Examination of Witnesses (Questions 326
- 339)
WEDNESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2005
MS KAREN
BUCK MP AND
MR MIKE
TALBOT
Q326 Chairman: Good afternoon, Minister.
You are most warmly welcome. Would you be kind enough to identify
yourself for the record?
Ms Buck: My name is Karen Buck.
I am the Parliamentary Under Secretary with responsibility for
this area of transport policy. I am joined by Mike Talbot who
is a senior manager in the Department with responsibility for
parking.
Q327 Chairman: Did you have something
you wanted to say first?
Ms Buck: Only very briefly, Chairman,
which is just to emphasise the point that I think the debate has
moved on a long way in terms of parking policy over recent years
from whether there should be any form of parking control to how
the enforcement is carried out. The research carried out by Which?
magazine confirmed that nine out of ten people now support the
idea of parking restrictions, but the concerns really are about
how the rules are implemented, the fairness of penalty charges,
et cetera. The very large volume of correspondence that we get
in the Department on this issue is not around the principle but
about the nature of enforcement, the lack of parking space, about
signage and about the uses to which the parking surpluses are
put. To a very large extent these issues are a matter of local
concern and accountability, but the Department has to ensure the
right regulatory framework and guidance, particularly in recognition
of the fact that especially in areas of high demand parking has
a role to play in broader transport policy. As I am sure you will
know, we are expecting to publish for consultation new guidance
and regulations in the early part of next year implementing the
provisions of the Traffic Management Act. Obviously we will be
answering questions and I hope you will forgive me if I turn occasionally
to Mr Talbot on matters of detail.
Q328 Chairman: Is decriminalised
parking enforcement meeting the objectives set out at the time
the legislation was written?
Ms Buck: I think in many ways
it is. I think for the most part the parking provision is working
well in most parts of the country. One of the objectives of decriminalised
parking was to take the burden off the police and it not being
a core police function to police parking.
Q329 Chairman: Is it going fast enough
in relation to all local authorities?
Ms Buck: We have never set out
an objective for all authorities having decriminalised parking
enforcement, although it makes sense for more to do so. We are
encouraged by the take-up of that.
Q330 Chairman: Do you want decriminalised
enforcement in all local authority areas?
Ms Buck: I do not think the objective
is to say yes by a particular deadline and that all should be.
Q331 Chairman: As a principle, are
you anxious to have decriminalised enforcement across all local
authorities?
Ms Buck: I would not use the word
anxious.
Q332 Chairman: Let us not start banding
words about. We are not dealing with the Deputy Prime Minister.
Could we sort out what it is we are talking about? Does the Government
accept that all local authorities will have decriminalised regimes
at some point in the future?
Ms Buck: Broadly speaking, yes.
Mr Talbot: I think the answer
is that you would expect certainly all urban areas to have decriminalised
parking. There may be some smaller authorities in rural areas
where it may not necessarily be the right thing for them and it
is for them to choose to do it.
Q333 Chairman: But you have not got
a timetable, have you?
Mr Talbot: No.
Q334 Graham Stringer: In the evidence
from previous witnesses it said they were very concerned about
having two completely different penalty regimes in essence, where
you could be sent to prison for not paying a fine in an area where
public parking had not been decriminalised but not in an area
where it had. Are you content in one country that the penalty
should be so different, Minister?
Ms Buck: In a sense it is the
same answer as the one I have just given. There are some 170 authorities
now that have decriminalised parking enforcement and that is moving
forward.
Q335 Chairman: Out of 500?
Mr Talbot: Yes, but with a very
clear emphasis on the major urban authorities and those with the
highest demand, and we expect that to continue. It is not a Government
objective to say that there is a definite rollout to ensure that
all authorities, including those with very low pressures on their
parking, should necessarily go down that road.
Q336 Graham Stringer: Can you define
a bit more clearly for me what you meant when you said that parking
is a matter of local concern and accountability?
Ms Buck: What we want to see is
that parking policy forms part of a broader transport strategy
and that there will be different priorities for the ways in which
local authorities implement their policy and different measures
in different areas, which could include parking, for example,
in the context of demand management. Clearly the kind of pressures
that inner-London authorities and other inner-urban authorities
are under and the way in which they manage their policy will be
different to that of a rural community or somewhere with less
demand. So in that sense it is right that the implementation of
those policies should be a matter for local people to relate to
their local authority.
Q337 Graham Stringer: I agree with
that. I just wonder what you mean in your evidence when you say
that there is considerable variation in how effectively the local
authorities carry out parking activities. That is bound to be
self-evidently true. As some local authorities are less effective,
do you think it is your role to involve yourself in their parking
policies?
Ms Buck: What we are aiming to
do—and we will be introducing the statutory guidance and
regulations implementing the supervisions of the Traffic Management
Act shortly—is to try and ensure that some of the problems
have been identified. We freely admit there are areas of delivering
a policy that are patchy across the country and they are tackling
some of those problems. Although there will not be a standardised
policy, we want to make sure there is good practice everywhere
and that some of the problems which occur are tackled, for example
some authorities not responding to representations within a reasonable
timescale.
Q338 Graham Stringer: How will you
tackle them? I am trying to get at just what is going to be left
to local areas and how the Department for Transport will say to
an authority, "You're not responding quickly enough, you
are too zealous," or whatever it is. How will you deal with
that?
Ms Buck: In very high demand urban
areas local authorities will take their own decisions on the number
of residents' parking places that they allocate and they will
have certain hours of residents' parking and bays can be used
in other hours for other purposes. Those policy issues are for
local authorities. Some of the issues that have been identified,
for example in the Ombudsman's report, over a lack of consistency
in dealing with representations and the time in which representations
are heard are reasonable, they are very much the kind of issues
that we get a lot of representations about and we would like to
see better practice across the board. I do not know whether Mr
Talbot would like to add anything.
Mr Talbot: I would like to expand
upon the mechanism. In the Traffic Management Act we provide for
statutory guidance to accompany the regulations under the Act
and through that the kind of messages that the Minister is referring
to in terms of good practice and raising performance more generally
can be emphasised to authorities, and in parallel we have a number
of things that we are working on with people within the industry
to raise standards more generally through the good practice advice
with the Institution of Highways and Transportation and the British
Parking Association, where we have been doing things to help improve
across the industry the quality and the performance of all those
involved.
Q339 Graham Stringer: Do you believe
that local authorities outside London should be given the power
to set their own penalties? There is a nationally determined penalty
at the moment outside of London. In terms of catering for the
particular problems in Birmingham or Newcastle which will be different
from Scarborough, do you think they should be able to determine
a higher or a lower level of penalty?
Mr Talbot: At the moment authorities
can choose outside London one of three penalty levels, the maximum
of which is £60 and those are set by the Secretary of State.
It is up to the authority to choose which is appropriate for them.
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