Clause 19 - Exemptions from speed limits
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
6:45 pm
Owen Paterson (Shadow Minister, Transport; North Shropshire, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 62, in clause 19, page 23, line 23, at end insert—
‘(c)is operating blue flashing lights.’.
This is an interesting clause, and we sympathise with what the Government are trying to do, but I am concerned that it will heighten the divide between the 34 million drivers whom I have cited and those who enforce the law. I know that the clause applies to the fire and ambulance services, doctors, those delivering blood and so on, but my main concerns are about police cars.
There is a real danger of a feeling that there is one law for them and another law for us. Some of the statistics that I have dug out are astonishing. For a start, there is an enormous variation between the speeding cases in neighbouring forces. The most spectacular that I have found was in Lothian and Borders where last year 2,272 cars triggered speed cameras, but no action was taken against any officer. That cannot be doing much for the confidence of law-abiding motorists in Lothian and Borders. Of 78 unmarked cars that broke the limit, three were given £60 fixed penalties, with nine further cases outstanding.
On the other hand, in Dumfries and Galloway, which has a police force one-sixth the size of Lothian and Borders, 15 officers were fined for speeding. In the vast majority of cases, officers were exempt from fixed-penalty fines and prosecution because they were speeding in response to a 999 call or on other operational duties. Of the five Scottish forces that supplied details of police cars caught speeding, only 34.5 per cent. were fined, taken to court or still had cases pending.
Actually, Lothian and Borders had only the fourth highest rate of officers caught speeding. Essex had 3.26 incidents per officer, Bedfordshire had 2.04 and Staffordshire had 0.91, which was tied with the Metropolitan police. I dug out those figures from the Press Association.
Public confidence is a problem. The RAC Foundation said that they believed that the results showed that some forces were overusing their exemption powers. The RAC’s Kevin Delaney, interestingly enough, a policeman for 30 years, said the following:
“The exemption rules are widely misunderstood by rank-and-file officers as giving them a carte blanche exemption from the speed limit when driving a police vehicle. That is clearly wrong and suggests that something is wrong with police driver training. Forces with the lowest number of camera triggers and higher proportions of officers refused an exemption have clearly taken a stand on this.”
We heard similar words from Neil Greig, who is head of policy in Scotland for the AA Motoring Trust:
“I think the vast majority of motorists understand that marked police cars responding to emergencies may be required to break the speed limit. But the number of exemptions given to police in some forces does concern me.”
There seems to be an inconsistency in the way in which the forces perform. I had a spectacular case in West Mercia where an officer was caught doing 159 mph in an unmarked police car, and he was caught by his own on-board video recorder.