Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Randerson

Committee stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Could I just point out that it is easier not to send loads of CO₂ out into the atmosphere in the first place? It is great to hear about all the millions that the Government are spending on these measures, but it would be cheaper not to pollute in the first place. Things such as carbon capture and storage are all incredibly theoretical ideas, so you cannot actually say that it is going to happen, because it may not.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in this short debate. I knew that I would provoke a debate by specifically mentioning hydrogen—and that was my intention. I wanted to tease out the Government’s views. I thank the Minister for her response, but it was light on detail as, I fear, the whole of the Government’s policy is.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on her view of the Government. I fear that the Government have been so self-obsessed for the past two or three years that there is a policy vacuum in all sorts of places, and transport is one of them. I also agree with her that we need to rely very much more on public transport but, of course, the vast majority of public transport is provided by buses, which are heavy vehicles. Electricity is fine in towns and cities but it is not yet the answer for long distances in rural areas or for long-distance buses. Of course, not enough of our electricity is green and comes from renewable resources. Despite the ingenious plans for the national grid, we have a crisis of capacity, which will face us very soon if we all rely on electric vehicles.

The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to aviation. I remind noble Lords about the Government’s jet zero strategy, which is a triumph of optimism over reality.

My noble friend Lady Sheehan made a very important point about batteries. It is important to emphasise that we are well behind in the international race for developing gigafactory capacity. Very soon, rules of origin will be a problem for those wishing to export.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Randerson

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Lords Hansard - part two & Report stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for that vote of confidence. I wish to speak to the amendments in my name and to the group in general.

I start with Amendment 63, on exceptional hardship. If you Google “exceptional hardship”, the first listing is an advert from a firm of solicitors. I will not give their name; they do not need free publicity from me because they also advertise on the television. They describe themselves as “exceptional hardship” and “totting up” solicitors. They define exceptional hardship as “real hardship”. They say they have covered more than 10,000 cases and have a 98% success rate. No wonder, as a recent FoI request revealed, there are 8,632 drivers driving around with more than 12 penalty points. The firm I have described is not alone; there are dozens of other firms of solicitors advertising similarly. This is an industry: this is not an exceptional situation that we are dealing with.

Amendment 63 seeks to define exceptional hardship as something significantly greater than the definition provided by that firm of solicitors and significantly greater than the hardship that would arise for a large majority of other drivers. The definition takes into account the offender’s economic circumstances, location and family circumstances. I bring this to the attention of the Government, and say that there is no point in putting down amendments for more and more stringent penalties if there is a gigantic loophole which is being exploited in front of our eyes.

Amendment 66AA, on bridge strikes, is the manuscript amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I am grateful to him for persisting with this issue because it is a very serious accident waiting to happen. As he has described, lorries hit bridges all the time. This causes a major impact on train services and on our economy, as well as obviously presenting a road safety issue. There are huge costs to the HGV drivers as well. Clearly, drivers do not do this deliberately, so there must be a problem. The problem is almost certainly in the signage; we have the technology nowadays, and improved signage needs to be implemented. There also needs to be a reappraisal of responsibilities between Network Rail and the highways authorities, where there is an interface.

Clearly, both my Amendment 66A and that of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, present examples of the type of issues that need to be included in a long overdue review of road traffic offences. My amendment is similar to that from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, but I have selected some other features that I think are important. It is unfortunate that all these are lumped together, but it is important that we look at this in a little detail. There is a separate group for pedicabs, which are a very small feature of modern roads and do not exist outside London, but they are one of a large number of new features of our transport system that need to be looked at and reappraised in the context of road traffic overall.

Another example of a new feature is e-scooters. It is reported that at least 11 people have been killed in the last year either on or by e-scooters. The Government’s approach has been to set up lots of pilot projects. Basically, e-scooters have been allowed to spread nationwide as a result of a lack of intervention. In a Written Answer I received from the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, when I made inquiries about safety issues associated with e-scooters, she said:

“While trials are running, privately-owned e-scooters will remain illegal to use on the road, cycle lanes or pavements.”


That is fair enough, but no one ever does anything about the fact that thousands of them are being used, and tens of thousands more will be bought this Christmas.

The large number of pilot projects has led people to believe that e-scooters are legal everywhere. The problem is that, because they are illegal, there are so many of them around and the rules not enforced, bad practice is now the norm. Noble Lords have only to walk outside this building to see that bad practice. There are issues such as minimum age—they are often ridden by very young people—maximum speed, wearing helmets, registration, and where you ride: on the pavement or on the road. This week, Transport for London has responded to the latest danger: fires from exploding batteries. There have been several fires on TfL vehicles because people carry those scooters on trains. Transport for London has said that people can no longer do that, but it has had considerable problems and all transport operators will have to consider this issue.

We will come later to the issue of alcohol levels, so I will leave that, but another issue I want to raise is road signage. In 2016, there was a relaxation of the specification and standards for road signs. It appears to be part of a drive to reduce red tape. Last week, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and I met the family of a young woman who drowned when she drove at night into a ford in bad weather on a country road. From the coroner’s report, it is obvious that the poor quality of the signage was a key factor because other people had also driven into that ford by mistake—luckily for them, with not such a terrible impact. The depth gauge at that ford was so slim and poorly marked that it was invisible at night. The previous standard for depth gauges, which was abolished in 2016, required a much bigger and clearer structure.

This and others are simply taster issues for the huge range that need to be included in a review. It was promised in 2014, with a public consultation phase. We are still working on the basis of the endlessly amended Road Traffic Act 1988. Our roads have been transformed since then by the number of vehicles, vehicle technology and capability and new sorts of vehicles. The key point I am trying to make with this amendment is that the review must be comprehensive, rather than just addressing a handful of issues that are annoying Ministers at the moment. It needs to be done now, not kicked into the long grass again. It needs specifically to grapple with new technologies and forms of transport such as autonomous vehicles. It must take an overall approach to consistency of sentencing.

The problem with the approach in the Bill is that the Government have plucked out some offences for tighter sentencing, which will inevitably leave them out of kilter with other offences. The Government’s approach is for stiffer sentences with longer jail terms, but many transport campaign groups would prioritise appropriate sentencing, especially disqualification and community sentences. There are many bad drivers out there, but they often lead otherwise law-abiding lives. We have nothing to gain as a society by locking them up, which is costly to the taxpayer in the short term and in the long term, as they become much less employable on release. So, alternatives ought to be considered to simply putting people in prison.

The good thing about disqualification is that it protects the public. The key point of my amendment is that there needs to be full public consultation. In 2016, in a debate in the other place, the Government claimed that there had indeed been a review, as promised in 2014, but there was no public consultation and no published outcome. That makes a mockery of the whole process, so I am very pleased to hear from the Minister that there are plans now for a proper review, and I shall be listening carefully to what she has to tell us. I hope it will be a full and comprehensive review with proper public consultation that will take place in the very near future.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is good that the Government have realised that our road traffic laws are a mess, because the cost—the human cost, the social cost—of the crimes and offences we are talking about is extremely high. When we think of the cost of the deaths and injuries to the NHS, to social services, to the emergency services, we are talking about billions of pounds and we really ought to understand that a lot of the causes are avoidable.

When I first got on to the Met Police authority, I went out a lot with the traffic teams—I have told this story before—and one sergeant said to me, “If I wanted to murder somebody, I would run them over with a car, because nobody could ever prove it was not an accident”. This brings me to the word “accident”, which we really should not use when we are talking about road collisions, road incidents and so on. It offends me and the whole road safety community deeply, because the minute you use the word “accident”, you are judging the cause of whatever happened and that is obviously unfair. You have to look into what really happened.

The most dangerous idea is people who should be disqualified from driving being able to plead exceptional hardship. We have heard a lot about “exceptional hardship”: what a misnomer. People are often allowed to keep on driving and quite honestly, they should feel lucky that they have not gone to prison because a lot of the time, it is complete nonsense. I have read about a lot of cases where the judge or the magistrate allowed someone to get away with—well, not murder, but certainly manslaughter at times. It is obviously a crime against society, not to mention the families themselves.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Randerson

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My noble friend has raised the issue of national standards. I want to approach this issue in a slightly different way. I have added my name to the amendment because I have concerns about clarity. The existing standards are set out in the 1988 Act, and we as drivers are all familiar with them. We passed our driving tests however long ago, but on an almost daily basis we practise following those standards—fairly rigorously, I hope.

According to this legislation, we are now moving to a set of standards based on a format for training of which we, with the exception of my noble friend, have no real concept. We do not understand exactly what is involved in this training and what is expected of police drivers. Indeed, I am sure this debate has been very instructive for us all in finding out a bit more about it.

Add that issue to the fact that standards are different from one part of the country to another and we have a difficult situation for the Government in applying this new approach. Good law has to be easily understandable. Publicising the details of these standards—making sure that the public, as well as police officers, understand them—is essential for acceptance by the general public. That will be essential if cases brought under this legislation are to succeed in court.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have a confession to make: I love the traffic police. I have spent many happy hours in the front of a police van with an automatic number plate recognition machine, spotting illegal drivers. The fascinating thing about criminals is that not only do they break the law on drugs, guns and so on, but they do not pay insurance on their cars either. If I were a criminal, I would make sure that my car was perfectly legal, but for some reason they do not. So the traffic police are incredibly successful at catching criminals; at one point—I do not know if this is still true—their arrest rate was far higher than that of the average police officer here in London.

In the 12 years that I sat on the police authority, I took advantage of that to go out with the traffic police. I remember one spectacular day when they had a car-crushing machine next to the A1. All the vehicles speeding down the A1 saw that machine and slowed to legal limits. We were not actually crushing cars that had been taken that day; they had brought some cars out with them from central London. So I am a big fan. The traffic OCU serves an incredible function of keeping our roads safe.

I support Amendment 19. Of course, everybody expects the police who respond to blue-light emergencies to drive fast, overtake, go through red lights and so on, and it is right that the police are given the necessary legal protections to do their job in these situations. Then there are more controversial and dangerous tactics, such as officers aggressively ramming moped drivers who refuse to stop. We cannot leave that for the courtroom to decide—it has to be a political decision. Whether a tactic meets the standard of a reasonable and careful constable is political, because you cannot leave police officers uncertain about whether their behaviour is legal. It would also leave the public unsure about what standard of driving you can expect from our public servants. Amendment 19 addresses that issue and is an extremely neat solution.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Randerson

Committee stage
Monday 5th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak specifically to the amendments in my name, Amendments 151A and 151B. I also support the other amendments in the group. As my noble friend Lady Sheehan ably and clearly set out the issues in relation to emissions and particulates from vehicles, I will not repeat what she said, for the sake of brevity, but I wish to underline the importance of the information that she has dealt with.

The purpose of my amendments is simple: to set out clear obligations on local authorities to monitor air pollution at those points where it is likely to be highest, such as near busy roads, and where it is most damaging to human health, such as near hospitals and schools—because children are especially vulnerable. They would oblige local authorities to take action as a result of such monitoring and to publicise that action plan.

Local authorities already have powers to monitor air quality, and additional powers to encourage environmentally-friendly behaviour that improves it. For example, stationary idling of a car is an offence under Section 42 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. It can incur a £20 fixed penalty under the Road Traffic (Vehicle Emissions) (Fixed Penalty) (England) Regulations 2002—that penalty going up for late payment. So this is old hat, but the key point is that the fine is imposed only if the driver fails to switch off their engine when asked.

It is local authorities which issue those penalties rather than the police. As all noble Lords will know, local authorities are massively overstretched, with multiple responsibilities and inadequate funding. For many of them, this simply is not a priority, although there are some that make it so. For example, Islington Council had a crackdown on idling vehicles in 2014, and again in 2016, but it is an exception and not the norm. With a host of other powers, such as safe routes to school, pedestrianisation, 20 mph zones—as my noble friend has outlined—low emission zones, the provision of charging points for electric vehicles et cetera, some local authorities are much more enthusiastic than others, and some are simply better resourced to use the powers effectively.

My noble friend referred to the devolved Administrations. In Cardiff, where I live, we are well used to 20 mph zones, which are dotted around the capital city of Wales. Although there was a minor controversy in the early months of their introduction, it has been notable how widely effective they are and how people accept them. Traffic speeds have undoubtedly reduced as a result.

My amendments would establish a baseline which would raise the game for local authorities and ensure that the Government set the high standards and proactive approach, and provide the leadership which will be needed if the UK is to get anywhere near government targets by the dates that they have set. It should be emphasised that if local authorities are to take a uniformly more proactive approach, they need the funding to do so.

Those of us who work with these issues are sometimes surprised that public knowledge and understanding of the impact of traffic and other forms of air pollution is so poor. The tragic death of Ella Kissi-Debrah, referred to by many noble Lords, and the coroner’s ruling on it turned statistics into an understandable human story. She lived close to the South Circular road, but the link between her asthma and her living conditions was not properly understood back in 2013. There is now research evidence from a large study in Lambeth that a period of high levels of air pollution, particularly diesel-related air pollution, leads immediately to a spike in the number of people going to see their GP with breathing difficulties. That spike includes a disproportionately high number of children.

Local authorities have public health responsibilities, and a natural part of those must be to take a more proactive approach to reducing air pollution and to informing their residents of those areas to avoid because they are heavily polluted.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am extremely happy to see so many noble Lords interested in this issue, because it is a massive national health issue that we really have to do something about. I agree completely that “20’s plenty”. Reducing the speed limit to 20 mph would not only reduce emissions and improve the health of people living alongside those roads but reduce the number of casualties—the road deaths and injuries—that cost the nation a fortune in social services, the NHS and policing. Anything to do with lowering the speed limit has a lot of benefits. The only negative appears to be a few irate car drivers who think that it is okay to drive at 80 or 90 mph in towns and cities.

My amendments seek to create a comprehensive system of targets, monitoring and funding to reduce air pollution levels to World Health Organization guideline levels. I know that we are not supposed to get involved in money or government finances, but it is not possible to end this crisis without significant public spending. The Government must make the money available to local authorities to transform their communities and clean up their air.

I first became aware of the huge problem of air pollution in London when I was on the London Assembly. I lived through Ken Livingstone’s eight years and the Boris Johnson’s eight years in power; Ken Livingstone did seem to get this, and the congestion charge obviously helped. In Boris Johnson’s time, we were in the build-up to the Olympics. At that point, there were only two monitoring stations in London from which the EU—it oversaw and monitored our air pollution—accepted information. One of the stations was on Marylebone Road, opposite Madame Tussauds. It is still there, and the intake pipe is some 12 feet above the road. Anybody who understands anything about air pollution knows that it is mostly lower, and that is why we should be very careful with children in prams, but this was 12 feet up. Our air was still polluted and higher than EU levels, so that gives an indication of how dirty our air was then.

My amendments are based on my clean air Bill that I keep putting into the ballot to be debated here. It has had a lot of legal input; I clearly think it is the best, but I am prepared to discuss this. One measure that Boris Johnson put in place because of the air pollution on the way to the Olympic Park was to install quite a lot of potted plants along the roadside. They were very attractive, but I am not sure that they did much to reduce the pollution—but he had been told that they might, so he put them in.

It is obvious that local authorities also need tougher powers to clean up other dirty sources of pollution, so my Amendment 153 proposes powers to prohibit the use of fireplaces, wood-burning appliances, diesel vehicles and other sources of pollutants in air pollution improvement zones. The Government have recognised that something needs to be done on air pollution, and this is a very good Bill to do it in. It will be very embarrassing if we get to COP 26 and still have this sort of pollution problem.

In summary, air pollution is a national health crisis: it costs us billions every year. It affects the old and the young. Several of us have mentioned Ella Kissi-Debrah, who lived next to a dirty, filthy road and died at nine years old because of her asthma. It is children who will have health problems all their lives because of living near polluted roads. This Bill is an ideal opportunity to fix this problem. We know what the solutions are, and they are here in these amendments, so I hope that the Government accept them.