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2.15 pm
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab): I have listened to the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) with incredulity given his references to the debate in Committee on 5 February in which it would be reasonable to say that I played a prominent part. He is so keen to pursue his long-held ideology of privatising everything and attacking the public sector at all times that one fears that he may have privatised his brain and that the shareholders have just taken a dividend. The debate on 5 February covered not only the public sector but the private sector.
The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) issued a letter that specifically refers the 5 February debate, in which I pointed out the difference between private sector operators of car parks and public sector operators of car parks and that private sector operators of public car parks are anomalous. I received the Minister's letter yesterday, which is rather late in the day, and it does nothing to address that anomaly—indeed, it excuses it.
The Minister is highly capable, competent and articulate, and he should know not to rely on information provided by the Department for Transport. He will recall that the Department managed to introduce road humps that failed to take account of where cars are positioned on the road, which were a disaster and unpopular across the country. The same point applies to the information that the Department has provided on civil and criminal enforcement, and the Minister's letter defends the existing legislation and the anomaly within it. An individual fined by a private operator of a private car park can go to a civil court and have their day in court. If a local authority is involved, an individual has the potential remedy of the parking adjudicator. But if a private operator of a local authority car park is involved, an individual can go to neither one nor the other and is therefore criminalised by the case being taken to the magistrates court.
The Minister's letter and new clause 1 both fail to address this point: a private operator with a profit maximisation outlook, which is reasonable if one runs a private company, can put the threat of going to a criminal court to the motorist. The motorist faced with the prospect of going to a criminal court will obviously be intimidated by the potential for criminal proceedings and a criminal record. The evidence from many cases in Bawtry car park, which adjoins my constituency, is that individuals cave in although their tickets should not have been given in the first place. New clause 1 must therefore incorporate civil enforcement if it is to be of any use to Parliament, motorists and the people of Britain.
Private operators are running public car parks as cash cows. They are raking in 100 per cent. of the money—as at Bawtry car park—and that must be addressed. The Minister, through his civil servants, has attempted to address the anomaly in the legislation, but failed once
again to address the anomaly in the law, which was demonstrated in Doncaster magistrates court. Such cases are covered by section 112 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, which defines local authorities as
- "a county council . . . a district council, a London borough council and the Common Council of the City of London."
One should never rely on evidence provided by a cursory examination by a local authority that—as the hon. Member for Christchurch pointed out—may also be on the make by skinning the motorist. For example, local authorities claim that car parking machines across the country are the same. They do not know that, because they did not configure the machines. If the civil servants had read the report of the debate on 5 February they would have seen from Hansard that the manufacturer of the machines, Metric, admits that the tolerance on the machines can be configured by the owner. When configuring a machine, the margins of tolerance are significant enough to determine whether, for example, a 20p piece registers. It is a longstanding issue. Years ago, people who had been abroad could stick old French francs in chocolate machines in place of a shilling to fiddle the chocolate manufacturers. Of course, I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing myself, but we have all heard the stories about such practices.
The question of the tolerance of the machines is fundamental. The owner of a machine can fiddle the tolerance so that a 20p piece stays in the machine but does not register, and the motorist might not notice that. How would the motorist then know that the money that they had paid honestly for car parking had not been registered by the machine? That might lead to the absurdity of a fine. That is a major issue, and I suspect that the scandal of Bawtry car park has been silently replicated across the country and that other hon. Members will be inundated with demands for action if my hon. Friend the Minister does not take action now.
In exposing the weakness in the new clause, with its ideology of privatisation, I have put before my hon. Friend the weakness of the arguments that his civil servants have provided for him. I trust that he will wish
to reconsider that advice, put the record straight and allow the motorist to win, not the fleecer of the motorist's pocket.
Mr. Redwood: It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) after that powerful speech, and I have much sympathy with his condemnation of rapacious car park managers of all kinds. He may be on to something and it is a pity that Ministers have not taken his arguments more seriously so far. It was a little unfair to criticise my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), because the new clause tries to deal with a wider point about ensuring that sensible guidance is issued to local authorities that may be rapacious enough to see these measures against the motorist as an opportunity to raise revenue rather than to run a disciplined show.
The clauses in question include clause 70, which shows that we are talking about a wide range of contraventions by the motorist. The list includes:
- "parking contraventions . . . bus lane contraventions . . . London lorry ban contraventions . . . moving traffic contraventions".
I shall not bore the House with many examples, but it is important to consider one or two cases of inadvertent or unavoidable infringements for which a motorist could be hounded if sensible guidance is not offered. One example is bus lane contraventions. Most of the time, it is right that a motorist should observe the restriction on his use of a bus lane. If the bus lane is in operation, whether or not any buses are using it, the motorist knows that he must keep outside the bus lane on what remains of the highway. Let us suppose something happens just ahead of the motorist—an accident, or a motorcycle or cycle pulling out—so that it is rational and necessary for the motorist to take evasive action by moving his vehicle temporarily into the bus lane to avoid a worse problem such as a collision or worsened congestion. That is a judgment that a motorist has to make in a split second. It may be that, before the enforcement authorities intervene, the temporary problem that caused the motorist to move into the bus lane has cleared or is not immediately apparent to the enforcement officers who were not on the scene at the time. The motorist may then be prosecuted, but it is important that authorities dealing with such infringements are sensible about what might have happened. In the event of prosecution, there needs to be a proper procedure to allow the motorist to state his case, and for that to be taken seriously. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has done us a service by drawing attention to such issues.
The same is true of parking. On occasion, a motorist may identify a free parking space only to discover that the parking machines in the vicinity are full of coins and not operating or have broken down. Is it really the case that the motorist has to feel that he cannot park there at all, even though it is a lawful parking slot in normal circumstances, because the authorities have been unable to collect the money or maintain the machine to an appropriate standard? I would hope that a plea in mitigation would be available, so that the motorist could get off if he had tried to pay and had genuinely been unable to do so, especially in cases where he had put a note on the windscreen of the car, explaining that he had no wish to defraud or deprive the authorities of their money but that there was no one around to collect it and the machine that the authority had supplied could not take the money. I hope that such extenuating circumstances will lead to sensitive and sensible enforcement.
Under the new clause, in the event that authorities tried to play Dick Turpin with the extensive powers to charge and fine, there would be an opportunity for a Minister to issue national guidance. I have only one worry about my hon. Friends' sensible proposal. I doubt whether Ministers are on the side of motorist and would wish to use the power sensibly if local authorities saw the Bill as a way to raise money from unsuspecting motorists or those unavoidably tempted into breaking a rule or regulation. I will not hold that against my hon. Friends, however. I would like to see them return to government as soon as possible, and it would be useful if the provision were included in the Bill so that it could be used by a sensible Minister, even if we cannot persuade current Ministers that there is a problem. I sometimes read in the press that Ministers have seen the light and recognised that most of their constituents—and they themselves—are occasionally motorists, but at other times they seem to go back into the mode of thinking that all motorists are wicked and should not use their cars.
It gives me pleasure to support the new clause, and I hope that the Minister will find some words of comfort for the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, who needs a different kind of amendment to tackle the robber barons about whom he is rightly worried.
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