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The Chairman: May I respond to the question about gentlemen Members and jackets first? When I am in the Chair, gentlemen Members can assume that they may remove their jackets—but I am not agreeing to anything else after that.
Mr. Wilshire: Not even my tie?
The Chairman: Not even that.
Question put:—
The Committee divided: Ayes 12, Noes 4.
Division No. 1]
AYES
Byrne, Mr. Liam
David, Mr. Wayne
Ellman, Mrs. Louise
Fisher, Mr. Mark
Heyes, Mr. David
Jamieson, Mr. David
Kidney, Mr. David
Merron, Gillian
Reed, Mr. Andy
Stinchcombe, Mr. Paul
Thurso, John
Younger-Ross, Richard
NOES
Chope, Mr. Christopher
Knight, Mr. Greg
Rosindell, Mr. Andrew
Wilshire, Mr. David
Question accordingly agreed to.
9.45 am
The Chairman: I remind the Committee that there is a money resolution and a ways and means resolution in connection with the Bill. Copies of the resolutions are available in the Room. I also remind Members that adequate notice should be given of any amendments. As a general rule, my co-Chairman and I do not intend to call starred amendments. I ask Members to switch off mobile phones and pagers, or at least to put them on silent mode, please.
Clause 1
Road safety grants
Mr. Chope: I beg to move amendment No. 1, in clause 1, page 1, line 9, at beginning insert 'Subject to subsection (3)'.
Column Number: 9
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 2, in clause 1, page 1, line 12, at end add—
'(3) No road safety grant shall be paid to any organisation which comprises or is part of a safety camera partnership.'.
Mr. Chope: The amendment tries to probe the Government a bit further on road safety grants. I do not believe that anyone is opposed to expenditure on road safety. Indeed, many people would criticise the Government for not having invested enough in it. Nor are we against giving grants. However, we would like the Minister to explain why the safety camera partnerships that have been set up in almost every area of the country, and which comprise local authorities, police authorities and others, are not able to spend their resources on road safety in the way in which this clause says that money can be spent. If the partnerships were able to spend money on road safety without constraint, there would be no need for the clause.
My second question, of which I gave notice, is about how clause 1 interacts with clause 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill. It is becoming increasingly difficult to follow road traffic law, as the Government are introducing so many different pieces of legislation that affect road safety. Indeed, many are being debated in this House at the same time. Clauses in this Bill and in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill deal with insurance. This clause authorises road safety grants, and clause 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill makes provision for payments by the Secretary of State to police authorities for the prevention, detection and enforcement of traffic offences in respect of seat belts, lighting, insurance, licences, test certificates, inadequate registration marks and so on. If such payments can be made under clause 132 of that Bill for the prevention of traffic offences, why is clause 1 necessary in this Bill?
Perhaps the Minister could discuss clause 132, which is, in essence, a Department of Transport clause in a Home Office Bill, and also the problem that I have identified. The notes on clauses for the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill contained absolutely nothing about why clause 132 is necessary, what it hoped to achieve and what sums of money might be at stake.
I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to some of those questions and explain in some detail why he feels that safety camera partnerships should not be able to re-invest their proceeds. They are awash with money as a result of the Government's policy of increasing the number of penalties through the establishment of fixed cameras.
Mr. Wilshire: I can understand my hon. Friend's argument, but will he reassure me that any provision that the Bill makes for safety partnerships will run only for 108 days, because when Labour lose the next election, we intend to abolish the wretched things?
Mr. Chope: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We intend to get away from unnecessary bureaucracy, and we regard the safety camera partnerships as
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unnecessarily bureaucratic. There is nothing that they do that cannot be done by the police authorities on their own. Indeed, there is a system of divide and rule that is causing a lot of confusion for the public. I have passed on correspondence from constituents to the police authority, which has replied, ''That has nothing to do with us. It is the responsibility of the safety camera partnership.'' Similarly, the local authority said, ''It has nothing to do with us. It's the responsibility of the safety camera partnerships.''
The partnerships have a lot of money. I estimate the yield from fines to be between £60 million and £100 million per annum because the number of speeding offences has increased under the Government from about 600,000 in 1996 to the best part of 4 million, based on the figures available.
The partnerships have an enormous amount of income and many people might ask why some of that money cannot be reinvested on speed indicator signs, so that people are warned that they are exceeding the speed limit. Those signs do not incur any penalty if one does not comply with them, but they have a good impact in improving road safety and ensuring that people reduce their speed. The trouble is that it costs money to put those signs up, and many local authorities say that they have not got the resources to do that. Why have they not got those resources? Because the Government will not allow them to reinvest the money that is coming into safety camera partnerships from fines because the money is being sent to the Home Office.
The only money that can be reinvested from safety camera partnerships is in propaganda, which has always been the top priority of the Government, and in putting up more cameras. We believe that prevention is better than cure, and we would like to see some of the money being invested in road safety measures, through engineering and education. We shall come on later to discuss driver-improvement courses.
Even the administration of those courses can require funds. The courses run under the auspices of many police authorities, such as the BikeSafe courses, require money. We believe that it would be much simpler if those road safety measures could be funded out of fine and penalty income, rather than have that income going to the Government to be recycled and churned, creating a lot more bureaucracy and work for officialdom and reducing the amount of money available for front-line road safety improvements. I hope that the Minister will answer some of our concerns.
Mr. Knight: I suppose that one could argue narrowly that speed camera partnerships do not directly promote road safety. They promote, or rather prosecute and pursue, the detection of offences. It would help the Committee if the Minister explained the scope of the definition of road safety in the clause. The sort of things we all initially think of are education—educating drivers to drive better and more safely—sensible traffic signing, and traffic-calming
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measures, including the increasing use of electronic flashing signs, which I welcome because that they are effective.
Those are the sort of measures that most of us associate with ''promoting road safety'' and it would certainly help me to decide where I stand on this group of amendments if the Minister gave the Committee some examples of measures that might be promoted under the clause.
Mr. Wilshire: I rise to speak specifically to the amendments. The generality of speed cameras may be better and more fully debated later in the Bill, so I shall not test your patience, Mr. Hughes, by drifting out of order into a general discussion of road safety.
I feel constrained and those who have the same sense of deja vu as I do will have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire occasionally but cruelly disagreeing with what I thought at the time were sensible amendments to the Railways Bill. Perhaps they will forgive me if I say that I am slightly worried about their otherwise marvellous amendment. The wretched safety camera partnerships are bureaucracies that too often persecute motorists; I shall talk about that under a later clause.
The principle of giving them the power to spend the money they raise is fine, but why not make the money do something good, such as improving road safety? I can buy into that principle, but what worries me is that the amendment would provide yet another reason for the cameras to be used for general money raising, which is what some of them are used for at the moment. Knowing how some of them operate, if they could spend the money that they raised on road safety—we all agree that road safety is a good idea—many would succumb to the temptation to fleece motorists even more for a good cause. If my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will forgive me, I think that the amendment contains a slight technical snag.
However, I warm to amendment No. 2, which states:
''No road safety grant shall be paid to any organisation which comprises or is part of a safety camera partnership''.
My hon. Friend will tell me if I misunderstand his intention, but I take that to mean that no grant of any sort could be paid to any council or police force that supports those wretched bureaucracies. That would certainly focus their minds on getting rid of them and we might not then need to legislate to do so. I commend amendment No. 2 to the Committee wholeheartedly for the purpose of destroying the bureaucracies rather than anything else.
If my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch wants to pursue the matter, I hope that he shares my enthusiasm for amendment No. 2 and will reflect on my minor reservation about amendment No. 1.
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