Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, unlike the noble Baroness, I start from the point of view that clamping must be stopped. I have concerns about some aspects of the Bill, including the role of the accredited trade association. In practice, as the noble Lord said, there is only one and, although it may be a perfectly reputable organisation, not all of its members live up to the expectations that one has of them. As has been said, it is very difficult to police a members’ organisation. There needs to be a further effort, via legislation, to raise standards in the industry and there need to be mechanisms that ensure standards are raised, such as a guaranteed right of appeal. The code of conduct must include a provision on clear bay markings, lighting and adequate size of parking bays. There have been too many cases of people being fined exorbitant amounts of money because one wheel of their car protrudes into the neighbouring parking bay. Irritating as that may be to you and I when we go to the supermarket and it is the last available parking bay, it is nevertheless the case that at night in a dark car park, when the markings have long ago rubbed off, that can be—and is— exploited. There is plenty of evidence of that. Penalty charges and tickets should be levied only by companies that adhere to the code of conduct, to which I have referred, and the charges must be reasonable. A good benchmark would be the charges levied by local authorities. They vary of course from area to area, but the joy of that as a measure is that it takes account of the local market in parking provision and enables variation from one part of the country to another. It gives a reasonable comparison. I should like to ask the Minister about the experience in Scotland. I understand that wheel clamping is illegal in Scotland: has there been the explosion in unfair and extortionate ticketing that the noble Baroness fears? I do not recall reading or hearing about that problem but it would be useful to hear about the experience in Scotland. On Amendment 42, I want to raise a couple of practical issues relating to this. First, proposed new subsection (2A) refers to an offence not being committed, "““if … the vehicle is not registered under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act””." As I understand it, that means that it would be legal to wheel clamp foreign vehicles. I wonder where that places us in terms of EU law and international law and whether it is possible to discriminate against foreign vehicles in that way. I am not for one minute suggesting that it is desirable to do so and I do not know whether the noble Baroness intended that outcome but, as far as I can see, included in those vehicles that are not registered would be foreign vehicles. That could cause a problem. I want to look at the issue of proposed new subsection (2B), which says that, "““land on which the vehicle is parked is designated for parking by residents of specific dwellings or by their guests””." The Government need to look at the particular situation of those people, as they are not setting out to make money from parking. It is their private property. I am aware of one example near where I live, in what was my constituency. I dealt with this thorny problem for a very long time. There was a block of flats where it was not practical or possible, for reasons of geographical layout, to have erected a barrier or gate. The block of flats is next to a university that charges for parking, so the students and the staff park all over the place, including in the area designated for residents of the blocks of flats, and some of them are even prepared to trap people in their garages, let alone take their parking spaces in their front gardens and on the private road. The residents of the flats are not in the position where they can erect a gate or barrier; they surely do not want to set up a system where they charge people through ticketing, which would be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is a difficult nut to crack but, nevertheless, the expense, complexity and legality of setting up a system for ticketing and levying tickets on people is ridiculous. So the obvious answer was wheel clamping, because there is nothing more annoying than not being able to drive your car home at the end of the day. We cannot work on exceptions such as that one, but the Government need to look at how to solve the problem for the people in that block of flats. The problem referred to in that part of the amendment needs to be looked at again. Proposed new subsection (2C) in Amendment 42 sets up a system to allow clamping to continue, which has not been successful in the past. I cannot support amendments that establish a major regulatory system, because one desirable thing about this Bill is that it narrows down the number of people who have the right to get information from the DVLA. It is important that information is channelled down so that it has to go via the accredited trade association, and only companies that are members of that are eligible to get that information. In my experience, it is extremely worrying how easy it is to find that information and the misuse to which that information is put. The Bill takes the right approach in narrowing that down, so I do not believe that the amendments that we are discussing take the right approach from that perspective.