New Clause 3
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
9:00 am
Stephen Ladyman (Minister of State, Department for Transport; South Thanet, Labour)
I hope that you had a good Easter, Mrs. Anderson, and I welcome you back to the Chair.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) for raising this issue. I entirely understand his point and agree with his intentions, but I am afraid that for several reasons I shall advise the Committee not to accept the new clause. The first is that there is already judicial discretion about who can appear in front of the court in a routine case. Therefore, judges can, and sometimes do, allow police officers to present routine cases. The cases that my hon. Friend has identified are the sort to which judicial discretion could be applied.
The Government’s preference is that we should leave the matter to judicial discretion, rather than putting in place an automatic power to allow certain individuals to appear before a court, which would be impossible to remove without further legislation. As the new clause is drafted, there is a tension between whether an officer who is to act as a court presentation officer needs to have had a certain amount of training, and whether the court presentation officer should just follow guidance as to how he should behave. If the new clause were accepted, it would not be possible to take the power of appearance away from individuals even if things were not to work out in the way in which my hon. Friend assumes that they will, and people were to present to the court defective cases that held up its procedures.
Although it is the Government’s view that the matter is best left to judicial discretion, I hope that I will go some way towards satisfying my hon. Friend if I tell him that the Metropolitan police, the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Department for Transport are working together on it. The Metropolitan police has agreed to put together information for the DCA about the rights of judicial discretion, and how it could be used to improve the presentation and efficiency of routine cases. We undertake that, when we have that information, we will do what we can to ensure that all courts realise how they might use that discretion and think about how they can improve the efficiency of presentation of cases.