Parking hell

Bakkali, 39, was taking home £226.79 for a 42-hour week when he says he was sacked after three months’ probation. The reason, he says, is that he found grounds to ticket only five or six cars “legally” in a typical day, rather than the ten or more he says his superiors expected. “If I wanted a permanent job, I was told I’d have to bring in at least ten tickets.” The scams, he says, ranged from falsely claiming that bays had been suspended to hand-issuing deliberately mistimed tickets after claiming his computer was down. “I told them, I can’t do that. I said I believed in God. I asked my supervisors, ‘How do you sleep? Do you lie there dreaming about ticketing cars all night?’”

Camden council utterly refutes his allegations, and, as a clearly disaffected former employee of NCP, the council’s parking contractor, Bakkali is by no means neutral. He accepts that he bears grudges against NCP, whose management, he says, refused to hear his complaints and promoted supervisors who openly broke the rules. Yet his claims – of attendants falsifying observation times, issuing “ghost” tickets when cars were not present, dishonestly claiming tyres were outside parking bays – have all been made by other London parking attendants (PAs) in recent months. At stake is public confidence in the entire system of parking enforcement.

“You have to ask why drivers hate the PAs,” Bakkali reflects as he crosses into Prince Arthur Road, a favourite spot, he explains, for colleagues to hide before pouncing on cars left for three minutes at school pick-up time. “How many people have spoken out before me? You have to ask why the council doesn’t want PAs to help the drivers. You might call it cheating, but I call it stealing.” He shakes his head and whispers disapprovingly. “It’s money, isn’t it? Money talks.”

For the first time in 2003-4, English local authorities made more than £1 billion from parking. The London boroughs alone took in £337 million, of which more than £143 million was pure profit. Council coffers are swelling not simply through parking tickets and bus-lane fines, but also from meter feeds and the sale of permits. Yet by any standards, the business of ticketing, clamping and removing cars is booming as never before.

The London boroughs issued almost six million penalty charge notices in 2004-5, up from 4.3 million in 2000-1. Outside London, English and Welsh councils handed out almost three million more. By law, local authorities must regulate parking not primarily to raise money, but “to secure the expeditious, convenient and safe movement of vehicular and other traffic”. Yet as the surpluses have risen over the years, so have public suspicions about the councils’ true agenda. As Edmund King, director of the RAC Foundation, sees it, local authorities now see parking as “a convenient and easy way to raise money, rather than as a policy issue”.

Public tolerance is being tested with every television investigation alleging corruption, and with each outraged report of target-fixated attendants ticketing buses, fire engines, even a rabbit-hutch whose owner, delivering to a Manchester pet shop, moved his van before a warden could pounce.

“It’s the biggest fraud that goes on,” claims Barrie Segal, a Pimlico accountant who runs AppealNow.com, one of a growing number of websites campaigning against what they see as unjust use of parking regulations to make money. He makes an annual award to the victim of what he considers the most absurd abuse of a PA’s powers. Its latest winner was Nadhim Zahawi, handed a penalty charge notice in central London as he lay in the road with a broken leg after coming off his scooter. “The councils are very happy to allow a poor system to continue, because they get the revenue,” Segal says wearily. “Nobody now has faith in the system. I certainly don’t.”

Monday, 3.10pm: Dr William J Knottenbelt, a 32-year-old computing lecturer at Imperial College, London, is pacing outside the college in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, explaining animatedly how Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea councils conspire to “sting” honest motorists. “What really makes me mad is when a law-abiding family parks here to visit one of the museums, pays £12 to stay in a pay-and-display bay for four hours, and comes back shocked to find their car clamped with a £115 fine,” Knottenbelt says furiously, walking the few yards between an occupied parking space and the nearest ticket machine.

This bay, according to a discreet logo on a nearby sign, belongs to the City of Westminster, which last year issued 817,596 penalty charge notices and earned £72 million from parking – making it Britain’s highest-ranking council on both counts. The ticket machine, on a traffic island separating two wide traffic lanes, belongs to the neighbouring Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (on-street parking income: £39,219,000), but it would take a close reading of the payment instructions to notice the distinction, and there is no warning, even in the small print, that this machine’s tickets are invalid in the nearby bay.

“The instructions don’t say you pay your £12, slap your ticket on the windscreen, and then come back to find it’s been clamped,” Knottenbelt says. “The people I see being caught out genuinely want to pay, but are simply getting confused. The council bosses know that – I’ve written to them three or four times asking for the notices to be made clearer – but all they say is ‘our signage is excellent’. That in my view is neither a fair nor a reasonable system. There’s a widespread suspicion of some kind of revenue-related motivation.”

So Knottenbelt, who has only ever received one parking ticket – which he proudly had cancelled on appeal – has become one more campaigner. With a website and a series of Freedom of Information requests, he has spent the past year obsessively investigating the commercial incentives that he considers have allowed councils to pervert the law’s intentions. His discoveries highlight some of the absurdities of the current system: the Post Office van that received 75 Westminster parking tickets in a year; the drainage company that he alleges was somehow exempted from yellow-line tickets; the “incentive scheme” designed to reward Westminster PAs with Argos vouchers according to their “sales” and “issued number of tickets per shift”. The proposal was withdrawn, according to NCP, the Westminster contractor, but only after it had been tested elsewhere.

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“I didn’t expect this to become an obsession,” Knottenbelt reflects, a little embarrassed. “I just found myself talking to PAs and council bosses and getting different answers. The bosses told me the system was about keeping traffic flowing, but the PAs told me they were being pushed to issue tickets – up to 20 per shift in Westminster. As for Kensington & Chelsea, it’s hardly surprising that 90 per cent of residents apparently approve of how things are managed there – they know that most fines are issued to non-residents. It’s taxation without representation. There are conflicts of interest if the council enjoys the revenue it receives from parking,” he concludes. “When contractors’ profit is based partly on the number of tickets issued, the contractor is not concerned with implementing the law correctly, but with hitting targets.” He pauses by the ticket machine. “I want things to change,” he says, a revolutionary fervour rising in his voice. “Everyone you talk to says, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just implementing the system.’ Well, maybe it’s the system that we need to change.”

“If councils are trying to maximise their parking revenues, you have to ask what’s the purpose,” says Councillor Daniel Moylan, responsible for parking policy at Kensington & Chelsea. “Frankly, it’s keeping the council tax down. As a resident, what would you want – your local services paid for by the delinquent motorist, or through higher council tax?”

Moylan is blunt about where he sees the current problem. “The fines are intended to act as a deterrent,” he says. “Yet in one recent survey, we found 900 illegally parked vehicles, of which just 5 per cent got tickets. People take a chance, and blame the system if they get caught. Surely we should put the fines up to deter illegal parking!”

Yet as Moylan admits, his council’s reputation has lately taken an embarrassing blow. Last June, a BBC One Whistleblower documentary showed a Kensington & Chelsea parking attendant – employed by APCOA, the council’s contractor – allegedly plotting to steal a motorcycle. Other PAs were filmed telling an undercover reporter to meet his ticket “target” by penalising nonexistent offences when cars were not present, ticketing abandoned vehicles and ignoring the standard five-minute observation period. In neighbouring Westminster, a PA was shown taking bribes for allegedly settling drivers’ tickets using illegally obtained credit-card numbers.

“You’ll always have bad apples,” Moylan says. “But it’s the [APCOA] management culture that we’re not happy with, and I’ve made that clear to them. I don’t think PAs should be put under the sort of pressures APCOA seems to be putting them under.” Last month, the council moved its parking contract form APCOA to NCP.

Parking enforcement was never much of an issue until the postwar boom in car ownership. The first UK parking meter – in Manchester Square, Marylebone – was not considered necessary until 1958; it took 11 more years before traffic wardens followed. A Road Traffic Regulation Act in 1984 specified the strict grounds for which parking could be regulated, mainly for road safety and regulating traffic flow. Raising money was not part of the plan. The police were responsible for parking enforcement, but it was never much of a priority. Local councils grew increasingly restless. Studies in Sheffield and Rotherham during the late Eighties suggested that only 1 per cent of cars parked illegally were being ticketed, with many of these fines unpaid. A lobbying campaign by local authorities led to a new Road Traffic Act in 1991, which “decriminalised” parking offences and put councils in charge of enforcement. As more councils applied to use these powers, the number of penalty charge notices rose sharply.

By law, local authorities must separate parking revenue from their other income, money that is “ringfenced” for specific transport and environmental uses, such as highway improvements and subsidised public transport. Recently, however, this ringfence has been radically widened by a new Traffic Management Act to include any lawful expenditure incurred by councils achieving “beacon” status. The reform, seen by critics as a further incentive for councils to maximise parking profits, caused alarm among the parking adjudicators who independently hear motorists’ appeals.

“There is an urgent need for more transparency and accountability in the councils’ activities,” Caroline Sheppard, chief adjudicator for England and Wales, concluded last year. “Before [the ringfence is widened], there should be standards set for civil traffic enforcement.”

Councils across the country, in the meantime, are starting to consider how they will use their new-found powers to fine drivers not merely for parking, but for entering bus lanes, blocking box junctions, and various other “moving traffic” offences. And, of course, how they will be spending the money that may soon be theirs to use as they please.

Thursday, 10.51am: In a tribunal room just off Trafalgar Square, one floor up from the backpackers awaiting visas at New Zealand House, Mrs Byrne from South London is finally nearing the end of an eight-month ordeal. Mrs Byrne, wearing a leopardskin-print jacket and heavy gold earrings, was awake for much of the night preparing her case before the Parking and Traffic Appeals Service, which considers challenges to the London councils’ parking tickets; yesterday, she tells the adjudicator, she was busy taking her elderly brother to hospital. As the adjudicator familiarises himself with her case, Mrs Byrne flips open a well-thumbed folder of papers, annotated in pink highlighter and separated by 15 yellow Post-it Notes.

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“It was a Saturday, but the bay they say was suspended just operated Monday to Friday,” she explains in fast sentences laden with frustration. “Then they say the suspension sign was outside Number 8, but I was parked outside Number 102.” She throws up her arms in disbelief. “I asked Westminster Council on four occasions for more details, but they just don’t respond.”

“It does appear,” the adjudicator says eventually, “that some of the original ticket details differ from those presented by the parking attendant. The date is different, the location… Hmm, these discrepancies certainly cast doubt on the accuracy of the local authority’s evidence.” There is suspicion now in his voice. “I’m going to allow your appeal, Mrs Byrne,” he says finally, to a weary nod from his witness. “The evidence is that there were no suspension signs where you parked.” It has taken 27 minutes to hear just one of the 10,000 or so appeals held each year against tickets from Westminster alone. There are 76 cases scheduled for today, and most, like Mrs Byrne’s, go the driver’s way.

Nationally, two-thirds of appeals are successful, yet just one in a hundred drivers bothers to take their case this far. Some are doubtless discouraged by the time required; others by the menacing warnings of prosecution included in local-authority correspondence. Could this inertia perhaps be encouraging the less scrupulous parking attendants to play the system?

“Certainly, I’ve seen cases where tickets have been fabricated,” says Martin Wood, the chief parking adjudicator. “But one has to be careful about concluding that the entire system is corrupt. There’s obviously a danger in providing an incentive linked to the number of tickets a PA issues. But then, if PAs were not to issue tickets where there were grounds to – well, that might be equally unsatisfactory.”

The fundamental injustice, as the Association of British Drivers sees it, is the councils’ direct financial gain from laws that they themselves enforce. Inevitably, the association believes, this results in “a systematic and flagrant abuse of power”.

“It’s like giving each council a large printing press producing £50 notes,” complains Mark McArthur-Christie, an ABD spokesman. “The councils are legislature, judge and jury. It’s simply money-spinning.” He draws attention to the sums raised in individual streets, such as Atlantic Avenue, Brixton, in South London, where Lambeth issued fines worth a remarkable £3,112,400 in the year to last April. Similar injustices, he suggests, are resulting from speed-camera fines.

“There’s a growing view that councils are remote, unaccountable and uninterested in anything but money,” McArthur-Christie continues, exasperated. “I know that’s not true – I sit on lots of transport committees – but there’s an increasing tendency for the public to think, to hell with the lot of you. There’s been a bad deal here, which can only be sorted out by a government-empowered parking regulator with big, sharp teeth.”

Needless to say, that’s not quite how the councils see things. “There are enough people out there desperately searching for the smoking gun,” sighs Nick Lester, director of transport for the Association of London Government, which speaks for the capital’s 33 councils. “If they found it, they’d go immediately to the High Court to stop any council unlawfully operating their parking enforcement policy on the basis of raising revenue. It’s irresponsible to make serious allegations of wholesale conspiracy and unlawfulness with no evidence.” There are, Lester acknowledges, “communications issues” that councils need to address. There could also be better PA training. “But the system is delivering less congestion, better journey times and more parking spaces. And don’t forget, parking can influence the vote in local elections. If people were unhappy, councils would back off.”

Wednesday, 12.05pm: Manchester City Council backed off two years ago. The horror stories were becoming just too politically damaging: the bus-driver ticketed while picking up passengers; the 101 tickets wrongly issued by a single warden during a May Bank holiday; the infamous rabbit hutch, booked just up the road in Eccles. “You’ve got to have some level of public support, and we weren’t winning,” admits Pete North, the council’s director of operations. “It wasn’t seen as a fair regime, but one aimed at making money. So we said, enough is enough.”

The response was radical. Control Plus, the parking contractor, was peremptorily replaced by NCP. Clamping was banned, PAs were retrained in “customer service” and “reasonableness”, and, crucially, the new contract incentivised NCP not on ticket numbers, but on “quality of service” criteria as measured by the council.

“Before, it was ‘get out and issue as many as you can’,” recalls Alice Hauenstein, warden number MC370, as she tests the pay- and-display machines along Spring Gardens in the city centre. “Now, you’re trained to speak to people, alert them if they’re not aware they’re overstaying their time, help passers-by with directions. It’s about using a bit of common sense, really.”

“There’s still a lot of work to do, but we are winning greater public acceptance,” Chris Aylward, NCP’s contract manager in the city, says back at base. Council income from parking has fallen by a fifth under the new system, but that, Aylward suggests, is simply proof of the council’s commitment. “This industry,” he reflects, “has been focused for too long on revenue, with parking seen as a cash cow.���

Slowly the message is percolating back to London. Last June, Islington Council declared that it, too, was ending clamping “to show that we do listen”. But back at Abdallah Bakkali’s former ticketing grounds in Camden, clamping (at £115 a time) provides a guaranteed revenue stream that has been factored into the borough’s financial planning. After all, its contracts with NCP require a “clamp achievement level” of 34,218 cars in a year, as well as 9,924 tow-aways and 463,000 penalty charge notices. These are not targets, insists a council spokeswoman, simply “baseline performance indicators”. But if NCP fails to meet them, it does risk losing a large financial bonus.

Not that NCP sees any links between financial considerations and the allegations of unfair ticketing made by Abdallah Bakkali. “That sounds like the ravings of a disgruntled employee,” says Tim Cowen, the company’s spokesman, when Bakkali’s charges are put to him. “None of that stuff happens. He would have been expected to reach standards of quality and accuracy, but there would never have been a question of him issuing a certain number of tickets a day.”

On Camden’s streets, where parking last year brought the council a £21 million surplus, such assurances may be of limited value. Tom Conti, the actor, is campaigning to make parking an issue in May’s council elections. More widely, measured in physical assaults on PAs or furious letters to local papers, hostility to parking-enforcement regimes appears to be intensifying. The widespread suspicion, articulated with ever-greater contempt, seems to be that money- making has become a driving force in certain councils’ pursuit of the motorist. But that, as we know, would be against the law.