Parking hell: The parking industry investigated, continued (page 2) ...
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUED FROM HERE . . .
For the first time in 2003-4, English and Welsh local authorities made more than £1 billion from parking. The London boroughs alone took in £337 million, of which more than £143 million was pure profit. Council coffers are swelling not simply through parking tickets and bus-lane fines, but also from meter feeds and the sale of permits. Yet by any standards, the business of ticketing, clamping and removing cars is booming as never before.
The London boroughs issued almost six million penalty charge notices in 2004-5, up from 4.3 million in 2000-1. Outside London, English and Welsh councils handed out almost three million more. By law, local authorities must regulate parking not primarily to raise money, but “to secure the expeditious, convenient and safe movement of vehicular and other traffic”. Yet as the surpluses have risen over the years, so have public suspicions about the councils’ true agenda. As Edmund King, director of the RAC Foundation, sees it, local authorities now see parking as “a convenient and easy way to raise money, rather than as a policy issue”.
Public tolerance is being tested with every television investigation alleging corruption, and with each outraged report of target-fixated attendants ticketing buses, fire engines, even a rabbit-hutch whose owner, delivering to a Manchester pet shop, moved his van before a warden could pounce.
“It’s the biggest fraud that goes on,” claims Barrie Segal, a Pimlico accountant who runs AppealNow.com, one of a growing number of websites campaigning against what they see as unjust use of parking regulations to make money. Segal has heard it all: PAs falsifying information in their notebooks to "prove" that correctly parked cars were elsewhere; motorists illegally ticketed long after they had driven off. He makes an annual award to the victim of what he considers the most absurd abuse of a PA’s powers. Its latest winner was Nadhim Zahawi, handed a penalty charge notice in central London as he lay in the road with a broken leg after coming off his scooter.
“The councils are very happy to allow a poor system to continue, because they get the revenue,” Segal says wearily. “Nobody now has faith in the system. I certainly don’t.”
++++
Monday, 3.10pm: Dr William J Knottenbelt, a 32-year-old computing lecturer at Imperial College, London, is pacing outside the college in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, explaining animatedly how Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea councils conspire to “sting” honest motorists.
“What really makes me mad is when a law-abiding family parks here to visit one of the museums, pays £12 to stay in a pay-and-display bay for four hours, and comes back shocked to find their car clamped with a £115 fine,” Knottenbelt says furiously, walking the few yards between an occupied parking space and the nearest ticket machine. "I really don't like to see people exploited."
This bay, according to a discreet logo on a nearby sign, belongs to the City of Westminster, which last year issued 817,596 penalty charge notices and earned £72 million from parking – making it Britain’s highest-ranking council on both counts. The ticket machine, on a traffic island separating two wide traffic lanes, belongs to the neighbouring Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (on-street parking income: £39,219,000), but it would take a close reading of the payment instructions to notice the distinction, and there is no warning, even in the small print, that this machine’s tickets are invalid in the nearby bay.
“The instructions don’t say you pay your £12, slap your ticket on the windscreen, and then come back to find it’s been clamped,” Knottenbelt says. “The people I see being caught out genuinely want to pay, but are simply getting confused. The council bosses know that – I’ve written to them three or four times asking for the notices to be made clearer – but all they say is ‘our signage is excellent’. That in my view is neither a fair nor a reasonable system. There’s a widespread suspicion of some kind of revenue-related motivation.”
So Knottenbelt, who has only ever received one parking ticket – which he proudly had cancelled on appeal – has become one more campaigner. With a website and a series of Freedom of Information requests, he has spent the past year obsessively investigating the commercial incentives that he considers have allowed councils to pervert the law’s intentions. His discoveries highlight some of the absurdities of the current system: the Post Office van that received 75 Westminster parking tickets in a year; the drainage company that he alleges was somehow exempted from yellow-line tickets; the “incentive scheme” designed to reward Westminster PAs with Argos vouchers according to their “sales” and “issued number of tickets per shift”. The proposal was withdrawn, according to NCP, the Westminster contractor, but only after it had been tested elsewhere.
“I didn’t expect this to become an obsession,” Knottenbelt reflects, a little embarrassed. “I just found myself talking to PAs and council bosses and getting different answers. The bosses told me the system was about keeping traffic flowing, but the PAs told me they were being pushed to issue tickets – up to 20 per shift in Westminster. As for Kensington & Chelsea, it’s hardly surprising that 90 per cent of residents apparently approve of how things are managed there – they know that most fines are issued to non-residents. It’s taxation without representation.
"There are conflicts of interest if the council enjoys the revenue it receives from parking,” he concludes. “When contractors’ profit is based partly on the number of tickets issued, the contractor is not concerned with implementing the law correctly, but with hitting targets.” He pauses by the ticket machine. “I want things to change,” he says, a revolutionary fervour rising in his voice. “Everyone you talk to says, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just implementing the system.’ Well, maybe it’s the system that we need to change.”
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
For the first time in 2003-4, English and Welsh local authorities made more than £1 billion from parking. The London boroughs alone took in £337 million, of which more than £143 million was pure profit. Council coffers are swelling not simply through parking tickets and bus-lane fines, but also from meter feeds and the sale of permits. Yet by any standards, the business of ticketing, clamping and removing cars is booming as never before.
The London boroughs issued almost six million penalty charge notices in 2004-5, up from 4.3 million in 2000-1. Outside London, English and Welsh councils handed out almost three million more. By law, local authorities must regulate parking not primarily to raise money, but “to secure the expeditious, convenient and safe movement of vehicular and other traffic”. Yet as the surpluses have risen over the years, so have public suspicions about the councils’ true agenda. As Edmund King, director of the RAC Foundation, sees it, local authorities now see parking as “a convenient and easy way to raise money, rather than as a policy issue”.
Public tolerance is being tested with every television investigation alleging corruption, and with each outraged report of target-fixated attendants ticketing buses, fire engines, even a rabbit-hutch whose owner, delivering to a Manchester pet shop, moved his van before a warden could pounce.
“It’s the biggest fraud that goes on,” claims Barrie Segal, a Pimlico accountant who runs AppealNow.com, one of a growing number of websites campaigning against what they see as unjust use of parking regulations to make money. Segal has heard it all: PAs falsifying information in their notebooks to "prove" that correctly parked cars were elsewhere; motorists illegally ticketed long after they had driven off. He makes an annual award to the victim of what he considers the most absurd abuse of a PA’s powers. Its latest winner was Nadhim Zahawi, handed a penalty charge notice in central London as he lay in the road with a broken leg after coming off his scooter.
“The councils are very happy to allow a poor system to continue, because they get the revenue,” Segal says wearily. “Nobody now has faith in the system. I certainly don’t.”
++++
Monday, 3.10pm: Dr William J Knottenbelt, a 32-year-old computing lecturer at Imperial College, London, is pacing outside the college in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, explaining animatedly how Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea councils conspire to “sting” honest motorists.
“What really makes me mad is when a law-abiding family parks here to visit one of the museums, pays £12 to stay in a pay-and-display bay for four hours, and comes back shocked to find their car clamped with a £115 fine,” Knottenbelt says furiously, walking the few yards between an occupied parking space and the nearest ticket machine. "I really don't like to see people exploited."
This bay, according to a discreet logo on a nearby sign, belongs to the City of Westminster, which last year issued 817,596 penalty charge notices and earned £72 million from parking – making it Britain’s highest-ranking council on both counts. The ticket machine, on a traffic island separating two wide traffic lanes, belongs to the neighbouring Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (on-street parking income: £39,219,000), but it would take a close reading of the payment instructions to notice the distinction, and there is no warning, even in the small print, that this machine’s tickets are invalid in the nearby bay.
“The instructions don’t say you pay your £12, slap your ticket on the windscreen, and then come back to find it’s been clamped,” Knottenbelt says. “The people I see being caught out genuinely want to pay, but are simply getting confused. The council bosses know that – I’ve written to them three or four times asking for the notices to be made clearer – but all they say is ‘our signage is excellent’. That in my view is neither a fair nor a reasonable system. There’s a widespread suspicion of some kind of revenue-related motivation.”
So Knottenbelt, who has only ever received one parking ticket – which he proudly had cancelled on appeal – has become one more campaigner. With a website and a series of Freedom of Information requests, he has spent the past year obsessively investigating the commercial incentives that he considers have allowed councils to pervert the law’s intentions. His discoveries highlight some of the absurdities of the current system: the Post Office van that received 75 Westminster parking tickets in a year; the drainage company that he alleges was somehow exempted from yellow-line tickets; the “incentive scheme” designed to reward Westminster PAs with Argos vouchers according to their “sales” and “issued number of tickets per shift”. The proposal was withdrawn, according to NCP, the Westminster contractor, but only after it had been tested elsewhere.
“I didn’t expect this to become an obsession,” Knottenbelt reflects, a little embarrassed. “I just found myself talking to PAs and council bosses and getting different answers. The bosses told me the system was about keeping traffic flowing, but the PAs told me they were being pushed to issue tickets – up to 20 per shift in Westminster. As for Kensington & Chelsea, it’s hardly surprising that 90 per cent of residents apparently approve of how things are managed there – they know that most fines are issued to non-residents. It’s taxation without representation.
"There are conflicts of interest if the council enjoys the revenue it receives from parking,” he concludes. “When contractors’ profit is based partly on the number of tickets issued, the contractor is not concerned with implementing the law correctly, but with hitting targets.” He pauses by the ticket machine. “I want things to change,” he says, a revolutionary fervour rising in his voice. “Everyone you talk to says, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just implementing the system.’ Well, maybe it’s the system that we need to change.”
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, January 31, 2001
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