Protection of Freedoms Bill

I shall speak also to Amendment 54. It seems to me that if we are to allow private operators the privilege of ticketing, we ought to expect the highest standards of them in both their propriety and their behaviour towards the motorist. We ought to look to them for the sort of regime that we wish that we could have with many local authorities who currently enforce ticketing. There seems to me no reason why we should import the standards of bad behaviour of, say, Camden, into the private sector, granting the private sector privileges on the basis of the bad precedents of the bad end of the local authorities. Amendment 54 sets out some of the things that I think we should ensure that private operators granted that privilege should do. First, they should take steps to establish a current residential address of the keeper of the vehicle. That is one of the major causes of distress in local authority parking enforcement. They send tickets to old addresses or to people who previously owned the vehicle, and the first thing that the real registered keeper at his real address knows is when the bailiffs turn up, because the bailiffs actually take the trouble to check addresses before they send people round. It costs about 50p a time to gain their address. That ought to be a duty on private operators granted those privileges. We must have a maximum. My noble friend has said that there will be a maximum; I am content with that. A feature of some of the rogues has been excessive maxima. We must make sure that the terms of the contract do not act as an unreasonable disincentive to appeal. My noble friend is working out an appeals procedure. He will be aware that there is a considerable disincentive built into the local authority system at the moment. You lose your discount if you appeal, and if you lose your appeal, you therefore pay double. That is absolutely as far as it should go. There has to be some disincentive, or people will just appeal anyway, but there has to be a limit on the disincentive. We would all wish parking attendants to behave in a civilised way towards someone who was a minute or two late or who just pulled up in their car, ran into the newsagent and ran out again. Pardoning that sort of behaviour is what makes for a civilised society—a neighbourly society, as one of my right honourable friends so memorably phrased it—and, again, we ought to ask that of the private industry if we are giving them these privileges. Evidence of payment should be provided in a proper form. Many local authority tickets are not self-adhesive and it is very easy for a draft through the ventilator to blow them off car dashboards, particularly some modern slippery and sloping examples. The tickets end up on the floor and that is it. If we grant private firms these privileges, they ought to provide payment evidence which is capable of being fixed firmly to the car so that it does not slip. When approached with a reasonable excuse as to why things have gone wrong, whether it be a parking ticket that has blown off or a document sent to the wrong address, or that the person’s mother-in-law had had a heart attack and he had to take her to hospital, we would expect a civilised private operator to take those things into account. We cannot take political action against a private operator, as we can against a local authority. We cannot put up candidates or campaign against private operators in elections. We have great powers against local authorities which misbehave or do things that we do not like—albeit we may be slow to use them—but we have no such powers against private operators and therefore we should expect the very highest standards of them. I beg to move.