Parking Review Aug 2002,p.13 Landor Publishing

Parking Debate

Against the grain: A new discussion colum

Penalty system is not British justice

Bob Pilbeam

Have your say:
If you have any reactions to ideas expressed in this article, or ideas of your own, please email them to:
ed.pr@landor.co.uk

Parking enforcement is essential if the highway is to function properly. Without the ability to penalise people who park in the wrong place or overstay limited waiting periods, the management of the kerbside would fall apart. However, in the transition from police enforcement to a decriminalised regime following the introduction of the Road Traffic Act 1991, questions have arisen over the integrity of the new enforcement regimes. There is a widespread impression among the public that decriminalised parking regimes are more about raising revenue than about traffic control, especially where private contractors are used by councils.

For example, London's Evening Standard recently alleged that a parking company working for one borough was paying a bonus to its attendants if they issued tickets above certain thresholds. The bonus did reflect other performance indicators, such as no sick leave, but ticket production was a key criteria.

When parking enforcement was the responsibility of the Metropolitan Police, great emphasis was put on integrity. The nearest police traffic wardens and beat officers ever got to being rewarded for the amount of prosecutions they achieved was during their initial two-year probation. During this period they were expected to produce a reasonable return of work in order to prove they were capable of doing the job.

In fact, police officers who 1 have spoken to found that the more work they produced, the more likely they were to have problems keeping their paperwork up to date. So the incentive was to do less rather than more. Obviously, there has to be a monitoring system to ensure that parking attendants are not being paid for doing nothing. But it should not be a case of rewarding personnel for the number of prosecutions achieved.

In the new Special Parking Areas, many councils use private parking enforcement companies. Private companies exist to make a profit. If they think the profits they are making are not sufficient,

how can they hope to improve them? Either by reducing wages and staff, or alternatively getting better productivity from staff - in short, issuing more tickets.

It is not for me to say that parking attendants are dishonest, and 1 am sure that most are completely honest. But in any walk of life, a little extra money is useful and when Christmas is coming or if the mortgage has to be paid, incentives to bend the rules increase. But, 1 hear you say, if the ticket is issued incorrectly the driver can always appeal and British justice will see them alright. This is normally true, but not with parking tickets. If you pay a Penalty Charge Notice within 14 days there is a 50% reduction in the penalty. You might presume that if you appeal and lose, you would also get a 50% discount if you paid promptly.

But no. As you had the audacity to appeal, you have to pay the full amount. The incentive is therefore for drivers to pay up and swallow the fine to save money.

If a criminal went to court and said to the magistrate: "Well 1 did not do it, but 1 want to get it over and done with quickly so 1 plead guilty", the magistrate will say he is entering a plea of not guilty for the defendant and will not let him plead guilty. However, exactly the opposite happens with a parking offence. Drivers should not be penalised for pleading not guilty.

It seems that we are arriving at a point where money has too much impact on the operation of the parking enforcement and appeals system. At the beginning of the process, financial incentives encourage attendants to issue as many tickets as possible, while at the end, inducements are offered to drivers not to challenge the veracity of penalties.

This certainly is not British justice. M

Bob Pilbeam is a former Metropolitan Police officer, and worked in the Met's traffic section. He is now an independent consultant and Blue Badge tourist guide