Sauce for the goose
Page 7
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P&O may have done a lot in the fight against illegal immigrants, but so have a lot of hauliers. Little wonder, then, that so many are outraged by the decision to grant P&O exemption from the stowaway fines scheme.
While P&O's efforts are clearly praiseworthy it's hardly surprising, given the value of fines it could have faced, that it has done so much. But we don't begrudge it its exemption. The irony, and the outrage, is that while P&O can now get just as involved in transporting stowaways as any haulier—and just as unwittingly—it will be spared the fines that threaten to ruin many others. How fair is it that one unwitting participant should be fined, while another isn't?
It simply isn't acceptable for the law to be applied differently to different parties. So if it's right for P&O to be granted exemption based on an acceptable set of detection procedures, then it must also be right for hauliers. Which means it's time for the Home Office to define exactly what procedures it wants truck operators to use and start granting similar exemptions without delay—or, at least, to explain satisfactorily why it won't.
• It may be a random sample; it may have been a particularly bad day; or it may be that all the rotten eggs somehow ended up in one particular basket. But the fact that a roadside check anywhere in Britain on any one day should show 70% of trucks to be unsafe is little short of a scandal. Based on these figures, enforcement in the UK doesn't appear to be working. Clearly, more effort and more money are both needed to help educate, prevent and, where necessary, convict the offenders.