New Clause 3
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
9:00 am
David Kidney (PPS (Mr Elliot Morley, Minister of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
I beg to move that the clause be read a Second time.
It is a pleasure, Mrs. Anderson, to see you back in the Chair after the Easter break. New clause 3 is quite specific: it would allow police officers to present one more category of case in court; it is in addition to those that they can present already.
When I was a young solicitor there was no such thing as the Crown Prosecution Service. When desperate motorists who faced disqualification as a result of road traffic offences asked for my representation to help them save their driving licences, I would go to the magistrates court and find the courtroom filled with others who had similar cases. The prosecutor was a police officer in uniform, who presented the cases one after the other until the whole list had been finished. That was quite common in those days.
For reasons that I understand and with which I agree, Parliament decided, through the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, that prosecutions should not be undertaken by the police but by a separate organisation, and the Crown Prosecution Service was established. From then on, most prosecutions have been conducted by CPS employees or agents. However, a small number of minor, summary-only offences, including many road traffic offences, could still be presented by a police officer. They were known as specified offences. Even those offences ceased to be specified, and they had to be handed over to the CPS in two set circumstances.
The first circumstance was when the accused pleaded not guilty. Once a trial was required because of a not-guilty plea, legal judgments and other legal issues might benefit from the presence of a qualified CPS prosecutor rather than a police officer. That is understandable. The second was when a person simply ignored the court process and did not turn up. Even so, the argument would have been that some legal judgments were required. For example, the court would have to be satisfied that the person accused of the offence knew that he was supposed to be in court, so evidence would be needed that they had received the paperwork. Next, a judgment has to be made on whether to call witnesses to prove the case or simply to serve the statements on the accused and then read them out in court. But why should we expend time and effort on people who are irresponsible enough to ignore the process? Inevitably, therefore, a CPS representative would turn up in court and read out the statements, and the case would be proved.
Under the new clause, in that second class of cases in which the procedures are ignored, the police officer can present the case to the court as the CPS would have done. To show how important it is, I shall give a case study, as it were, concerning the Metropolitan police. Although this example is of what happens in London, I stress that the problem affects all police forces; the new clause would benefit the administration of justice throughout the country.
In 2004, the Metropolitan police reorganised the way in which it dealt with road traffic offences. It formed a pan-London traffic criminal justice operation or command unit. As a result, all London’s traffic offence prosecutions go through one office. That has ended the postcode lottery of whether the police would decide to prosecute, so we have consistency, and with it come economies of scale, standardised processes and improved IT support systems.
Crucially, the police depend on a good strong partnership with the CPS and the courts. Between them, the three partners have developed a system of five specialised traffic gateway courts. All cases go through one of those five courts, and the system has resulted in an effective use of everyone’s time and the consistent enforcement of traffic law. I would argue that, if people cannot get away with breaking road traffic laws, the system also makes an effective contribution to road safety.
The police in London would like a similar model to deal with camera fines and other fixed penalty notices that have to go to court—for example, when cases are contested. The volume of work would be too much for the five gateway courts, and the police are currently negotiating for additional operations courts. Except for the specified proceedings, the CPS still has to provide the prosecution staff in all courts for all cases. As the Metropolitan police has found, however, the CPS is unwilling, because it is stretched, to devote resources to matters such as safety camera prosecutions.
The police are quite willing to provide the prosecution—except, of course, in not-guilty trials. They can prosecute the specified proceedings, except when the accused ignores the process, because there has to be proof in absence. In that situation, the court has the discretion to allow the case to be presented by a police officer, rather than a CPS prosecutor. Clearly, it is not possible to build a strategy on the hope that all courts will grant a police officer permission to do that on the day. If the new clause were passed, however, it would allow prosecutions to proceed in an orderly way. In any case, what is wrong with going that slight step further and using the law to allow police officers to carry on as they usually would and prove the case in absence? A fixed penalty notice system is good, but it must be underpinned by the ability to take people to court, which means proving the case in their absence if they ignore the process.
New clause 3 is narrowly drawn and deals only with the mischief that I have identified. It would give the police new powers and provide for new procedures, allowing the police to speed up the criminal justice system to the extent that it is in their power to do so. The Metropolitan police has used such new powers and procedures most effectively in dealing with road traffic offences, but it has alerted us to a bottleneck that it encounters at the court stage. It foresees it growing significantly, and as I said at the beginning, it will extend to other parts of the country. It is incumbent on us to remove that bottleneck, and we have the opportunity to do so today. That is why I tabled the new clause.