Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I have an interest to declare: by virtue of my profession, I am a manager of commercial property. I well remember, not very long ago, a tenant of one of my clients explaining, in the context of a rear service yard behind some shops, how perilous it would be for the continuation of that facility were she not able to involve a clamping firm to deal with serial offenders, because that is what we need. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for raising this because I was unable to be present for Second Reading of this important Bill and therefore this is the first occasion I have had to comment on this matter. The Government’s intentions certainly need clarification here. The Minister’s clear statement at Second Reading about there being no option but to ban clampers overlooks the need, as other noble Lords have mentioned, to have a workable system to discourage the abuses. I will not follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the number of apparently able-bodied people who I have seen leaping out of cars with blue badges, other than to draw the Committee’s attention to there being, I am told, quite a flourishing market in stolen and counterfeit blue badges themselves. Apart from that, we have a system where serial abusers of parking facilities are putting their cars where they should not and serial malefactors, in terms of clampers, follow on to make life disproportionately unpleasant for people who have sometimes inadvertently parked in the wrong place for a short period. Both of those are abuses at either end of the spectrum. We need to somehow see the middle ground, and what we can get out of it, before we ditch the baby and the bathwater because in urban areas it is extremely important that this functions effectively. If I have one criticism at all of the noble Baroness's amendments, it would be that her proposed new subsection (2B) does not quite deal with rights of way and such matters. It seems to be hypothecated towards the residential occupier, for reasons I can well understand, but I would put in a plea for the commercial occupier as well. It is very important that shops can get access to their loading areas and that sort of thing, and that where there is an allocated parking bay in connection with an office it is not blocked by somebody else. For years, that has not been properly regulated. In connection with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Newton—and I found myself in near total agreement with his comments and those of other noble Lords—we would not be where we are had there been a proper, objective and robust adjudication system for dealing with it many years ago, which is when it should have been put in place. We are at risk of sweeping away the clampers by having a set of regulations put in place without realising, on the one hand, that we want to deal with an abuse and, on the other, that there is a need for the private owner to have some control over their own land. After all, it may be a car parking space which represents for them a sum of money in terms of their non-domestic rating assessment. They are paying for it. They may be paying for a remote parking space, but if it is blocked by somebody else it can lead only to problems. There are many effects in the Bill as drafted. Perhaps the noble Earl can reply later on this, as I had not given him advance warning of it, but I feel that Clause 54(3) is the most incredible gobbledygook. I have asked several noble Lords this afternoon if they can fathom out what it means, and nobody has been able to tell me. He will doubtless say that Clause 55, the extension of the powers to remove vehicles from land, covers the noble Baroness's point. I am not sure that it does. How are these powers to be exercised in practice when, in reality, the process of removing offending vehicles—a remedy which needs to be dealt with fairly quickly—does not even have effective coverage in urban areas, let alone where this ““or other land”” might be? Presumably, that means something other than the public highway and can mean something rural as well as urban. I have my doubts about that thinking. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said that we need robust and comprehensive regulation. Certainly we do not want too much regulation, as has already been said, but we need some. We certainly do not need a legal minefield or something lacking in clarity. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, rightly pointed out that it is the ingredients that are important here. Beyond licensing, there has to be a code of practice, probably some sort of insurance provision to make sure that people are properly covered, a complaints procedure, sanctions for bad performance and a compensation provision for where they have stepped out of line. That would probably be dealt with before an impartial adjudicator, who needs to be put in by somebody else. However, there is an issue. I relate to what the noble Baroness said, in the sense that this is setting up another great load of regulation, but what is the option? It is that people will simply barricade their urban parking areas. Whether they barricade them for the purposes that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested —to enable them to stick the clamp on as before—or whether they barricade them permanently, with a gateway which is locked at night, my concern is that a lot of these spaces in and around our urban areas are freely and conveniently used by all sorts of people out of hours and generally create no problems whatsoever. If the only sanction is for people to spend a lot of money creating barricades, the utility of our urban areas seems to become much less convenient for the general population and a great deal more expensive for those who are trying to get, effectively, exclusive possession for their own purposes of their own piece of land. We have a problem here, and we must get the balance right. I shall not press the Minister for any detailed response to the comments that I have made, but I will perhaps write to him and suggest ways in which we might be able to forge a better way forward.