Traffic Management (Northern Ireland) Order 2005

I shall answer that last question first. It was raised also by the noble Baroness. The existing 104 Police Service of Northern Ireland traffic wardens and 25 Road Service car park staff—that is, civil servants—will transfer to the company. So the answer on redundancies is no. They will transfer under the rules that appertain to the transfer to the TUPE regulations. That will be to a specialist parking enforcement company. I do not know which company, as it has not been chosen, but someone professionally experienced in such matters. I shall turn to how they will be measured in a moment. I shall try to go through the issues in the order that they were raised. On the training of enforcement staff, obviously when selecting the contractor we have to review the training proposals of each tender, because it comes back to choosing the appropriate company. A key performance indictor for this contract will be the level of continuous training of the staff; it will not be the issuing of tickets. That is not an issue at all. The new British Parking Association model contract on quality of enforcement will be adopted. This is not something that we have just invented; there are professionals out there doing this job at present. There are companies with a model contract, and we will adopt that. It will be a single private enforcement company, to get continuity of approach across Northern Ireland. It is important that there is continuity of approach in what is a fairly small area. It would be terrible if there were divisions and if people were being treated differently in different geographical areas, for reasons that I do not need to explain. The best practice involved in that model contract will promote higher quality standards of on-street enforcement. One of the indicators will be quality of training; others will be good quality penalty charges, a reduced number of complaints and a reduced number of appeals. There has been a big consultation on this, and many of the issues were raised. There is a general consensus that something has got to be done. The regulations will need to set out the conditions that will have to be satisfied before the department uses the powers to clamp or remove vehicles. As I have said, for normal parking enforcement there will be financial penalties. If the penalties are not met, the regulations are likely to specify a level or a number of debts that might have to be outstanding before the powers of removal or clamping are used. They are similar conditions to those in the London Road User Charging Regulations, where the congestion charging scheme at the moment specifies three outstanding penalties. Obviously, we will consult on the draft regulations. The fact that they will be negatived does not matter—it does matter, I accept that, but they will not be bounced on anyone. We will consult on them.