Overhaul of UK parking fines system long overdue but will any politicians have the guts to support it while Westminster stay top dogs in issuing dodgy PCN gravy train tickets?

Over the last few days I’ve been rather more immersed than I’d like in the dark and dodgy business to be found lurking behind the smoothly drawn official lines about parking schemes and scams. The most pressing things have been focused by calls from the NTBPT to help them and their legal team deal with Westminster’s plan to try and force riders of scooters and motorbikes into the clutches of ‘golden contract’ Verrus As you may recall, this lot have a potentially juicy contract from WCC to use their super-slick pay by phone systems to extract a brand new bike parking tax. And they’ve already trousered well over £2 million from the first few months ‘trial’ of the new tax.

But there is good news on that front though as the case against the legitimacy of the WCC plan, and recent Traffic Orders to try and make it a permanent fixture, is already big and powerful. And, following a meeting I went to last Friday where the NTBPT team discussed refinements with their lawyers, and we all went off to get a few more crucial facts and figures, I can say that the case is growing stronger each day. And there will be more to say on that very soon after the application for statutory review is lodged this Friday!

However, there may be other glimmers of hope for progress. These latest steps in what will be a crucial case for all UK bike and scooter riders also coincides with a new coalition of forces to call for a complete overhaul of the way parking is ‘managed’ in Britain. As this article reveals in useful detail. But this has prompted me to do a mini review and dig a bit deeper to see how we got into what seems to me to be an increasingly nasty and abusive mess.

Ever since parking enforcement was ‘decriminalised’ in 1991, i.e. it could be done for councils by big profit-making companies – in exchange for a slice of the cash extracted for ‘managing’ this aspect of road use – it has become a very big business indeed.

In fact the latest figures show that the total income from UK parking charges and fines reached an eye-watering high of £1.9 billion per year. And, to make matters worse this is not only one of the few real growth industries in terms of revenues, it is probably the fastest growing one in Britain right now. Some councils doubled the income they squeezed out of motorised road users in the last year alone – and one is trying desperately hard to bolt a new bike parking tax on the side.

But as we all know, whenever big sums of money are at stake there will always be some players who are prepared to bend or break the rules as much as they dare – to get a bigger slice of the action. And recently I’ve had to do a bit of digging to discover who is doing what on the dark and dodgy side.

So, the less good news for me has been finding out just how rotten our parking enforcement systems have got. The number of parking penalty charge notices PCNs that are unlawfully issued is staggeringly high. This is clear to see if you know where to look, as all UK councils have been forced to reveal the figures. But top of the national league in issuing dodgy PCNs – which is in my view nothing short of an abuse of local government powers is… well who do you think? Yep, as Westminster City Council’s Annual Report on Parking shows, they are streets ahead of all others when it comes to the number of fines they have to withdraw because they were unlawfully issued in the first place.

Since 2005, Westminster council has agreed to cancel an average 20% of all PCN notices to pay a parking fine each year as they were found to be unlawful for various reasons. The extent of this unlawful use of Traffic Management power is shockingly quantified by the council’s own figures.

In 2008/9, there were 133,856 instances in which a PCN for an alleged parking offence was cancelled as it had been issued without due evidence that a violation had been committed.

This works out at an average of 372 unlawfully issued fines per day! Does our UK system in which this can go on need overhauling? You bet.

So now back to the big question about whether UK politicians will support new challenges to the rotten parking enforcement systems we have – and riders are facing more of. In my view the answer will depend on various things. But the key one in the run-up to the election is whether they think there will be more votes in supporting the challengers, or the fat cat players who are currently driving the gravy trains.

Well, I’m sorry to say that’s all I’ve got time to say for now as there is still quite a bit to do before Friday – when the next few rounds in fight against new bike parking taxes will begin…



Will the UK Serious Fraud Office investigate claims that top Westminster Council officers were part of a £200m Parking Enforcement contract scandal – or not?

Unless you are new to Britain or live in a shed or up a tree, you will know that the business of ‘enforcing’ parking regulations frequently arouses suspicions of foul play. Parking contract activity may seem like a dull aspect of local governance, but since it was ‘decriminalised’ in 1991, it has become quite ‘exciting’ for some. And, with parking fees and fine incomes for UK councils totalling £1.9bn per year in 2009, it has also grown into a very big and often murky business indeed for others, especially in that most illustrious and wealthy of London Boroughs, run by Westminster City Council (WCC).

But, the latest focus for suspicions may cap all that have gone before. This week, two top WCC officers were formally accused of a series of offences under the Fraud Act 2006, and of Gross Misconduct in Public Office. I learn late tonight that the BBC have now picked up on this. The claims were lodged by the No-To-Bike-Parking-Tax (NTBPT) campaign group against the suspects who are… Well I’ve just heard that one of them is shaping up to take legal action to block being named and attack anyone with the temerity to question the legitimacy of his recent actions, so, as I have no intention of interfering with the due course of justice, I have for the moment removed the names of the suspects…

To be fair to Westminster, as I always try to be, theirs is not the only place where the execution of parking business can at times become unseemly or shown to be illegal.

Dodgy doings by private parking companies with hugely lucrative council contracts across the UK have been well documented over many years. And, as the latest ‘SHOCKING’ video evidence shows, the UK’s ‘leading parking enforcement firm’ APCOA, recently employed a couple of ’swaggering’ wardens to act as agents of local governance, but who seem to have extended the ’services’ they offer the local community to a spot of illegal drug dealing.

I can’t vouch for the reliability of this footage or legal case against the two ‘civil enforcement officers’ though, but note that the National Newspaper who published reports of these seemingly criminal actions has not been made to take them down as yet. I am, however, fairly confidant that if the two officers caught on film were selling illegal drugs, they will probably be subject to rigorous investigation by their employers and be brought to due justice by the police. In fact the employers APCOA were quick to say they were “appalled” by the allegations and are taking them “very seriously” and that “any suggestion of illegal activity by their employees, would be taken straight to the police”. Strangely though, I am far less confident about what will happen to the two senior officers on the Westminster payroll. I am even doubtful about the extent of justice that will be brought to bear on this case.

For a start, the video footage of two blokes in parking enforcement officer’s uniforms doing a sixty quid dope deal is clear – and looks like damming evidence of deeply dodgy conduct. Whereas it is not so easy to see such clear proof of what that Gilchrist and Large may have been up to. Especially as the evidence so far is currently all in a 54 page report that details the various claims about what they have been doing behind the scenes where big value enforcement contracts are transferred from one company to another. But although I make no claims to being a legal expert, I have read the complete list of ’suspicions’ of wrong doing and have formed my own opinion that that there seems to be some serious and well evidenced reasons to doubt that due procedures have been followed.

In a nutshell, it is claimed that the WCC officers made a series of moves to enable Westminster and over 30 other councils to change the contractor they used for parking enforcement, but without going through the full tendering processes that local authorities are required to do by UK and EU law. Crucially though, if it is eventually proved that this is what they have done it could mean that all of the councils involved will have to pay back over £200m to people who were issued with PCNs by companies that had no legal right to do so.

So, with that amount of local government and big parking company business revenue potentially at stake – and the ongoing £billions from future enforcement contracts – it should come as no surprise that the activities of ********* and ***** are likely to benefit from a significantly more well funded defence than a pair of dope dealing traffic wardens are likely to muster.

It also seems likely to me that a whoever is involved with investigating the allegations of Fraud and Gross Misconduct, they will be in for an uphill struggle and will face intense scrutiny and great but probably well hidden resistance from various aspects of the government machine. Initially, this investigation will be by the Met Police who have told me tonight. “We can confirm we have received an allegation of fraud on 10 February. The allegation is currently been looked at. We are unable to discuss further at this early stage.”

I also gather that whether this ends up being investigated by the SFO will depend on various factors including the amount of cash that ends up being considered to be at stake.

Meanwhile, the latest news I’ve been given from Westminster tonight comes from Mike More, Chief Executive of Westminster City Council. He tells me that these allegations are all part of an ongoing campaign by a “motorbike protest group who are unhappy over parking charges in Westminster”. Although More fails to acknowledge a parallel set of similar claims being investigated in Sunderland by the Parking Appeals car driver group co-ordinated by Neil Heron. Anyway, More goes on to say that WCC “remain confident that the parking contract was properly let by our officers and all allegations of fraud or deliberate wrongdoing are completely unfounded”. Although he feels obliged to add that they are now considering their legal position to see what action they should take in response to these claims with a suggestion that “if “there is an investigation “we will fully co-operate with any police enquiry and I fully believe this will resolve the issue.”

But with no undue disrespect for Mr More, the Met police have already issued a crime number in response to the NTBPT claims – so it is already clear that an investigation is going to happen – and has begun. What remains to be seen is how far the investigation will go and to see if the SFO will be drawn into investigate these allegations that senior officers have been engaged in Fraud and Gross Misconduct. All I can say for now is, that we’ll all have to wait and see but don’t hold your breath though because this is in my view likely to be a very long winded affair…

Spy in Sky CCTV cameras over the White Cliffs of Dover tomorrow? Just you wait and see…

Update 26 Jan. Eminent and highly respected commentator Simon Jenkins has just added a new angle on the focus for this blog which illustrates how key the issue of money may be – and can be found in full here

Just to cheer us all up on a rainy start to the week in London, I bring news that our real Big Brother in Britain plans to use unmanned spy drone cameras to look after us even better than before. Ah, how lovely you may think. But maybe not…

Frankly, the idea of UK police using such high-tech spy- in-the-sky kit, currently deployed in war zones like Afghanistan, but now for ‘routine’ monitoring of riders, motorists and protesters, in our occasionally Green and Pleasant Land – does not fill me with great joy at all. There are also some bloggers out there like BB Watch who take a very dim view of this latest news. To be fair though, these new additions to the armoury of surveillance kit our governors and private enforcement companies have to hand are not called spy drones at all. Oh no.

It seems, according to responses to a Freedom of Information FOI request submitted by the Guardian that the folk who make this kit are the arms manufacturer BAE Systems, and they produce a range of ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ aka UAVs. Worryingly though for some of us perhaps, good old BAE is converting a fleet of UAVs from use in warfare to use by a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

The FOI request forced release of report documents from the soothingly titled South Coast Partnership. But it turns out that this is a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE.

Their report reveals the following news:

“Five other police forces have signed up to the scheme, which is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for “surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering”. The partnership’s stated mission is to introduce drones “into the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies” across the UK.”

So there you go then. And all I can say to anyone who is starting to harbour suspicions that this plan may not be entirely driven by an earnest desire to look after us all better than ever, is that you could be in danger. And the danger you’d be in is of joining that widely reviled group called sceptics. And for those who go further with thoughts that a primary driver for getting this kit into action is to dish out loads more revenue generating penalty charge notices PCNs, for such heinous crimes as exceeding speed limits by a few mile and hour etc., could be in graver danger still. You could be heading down the slippery slopes to the doom of becoming an extreme cynic. By the Cringe!