draft Disabled Persons’ Parking Badges (Scotland) Act 2014 (Consequential Provisions) order 2016

Ian Murray Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 General Committees

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

It is always a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David. I wonder who you have upset on the Speaker’s Panel to get such orders. I am disappointed not to see my favourite Minister, the Deputy Leader of the House, but she informed me earlier that she had missed two trains. She did not quite say that that was the result of the dreadful privatisation of the railways, but she said that she had missed two on the trot and that it was unfortunate that she could not be here. The hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire did a fine job in her place. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] He has just got Back-Bench approval for his promotion on the Front Bench.

The Opposition supported the aims and objectives of the 2014 Act when it went through Parliament and we support the draft order today. However, it is worth noting that my colleagues emphasised on a number of occasions when the Act was going through Parliament that appropriate resources should be given to local authorities both in Scotland and in England and Wales to ensure that such provisions are enforced robustly, so that the system is robust and can be relied on by the disabled people who use blue badges.

That notwithstanding, the draft order will make the necessary amendments to the existing legislation to ensure that blue badges issued in Scotland are treated in a valid and consistent fashion across every nation in Great Britain. This applies both to the form badges must take to be recognised as valid, and to the circumstances under which such a badge can be rescinded, so that if a badge is cancelled by a Scottish local authority that takes effect in England and Wales, too.

We are committed to ensuring that our towns and cities are more accessible for disabled people. I was delighted that the Government accepted our amendments, in both this place and the House of Lords, for pavement parking to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. I thank Living Streets for the campaign that it ran. I also thank my former colleague, Mark Lazarowicz, the former Member for Edinburgh North and Leith, who campaigned on the issue when he was in this House in the previous Parliament.

There is little else to say on the draft order, apart from 37 technical questions that I hope the Minister is able to answer in depth, otherwise we may not be able to pass it. Seriously, I want to ask just one question, on paragraph 8.6 in the explanatory notes, about public awareness. Will the Minister tell us whether the UK Government intend to carry out some multi-agency work, which is referred to in the explanatory notes, and what that would consist of, just to ensure that people are aware of the changes and so that disabled people can feel confident that the system will be robust, whether they are driving through Swansea or Southampton or, indeed, Glasgow?