Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, the amendments in this group are intended to ask a short trio of questions about how line 36, which is about the admissibility of evidence, will work. First, I want to be sure that it covers civil as well as criminal proceedings because an awful lot of surveillance camera evidence is used in, for instance, parking ticket or traffic enforcement, which are civil proceedings. It is important that if there are rules and regulations being passed about how these cameras should be used, they and the guidance should be equally effective in dealing with traffic enforcement as in dealing with a mugging. Secondly, if one goes by not general, but certainly frequent, local authority practice, local authorities will rely in civil cases on the fact that most people do not appeal, so the case never comes to court. People pay their fines. Knowing that whenever a particular breach of the code comes to the tribunal the local authorities lose their case, they will none the less continue enforcing because they are losing only 1 or 2 per cent of revenue and the rest of the people are paying up as usual. What the guidance in the code is supposed to do is nullified by the fact that there is no mechanism for spreading the opinion of the tribunal more widely than the individual cases which reach it. Amendment 104 is intended to propose such a mechanism so that a tribunal can say, ““No, you have to stop this. We have seen this five times already and each time we have found for the appellant. You must cease enforcing until you have put this right. We will not allow you to issue any more tickets on the basis of something which we consider to be an unreasonable breach of the code””. The other end of it is that where a tribunal has found a local authority to be in frequent breach of the code and has on each occasion found for the appellant, none the less the local authority will have extracted a very large amount of money out of other people who have not appealed because there is a very substantial disincentive to appeal. If you lose an appeal, you double your fine. There is also a large amount of time taken up in the process of appeal. I would like to see some mechanism where a tribunal can say to a local authority, in particular, or to other people who are seeking to use camera evidence as the basis of fines, that they must repay not only the appellant but all the other people on whom penalties have been imposed on the basis of the practice that the tribunal disapproves of. I beg to move.