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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support what the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, has said and I declare my interest as a member of the Thames Valley Police Authority. The Crown Prosecution Service is already burdened with more work than it can do so that—certainly in the courts in the area to which I go—cases are being presented by ““journeymen lawyers””, who are not members of the CPS, but people that the CPS buys in to do the work and they are often not as expert in matters as they might be. They are certainly not as expert in many matters which the police officers—dealing in particular with traffic offences as we are discussing here—would be expert in. In their haste to pass the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and the other reforms that the Government brought to bear on the criminal justice system, there were good reasons for taking away from the police the presentation of certain facts before the court. But where the matters are technical, and particularly in the circumstances which the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, outlined, there is a strong case for allowing the police to present the case rather than—as is the system now—writing down the evidence for the CPS lawyer to read out. It is a convoluted system which is not in the interests of either the economy or justice.