I thought the answer used to be written on every driving licence, but since mine disappeared I can’t check easily. Trying to get a clear answer from people responsible for upholding that law proves difficult.
I asked several of them recently and got various answers, but nobody showed a copy of an Act of Parliament or a Statutory Instrument nor did they refer to one so that I could look it up. This is important in the most sensitive area: the ongoing war between cops and kombi drivers. It seems clear that a 30-seater bus is a heavy vehicle, but when exactly does a large kombi become a heavy vehicle? Some say when it weighs more than 2.5 tonnes, but most add that if it carries passengers, then the number of passengers is the deciding factor. However, no-one seems to be clear what the critical number is.
They are obviously concerned that there are a lot of overloaded vehicles on the road and a lot of fatal accidents. They show a commendable desire to reduce the number of deaths on the roads. But they may not have analysed the causes of the problem correctly and they seem to have misunderstood their role in implementing solutions.
If someone makes regulations that are binding on everyone, this needs to be done openly, transparently and in such a way that all drivers know the law and can therefore be held responsible if they break it. That is why a democratic country has written laws, made by elected representatives of the people in a transparent manner and properly published.
Parliamentary process is important to prevent the passing of unjust or misguided laws. Effective publication of the law is important, because nobody should be punished for not obeying a law that s/he is blamelessly ignorant of. We have heard a lot about just laws and how they should be made and enforced; here I am more concerned with misguided laws.
You can’t expect every parliamentarian to be an expert on questions like defining a heavy vehicle; their business is to set a framework within which experts advise on these details. But experts should not be consulted in secret and the decisions must be widely publicised.
I suspect that, although the civil servants, for example in the Vehicle Inspection Department, mean well, they have been exceeding their authority by making decisions on the basis of discussion among themselves. They might simply not know the proper limits of their authority, but a vigilant Parliament should be able to remind them and enforce the proper limits.
This puts responsibility back with elected representatives. Reasonable questions about the legitimacy of their election reduce their authority, but even when these questions were few, before, say 1996, few MPs accepted that the positions they were elected to carried duties and responsibilities.
hey enjoyed being “in power”, but they did not want to do the hard work of using their power to govern for the good of all citizens. So the decisions that they should have been overseeing, if not actually making, were really made by small groups of officials in the VID or in police stations because decisions had to be made and nobody else was making them.
The result is some ill-judged regulations, some contradictions and confusion about what is actually allowed or forbidden and a weight of decision left to police officers on the ground which invites them to take corrupt short cuts. If the law isn’t clear, the cop who is supposed to enforce it will face many more temptations to ignore the law, whether it is good or bad, if it is made worth his or her while. If the lawmakers don’t make laws, the law enforcers carry a burden that tempts them to corruption.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis