Westminster Hall
Thursday 18 January 2007
[Mr. Joe Benton in the Chair]
Parking Policy
[Relevant documents: Seventh Report from the Transport Committee, Session 2005-06, HC 748, and the Government’s response thereto, Fourteenth Special Report, Session 2005-06, HC 1641.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Liz Blackman.]
2.30 pm
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab): It is always a delight to see you in the Chair, Mr. Benton. You will sympathise when I say that parking is the one thing on which everyone seems to have an opinion. It is no surprise that when people regard themselves as newly affluent, they expect the right to buy a car. I am told that lottery winners always put a car first on the list of things that they want to acquire. That does not entirely surprise me. However, people do not seem to go on to consider where they will park their vehicles. The whole question of the space taken up by motorcars, how they are controlled and how they affect the quality of our lives, streets and houses is very important.
In considering parking policy and enforcement, the Transport Committee was concerned that the Department for Transport was expecting to issue a confrontation—forgive me, although perhaps that is the word. It was expecting to issue a consultation on draft regulations and statutory guidance for parking provisions early in July. We wanted the opportunity not only to take evidence, but consider some of the implications and, if possible, give guidance on how the Government should proceed.
It is startling to realise that an estimated 50 million acts of illegal parking take place each year in London alone, costing £270 million a year in additional delays and accidents. Clearly, the cost of illegal parking throughout Britain is significant. For many years, the police, faced with a series of difficult decisions, have chosen, almost inevitably—I do not mean that in any pejorative sense—to put their other duties above the responsibility for dealing with illegal parking.
Has the Department estimated the annual cost of the delays and accidents caused by illegal parking? Inevitably, people park in the wrong places; that impacts on not only the movement of goods and people but disabled drivers who want the right to park safely.
Local authorities have had 15 years to take on enforcement powers from the police. About half of local authorities have taken on civil enforcement powers, and that creates a rather strange anomaly. How can it be acceptable that motorists should be subject to different legal processes for the same parking violations in different parts of the country? Why should a motorist in one place be branded a criminal and face a £30 penalty, or ultimately appear in a magistrates
court, when in another area they would have committed a contravention but have faced a higher penalty—up to £100—and their representations would have been heard by an adjudicator rather than a court? What evidence does the Department have that its proposal to remove the requirement that civil enforcement operations should be self-financing will be sufficient to encourage all authorities to take on civil enforcement powers? In parking above all else, we require standardisation and harmonisation.
The Committee stressed that local authorities must not be able to use parking operations primarily to raise revenue. There is a logic to having a properly controlled parking scheme for whatever area is in the control of the local council or county council, but that should not be regarded as an automatic way of increasing a revenue stream. Using it in that way not only engenders very real irritation among the general public, but frequently means that people’s indignation spills over into the arguments and distorts the need for proper control.
“Raising revenue should not be an objective...nor should targets be set for raising revenue or the number of Penalty Charge Notices...issued”.
How will the Department and the Audit Commission uphold in practice the principle that parking operations must deliver transport priorities, not financial aims? The Committee was clear that incentive schemes for parking attendants and employees are totally misguided. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) will mention the evidence that we took from Manchester, which made it clear that that was the way to perdition and produced tremendously negative responses. We recommended that incentive schemes should not be permitted.
In their response, the Government stated that they largely agree with the Committee, without explaining which bit they disagreed with. How are incentive regimes in enforcement contracts ever compatible with sensible and proportionate enforcement? Does the Minister feel that such regimes ought to be allowed? If not, how will we make it clear that they are not acceptable?
The Committee has said that there must be much greater accountability and transparency in local authority parking operations. People ought to know how much a scheme costs to administer, how it is operated and the implications. The Committee was struck by the ignorance of how parking notice appeals worked. We sat in on the work of the adjudicators. Personally, I was enormously impressed not only with their professionalism but with their common sense in how they operated the system.
However, many people faced with quite large parking fines do not understand where they can appeal, what advantages there are or where they can benefit from an independent scheme. Many do not even understand that the scheme is independent. In some instances, some local authorities imply that if a person does not pay up in a short period and they appeal, they will not be able to take the benefit of any discount offered. Frankly, that is not constructive and I hope that it will be discontinued.
The Government said that there should be greater reporting by local authorities to their local communities, but as, to date, local authorities have not volunteered that information, the Government will have to do a great deal more to ensure that such local reporting takes place.
We must understand the question of penalty charge notices. From the evidence that we took, we believe that the business of a driver needing to make representations within 28 days of receiving a parking ticket, but there being no requirement for the council to respond within an agreed period, is not balanced. We suggest that the Government indicate to local authorities that, like Ministries, they should have a proper target in respect of the time that they take to respond and how they deal with the situation.
The Government propose that local authorities should respond to representations about vehicle clamping and removal within 56 days, but how can it be considered acceptable for a potentially innocent driver to be without their vehicle for almost two months? We also want to know a bit about the pay or challenge system, under which payment of the penalty charge prevents the owner from making representations subsequently. We heard evidence that not all motorists understand exactly how that works. We said that statutory guidance should require local authorities to make things clear on a penalty charge notice and the notice to owner because there is the attractive incentive of a discount for early payment. The principle needs to be clearly communicated.
The Government were measured and said that our proposal had a lot of merit. I am not sure about what that means, but I am sure that the Minister will be able to tell me exactly. All our proposals, of course, have enormous merit, but that does not mean that the Government have always accepted them root and branch.
A 50 per cent. discount is offered to drivers who pay the penalty charge within 14 days, but did the responses to the consultation support the Committee’s recommendation that the discount should be re-offered after the representations stage? In other words, it should be retained as a fair measure.
We talked about differential penalties, issued according to the seriousness of the offence. The report states:
“Illegal parking acts which clearly create danger for other road users, those which result in disruption to traffic flow, and those which contribute to congestion, should attract penalties at the severe end of the scale.”
Did the responses to the consultation support the Committee’s call for differential penalty charges based on the severity of the contravention? What action will Ministers take and what penalties will there be for persistent offenders?
The Government response told us that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency does not have data for overseas vehicles to allow enforcement to be undertaken. This is a matter of great moment, particularly with the increasing numbers of foreign vehicles coming to the United Kingdom. What steps will the Department take to ensure that the DVLA has
access to overseas databases to permit enforcement of foreign-registered vehicles? The Government have accepted in other fields the principle of increasing the number of occasions on which information about British citizens can be transferred between police forces, and the Home Office has almost made a virtue of it. I hope that the matter will be a priority because it is bizarre that foreign vehicles entering this country, particularly heavy goods vehicles and light goods vehicles, are frequently not prosecuted because the police believe that the amount of time and effort that would go into such a prosecution would mean it was not worth their while. That is not acceptable.
The subject of parking attendants frequently came up in our evidence. It is clear that parking attendants suffer a disproportionate amount of personal attacks, both verbal and actual, but it is also clear that many of them are not properly trained and, in some instances, not properly paid. If that service is to be a professional one, there must be some standards and a proper way of training the people involved. Inevitably, because they are in the front line, and because they will come up against indignant motorists—and heaven knows, motorists can get very indignant—they need the support and protection of proper training and payment. That would also ensure that their skills are retained within individual schemes. What analysis has the Department undertaken into the experience of granting discretion to parking attendants in Manchester? What lessons has it learned and what is it going to do?
The Department told us that it does not have the resources to check traffic regulation orders, which underpin parking enforcement, before granting powers to councils. Although errors are frequently discovered, we need to know what the Department intends to do in the future. If it does not have the resources, why not? In what way does it intend to change the situation, and how does it intend to ensure that that situation does not arise in the future?
The question of pavement parking is tremendously important. There is no point having disability legislation if people cannot get along pavements or get into parking spaces because of illegal parking. That is a great bugbear, and it does not matter whether it takes place in supermarkets, where local authorities are not responsible, or out on the streets. The utter selfishness of able-bodied people who park in places where the disabled desperately need to be able to leave their vehicles is a shame on our society. It is a matter that requires more urgent action than there appears to be at the moment.
The question of loading is a problem. I know that the Government have received evidence, as we did, of the extra cost and difficulties encountered in large cities by those loading and unloading. There has been an indication that industries that have a direct responsibility are not always prepared to be sufficiently flexible about the times at which they receive goods but, nevertheless, there are real problems. For example, because of health and safety issues at work, the brewery industry needs to ensure that delivery vehicles are able to park close to the point at which they are to be unloaded. From time to time, it is clear that those vehicles do not receive the support that they ought to from local authority parking schemes.
I do not wish to continue for too long, and I have gone on longer than I intended, but I would like to say one thing to the Minister. Parking is a problem for people from day to day, but there is a degree of unreality in views about it. People expect to be able to go on buying increasing numbers of vehicles. Households expect to go from one to three vehicles, and people do not closely and honestly look at the effect of such expansion. Nevertheless, that makes it all the more important for the Government not only to have coherent and defensible policies, but to tell local authorities that because this is the frontier at which they will come into contact with many of their own constituents, there must be clear, defensible and standardised schemes throughout the UK. People should know what is expected of them and what is necessary, and if people then commit contraventions by parking illegally and holding up the movement of goods and people, they should be fined and dealt with summarily.
However, that is not the current situation and it is bizarre that in this day and age we still have an uneven, unbalanced and indefensible situation throughout local authorities. I know that the Government care about it and that they have done a lot of work on the matter, but our Committee has highlighted areas on which urgent action must be taken and I look to the Minister for answers on these matters.
2.47 pm
Mrs. Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con): I commend the Committee on its report, which highlights some very important issues. As the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) said in her opening statement, everyone has an opinion on parking. In my constituency, a great many opinions on parking are put to me on a regular basis but, all too often, the impact of Government policy on transport receives far too little attention. The work of the Committee in this area, and the others it has considered in the past few months, has done a great deal to highlight matters that have not received attention.
Why is it important that we debate the report? In this country, 75 per cent. of households have cars, which amounts to 22 million cars. The hon. Lady said that car ownership was something that newly affluent people aspire to, but those figures suggest that it is more than just the newly affluent who aspire to a car. Increasingly, the vast majority of households have a car. In Basingstoke, more than 80 per cent. of households have a car, and a great many have more than that. The findings of the report are pertinent to the vast majority of people in this country, and it raises some important issues, about which I have received correspondence from my constituents. I have been told about problems with appeals to adjudicators, the role of local authorities and police—a dual role that causes increasing numbers of problems—and day-to-day issues, such as loading and pavement parking. The report has a particular emphasis on the enforcement of parking regulations and, as the hon. Lady has pointed out, on the issues to do with illegal parking.
I was particularly pleased to see that the Committee sought a submission from the AA Motoring Trust, which is a Basingstoke-based organisation that does a great deal of good work on this subject and on other
matters that relate to our roads and transport systems. In its submission, it particularly highlighted the issue of over-zealous enforcement, which is no longer peripheral but yields an income of more than £1 billion a year. That is pertinent to many residents in many constituencies. The trust echoed many of the Committee’s concerns about the use of draconian measures against people who park illegally and about the lack of proportion in the way in which enforcements can sometimes be put in place. I commend the trust for the work that it does on behalf of all motorists and all people who come into contact with our roads and transport networks. I share its view that there is a strong case for a thorough review of the powers of local authorities to make, administer and enforce parking regulations and that the report is a good first step in that direction.
I want particularly to pick up on a subject that received a little less emphasis in the report, in order to highlight it to the Chairman and the Committee for future consideration. It was dealt with under the section on capacity and demand in the part of the report called “Parking Accessibility” and, in particular, in the paragraphs that dealt with planning policy guidance. The Committee’s recommendations stated that it
“did not receive sufficient evidence to make specific recommendations”
on the subject. I would have preferred to have seen that gap in the report filled. By considering planning policy guidance, we are considering how we can help people to park legally in the future rather than focusing on illegal parking.
Planning policy guidance determines parking capacity, and so it is integral to the report. The Government’s planning regulations clearly state the need to reduce parking in new developments, yet as the report shows, car ownership is set to increase by up to 45 per cent. by 2030. The report shows clear evidence dating back as far as 1993 from the Transport Research Laboratory that
“people’s determination to own cars seems to outweigh all other considerations, including the difficulty of parking.”
If one were to draw a conclusion from that, one might think that rationing parking as a way to control car numbers might not be a robust strategy for the Government to follow.
We all know that there is a growing awareness of the link between emissions from vehicles and climate change and of the need to change our car-use patterns to reflect that. However, the figures that I have cited suggest that there is little evidence that that will result in a reduction in car ownership. Yes, it might result in a change in use or in car design, but not in a reduction in the number of cars that are owned.
Planning regulations are perhaps not easing the situation but, if anything, exacerbating it. Although the Committee perhaps struggled to find time to take the evidence—I am sure that there were many other subjects that the report covered in depth—I want to provide a couple of examples of why the regulations should be considered further. Perhaps the Minister will pick up on that in her response. There is a perverse incentive under planning guidance for developers to cut car parking, because a higher density of development
yields a higher level of profit to the developer, whether in the commercial sector or the residential sector. Planning policy guidance note 13 states:
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