No Stopping Powers for Inspectors
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FROM OUR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
THE Government last week successfully resisted attempts by Labour M.P.s to give weights and measures inspectors powers to stop vehicles on the roads (see The Commercial Motor, February 1, P. 9).
Amendments to the Weights and Measures Bill, put forward when the measure was being discussed in Committee, would have allowed inspectors to stop vehicles carrying solid fuel, sand or ballast, and "cause to be stopped" vehicles believed to be carrying "any equipment goods or documents" which the Bill authorized an inspector to test or inspect.
Pointing to the subsection which said that nothing in the Bill authorized any inspector to stop any vehicle, Mr. George Darling (Labour, Hillsborough) said the repeal provisions took from inspectors a right they had had for 70 years.
According to his legal adviser, said Mr. Darling, it was doubtful whether an inspector would be able to call upon a policeman to help him stop a vehicle, if, for instance, he believed it was cam ina short weight coal. Many inspectors acted on behalf of local highway authorities in connection with the overloading of lorries, but under the Bill if an inspector saw an obviously overloaded vehicle he would not be able to do anything about It.
Mr. Denzil Freeth, Parliamentary Secretary for Science, said he could not recommend any of the amendments, and could not possibly accept the words cause to be stopped ". Not only would that include demanding that a policeman should stop a vehicle, but it would give an inspector powers to barricade a road if he thought that necessary.
Mr. Freeth fully accepted that it was sometimes necessary to stop a vehicle en route between the point of dispatch and the point of final destination, but said that the inspector was perfectly empowered under the Bill to request the co-operation of the police. The final decision mast rest with the police when they had heard the inspector's case,