Part of Orders of the Day — Transport Bill – in the House of Commons at 5:15 pm on 1 February 1983.
No one is suggesting that an authority should be immune from legal action if it acts irresponsibly, foolishly and unreasonably. We object to the fact that under the Bill an authority which has acted completely reasonably and responsibly, and which under the present law is protected against action, in accordance with Mr. Justice Woolf's famous judgment in the Merseyside case, will in future be exposed to action because it has exceeded a figure arbitrarily fixed not by Parliament or the courts but by the Secretary of St ate who is taking the law into his own hands.