Charles Holland

What does the Tier 4 law on travelling actually say?

The stay-at-home rule has plenty of exemptions - including any 'reasonable excuse'

As is perhaps inevitable when advance notice is given of a stable door shutting, the response of many in London last night was to head for the railway stations and get out of town whilst they could.

The reaction to this has been condemnation. The Health Secretary Matt Hancock described the scenes at stations as ‘totally irresponsible’. The Transport Secretary Grant Shapps weighed in, not just with condemnation, but hinting at a police response. He said ‘If you are in Tier 4, the law means you must stay at home and you cannot stay overnight away from home’; ‘Follow the guidance and please do not come to a station unless you are permitted to travel. Extra British Transport Police officers are being deployed to ensure only those who need to take essential journeys can travel safely.’ Peter Hendy, the government’s ‘Christmas travel tsar’ (who knew?) said that ‘additional BTP officers are in place to ensure only essential journeys take place’.

What does the law say?

When I refer to law, I mean the regulations, published at 6.57am on Sunday and (with the bewildering speed that has become commonplace during this pandemic) coming into force 3 minutes later at 7am. What I do not mean is guidance, ministerial or departmental statements, nor what is morally right or epidemiologically sensible. Whilst those matters are extremely important, they are not laws that the police can enforce. Rather, for lawyers (and the courts) they are matters of personal responsibility.

From the get-go, despite having draconian powers at its fingertips, the government seems to have resolved to overstate its exercise of those powers in published guidance, rather than taking the more obvious step of passing laws that matched what it wished for.

An early example of this was guidance published at the time of the first lockdown in March to the effect that exercise could only be taken locally, and only once a day.

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