Ray Massey's column

The Government is considering making parking enforcement more motorist-friendly. About time, says Ray Massey.

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01st August 2006

Are we heading back to the Sixties' Summer of Love? Or towards Anarchy in the UK, as the Sex Pistols might have it? At home, my eldest eight-year-old son has taken to singing a catchy little pop ditty - "I wish I were a punk rocker, with flowers in my hair" - which laments that the 'yoof' of today have missed out on all the exciting bits of popular culture enjoyed by the ageing, but still sprightly, baby boomers of Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson vintage. I point out to my son that I was a sixth-former during the punk era, and about his age during the hippy haze. "Whatever," is his unimpressed response. Elsewhere, new Tory leader David Cameron is urging us to 'hug a hoodie' rather than give them a wide birth. And in the motoring world, the Labour Government wants us, apparently, to start loving parking attendants.

It was in the Sixties, of course, that traffic wardens - run by the police - were introduced, along with parking meters and double yellow lines, prompting the Beatles to sing 'Lovely Rita, meter maid'. Since the Nineties, we have been into the era of 'de-criminalised parking', with uniformed attendants organised by the council - but more likely contracted out to private firms - roaming the streets like Balkan militia, running up tallies of parking tickets to get their various bonuses and other incentives. The abuses are legion, well chronicled and prompted the powerful Commons' Transport Select committee to criticise the system as unfair, discredited, 'seriously flawed' and 'a mess'. They had been brought into disrepute and were 'a serious indictment' of the Government.

Parking costs have soared by 82 per cent in England since Labour came to power in 1997 - with motorists being used as cash cows to rake in nearly £1.2billion a year in fines and charges, and councils making a profit of £450million. But one in five of the 7.1 million tickets issued each year is cancelled. Labour ministers, fearing a backlash from Britain's 30 million voting motorists, claim they want parking enforcement to be fairer and more consistent, rather than fleece drivers.

So the Government has launched a new 'cuddly' consultation paper for draft statutory guidance on parking. It demands that councils use their parking powers only to keep traffic flowing - not to raise money like Dick Turpin - and says incentive schemes should be outlawed.

In a divinely politically correct New Labour twist, the parking attendants are being renamed 'Civil Enforcement Officers' or 'CEOs'. Wheel clamping should be used only for the most persistent penalty evaders - defined as someone with three or more outstanding, unpaid and unchallenged tickets - who should then be clamped on the fourth offence. Ticket offence details will be logged on a national blacklist database - shared with the DVLA - so that persistent offenders can be clamped when their tickets are totted up from anywhere in the country.

Additionally, the consultation paper recommends that there should be a more 'motorist-friendly' appeals process. And that's because if you or I, in our everyday lives, took the totally inflexible, unbending, jobsworth attitude that car owners endure daily from the authorities, there would be anarchy. It's only the inherent tolerance and decency of the long-suffering British public that prevents the sort of revolt motorists in nations of a more volatile demeanour might be driven to.

Ray Massey, motoring editor for the Daily Mail