Biker’s start ‘$mart Car Hunting’ to run mobile CCTV fine machines out of town

CCTV Smart Car Hunting is a new ‘sport’ that has already Grabbed the attention of the BBC’s watchdog program soon after it was invented by a dedicated band of NTBPT motorbike and scooter riders – who have been spurred into action to oppose Westminster City Council’s (WCC) highly controversial and regressive bike parking tax scheme. And, hot news tonight is that the Evening Standard has picked up on it too. The thrills and spills of Smart Car Hunting are often filmed and the latest action can be seen on U-Tube – with one of the first expeditions becoming the subject of a short documentary by a fellow biking blogger at nutsville.com. Video reports of other missions can be found here, here, and here.

Currently, riders and readers who live outside London, Kent or the North West may not have seen these mobile PCN fine churning machines yet… But as each one has raked in an average of £187.667 per year so far, with the BBC reporting that £7.3m came from London in one year, you probably will soon unless their profitability is significantly damaged by those who would a Smart Car hunting go. But to be fair to WCC, they have not yet officially topped the UK league tables of PCN ticket dishing and revenue raising from Smart Car CCTV as Lambeth are top dogs with an impressive 34,000 fines being issued by just three cars in one year which raked in a cool £1,689,460. However, it is of course my duty in the interest of balance to report that deployment of these mobile fine factories is, according to the councilors who support heir use, not about raking in cash at all. Oh no! As Councillor Nigel Haselden, Lambeth’s deputy cabinet member for sustainability and transport has said.

“CCTV enforcement is vital in making sure we can deal with the relatively small number of motorists who insist on ignoring the rules. Parking enforcement is categorically not about raising money, it is about keeping roads safe and clear.”

I have to admit though that I am a tad sceptical about the truth of that claim and find the phrase, my arse, coming to mind. After all, a recent FOI investigation by Big Brother Watch revealed that there are at least 54 CCTV Smart cars patrolling 31 local council areas in Britain. In the interest of balance I should point out that deployment of these surveillance Of course  councils at least £8,069,714.67 in fines in the period 1st April 2009 – 31st March 2010. This is equal to £322,788.58 for every council operating a CCTV Smart car, or £187,667.78 per car.

Enthusiasm for the new sport is spreading and becoming all the rage in central London. But I am now reliably informed that interest in the sport is growing throughout the UK biking community. In response to growing interest in the sport, a NoToMob Twitter account has been set up. And, I have just been informed that preparations are in hand to provide a ‘starter pack’ of advice on setting up a new hunting team and how to engage in the sport in an appropriately civilised and legal way.

In the meantime, here is a brief description of the new sport and how it is played:

Teams of plucky bikers draw attention to the whereabouts of mobile CCTV units that cruise around or sneakily park while trying to film minor traffic offences or parking infringements and rake in loads of cash by dishing out thousands of PCN fines.

So, step one in the hunt:

Find a smart car. Once spotted by a hunting team, initial contact is made with the pray by a friendly wave to the car.

Then sooner or later, the chase is on!

Step two:

The second phase of the hunt involves the mobile fine machines being provided with an ‘escort’ of riders who alert all road users to the presence of a CCTV unit that may have not been there before. But please note this well! A key rule of Smart Car Hunting that must not be broken ever is that the pursuit is purely and simply of the car and it’s camera system, and NEVER it’s occupants – who are merely employees of a private contractor who are going about their lawful business – albeit one that involves them breaking parking control regulations whenever they feel like it.

Step three:

The hunt is declared successfully over  when the CCTV Smart Car buggers off back to it’s shed.

Alternative interim move before step three:

Occasionally the occupants of the Smart Car may experience a misguided feeling that they are the focus of the chase, and may be being subject to some form of harassment, and to a point where they call for police  intervention and a premature end to the hunt. In these situations the Smart Car Hunting team must dismount from their motorcycles or scooters and engage in a polite conversation with the officers called to the scene. During the course of the conversation the hunters must politely explain that they have no interest whatsoever in the occupants but are only interested in escorting the  Smart Car and seeing where it goes, and that as cars have no feelings they cannot experience any meaningful sense of harassment.

Experiences of teams engaged in the sport so far shows that the police officers called in these situations are well aware that cars can not feel harassed and are therefore fully prepared to except that no harassment has taken place during the course of the event. I have no idea what impact this new sport may have in due course so all I will say for now is Happy Smart Car Hunting for those who care to, and Tally Ho!

Police, Camera, Action! But who is calling for the shots of protesters against bike parking taxes, Top Cops or two Greedy Piggies in two City Halls?

Up until now, the MET police in London have been more accommodating towards riders protesting against Westminster’s regressive cash-cow bike parking tax, than any other single issue riders campaign I have ever seen. So I was a tad surprised last week to see a highly visible video cop adding a new and potentially intimidating element in their responses to protest rides organised by the NTPBT.

But my latest info from sources close to the MET and Westminster insiders suggests that there  may have been some string pulling by the sharp trading leader of Westminster City council and his big business chum and deputy Mayor of London. And, if so, there may be a radically different explanation for what might really be going on…

Barrow + Cash Crop

Whatever the truth may be, one thing’s for sure as you can see from this latest film report. It looks like the MET decided to make a potentially imposing show of making a video record of protesters and police attempts to deal with them. But, as is often the way with this twisted saga, all is not what it may seem.

It turns out that the getting-richer-quick millionaire leader of Westminster Council, Colin Barrow, is a chum and business partner of Kit Malthouse, a premier league political bruiser, former WCC Cllr, and wannabe Tory Grandee. The barrow boy is top dog at Westminster City Hall and has several sources of income, although at least one biking blogger has questioned his accountability regarding some of them. Anyway, one wonger making option is wheeling and dealing as a Hedge Fund company Director – and the latest of these highly profitable ventures is Alpha Strategic where he is Executive Chairman & his big Mate Kit is Finance Director. But two other sources of cash for Barrow have taken months of diligent follow ups to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to reveal the truth.

Cop-watch Chum Malthouse

First, it was eventually revealed that in addition to his ‘Basic’ councillor allowance of £10,250, he got a handy £37,639.55 in 2009, for ‘special’ expenses making a total of around £48,000. And, equally handily, as the this FOI string finally confirmed in Feb 2010, (!) following a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, his decision to liquidate one of his Hedge Fund companies called Eiger Capital, meant that he was no longer legally obliged to pay £19,186.71 in business rates owed to none other than Westminster Council. So, in round figures, Cllr Colin effectively trouserred a cool £68,000 of rate payers cash in 2009.

Meanwhile, his business associate Kit Malthouse is technically second in line to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. But the scale of power Malthouse really has behind the scenes could be higher than a typical ‘number two’ for a few key reasons. Not least of these is that the Conservative party got rather fed up with seeing Boris, their Golden boy Mayor, rapidly establish a bad reputation for losing deputies for  unseemly reasons. Losing one deputy mayor might be considered unfortunate, two careless – but three in a year is a bit too far beyond the pale. So Malthouse was brought in as a “Boris hit man” to very much stick around in City Hall and get the Mayor’s ship back on as straight and narrow a path as possible.

However, the most significant thing about Malthouse for riders opposing Westminster’s plan to tax us to park, may be that he recently acquired new and potentially all encompassing powers over the police. When London Mayor Boris Johnson got ‘too busy’ to Chair the MET police authority as he famously vowed he would, he ‘stepped down’ so Malthouse could be shoe horned into the job at the end of last year.

This move was however far from free of critical comment as Malthouse had “missed key police meetings” up until then. But almost as soon as the mayor’s new deputy dawg began his new cop-watch role he fuelled even more controversy over the extent of his powers to influence the direction of policing in London.

Understandably, many in the MET were not amused. Right from the start of Malthouse taking charge of overseeing the MET a great deal of concern grew among senior officers. Some were “aghast at politicians meddling in their business”. But the stuff really hit the fan when the Mayor’s hit-man Malthouse infamously declared that he and the Conservative party had now got their “hands on the tiller” of the MET police force in London. In fact this prompted a “warning” from the MET’s chief that the claim by Malthouse could pave the way for ‘lunatics or the BNP winning control of the police’.

Now I have seen no hard evidence to prove any truth in rumous that the MET police have been heavily lent on to change the way that protests against WCC’s bike parking tax are policed – or that such pressure was applied by somebody with big clout in Mayor Johnson’s City Hall. Nor have I seen any proof  that the leader of the London council that is trying to pioneer a new parking tax for motorcycle and scooter riders has asked his mate and business partner – who had claimed to have his hands on the tiller of the MET, to either arrest the NTBPT protesters as a way of stopping them cause huge disruption to traffic on a weekly basis, or do something new to try and dissuade them from drawing attention to their beef with the rich burghers of Westminster. So, of course, I couldn’t possible suggest that such rumors are true. Nor would I even dream of doing so. Yet.

As ever I will leave it up to readers and riders to make what sense of this they can, and will welcome any further news or thoughts you may have…

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…