TC queries legal knowledge • West Midland Traffic Commissioner John
Page 10
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Mervyn Pugh is asking his deputy Roger Seymour to consider if a solicitor and barrister representing a Sutton Coldfield company should be reported to the Law Society and the Bar Council respectively, after deciding that they had misled him.
In his last public inquiry before retirement Mervyn Pugh accepted arguments that proceedings involving the review of Transform Shop Office & Bar Fitters' operating centre were null and void because the notice of the review had been issued too early. However, it later emerged that there were transitional provisions for licences granted before 1 January 1996, which laid down that they would expire on the last day of the previous month rather than the date on which the licence came into force (CM 5-11Mar).
When the proceedings reopened, barrister Hugh Richards argued that there was nothing in the act that enabled the TC to re-open them.
Adjourning the proceedings, Mervyn Pugh said it was the diiity of an advocate to present the law to a tribunal—not to take such parts of the law as suited his case.
The point of law raised on the last occasion should have been put before the review began, he added, and it would have been courtesy to have given prior notice. If he had not been deliberately misled, then it was incompetence. Members of the legal profession who appeared before specialised tribunals, such as a traffic court, should know the law.
The TC directed that the papers in the case and the transcript of the proceedings be submitted to the Deputy TC to decide if Richards should be reported to the Bar Council, and if Andrew Ballard, his instructing solicitor of the law firm Irwin Mitchell, should be reported to the Law Society.
Richards assured the TC that there had not been a deliberate attempt to mislead him.
El New TC, see page 6.