
3:15 pm
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham, Conservative)
I share the worries of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire and others who think that we would benefit from greater clarity. I would add to the worries that my right hon. Friend expressed the possibility that a company or an individual may have moved address between the time that the authority first researched the alleged infringement and the delivery of the ticket for the offence. Forwarding arrangements do not always work well. Would it be regarded as good service to have delivered the fixed penalty notice to the old address of the individual or company when they may have been genuinely unaware of the alleged offence and they did not get the document forwarded through the post?
We also need to know what happens in the event of an individual receiving a ticket and not paying it within the specified time. How much grace will they be given, given the vagaries of the postal system and the difficulty of sometimes getting the requisite amount of money back? What action will the Government take if they feel that the delay by the person in receipt of the ticket has been unreasonable? We need to understand that in the modern world the post can go astray, people may have moved address, there may be difficulties in due service and that there may not have been a delay by the person in receipt of the ticket; it may have been the delay or non-arrival of the fixed penalty notice.
The London authorities have found many such cases with the congestion charge, in which there is an accumulating penalty on those who do not pay. It seems unfair if the individual is unaware that they infringed the congestion charge zone and they have not received the ticket at the address at which they normally reside in a timely way that enables them to respond and pay. We should learn from those experiences of difficulty in compliance, rather than non-compliance, which seem to be emerging in many of the fixed penalty regimes, and we should try to do rather better with this one. We want payments due to be paid in a timely way, but we also want the person targeted for the penalty payment to know in good time and to have the proper amount of time to respond or appeal if they think that the penalty is unreasonable. I am not sure that that is embedded in the schedule. It may need a little work to reach that happy state. I would have thought that the Minister would want that as much I do.