My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Hunt and Sir Greg Knight for their work in introducing this Bill to another place and now to your Lordships’ House. It is important and highly focused legislation. In these times when our legislative system is grappling with some of its biggest ever issues of recent times, it is extremely satisfying to see Parliament doing its job by correcting injustices which directly affect the lives of very many people.
Over recent decades, great strides have been made with regard to the rights and protection of the individual but there is one area where, in my opinion, the situation has moved backwards. It can be best described in the context of legalised unfairness. We see this phenomenon in so many situations, from hidden charges in car-hire agreements to technology-enabled contracts which are fiendishly complex and difficult to cancel, or to the use of premium-rate phone-lines to correct the mistakes of service providers in a wide variety of situations. It is very easy now for companies to help themselves to the
wallets of the customers whom they deal with, often enabled by technology. This has become known by the shorthand of “the rip-off culture”, in which surcharges are buried in the small print and the consumer is really only a receiver of unclear and punitive contractual terms.
Among the worst of these practices are perpetrated by rogue elements of the private parking industry, a situation made far worse by the fact that it is facilitated by a government agency, the DVLA. Where government is involved in effectively doing the dirty work, we need to set the bar high for it. I welcomed the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who said that parking regulation and enforcement are an important service and that if it did not happen it would be a free-for-all and we would all be in a complete pickle. The industry is populated largely by responsible companies doing a proper job and charging a reasonable amount of money for it.
However, there is a significant rogue parking element which through its lack of integrity is in danger of bringing the whole industry into disrepute. It is therefore in the interest of the high-integrity, high-quality operators to ensure that those who do not abide by those standards are prevented operating. For parking to work properly, it is clear that there needs to be clarity in the rules and the tariffs, fairness in how motorists are treated and proportionality in the terms of penalty fares and fines—here, again, I agree that a charge of £100 for being one second late is entirely disproportionate; I hope that the code will cover that area, with penalties expressed as a proportion of the original charge. There needs also to be transparency as to the nature of the fine or penalty. Tickets are often dressed up to look like official criminal tickets when in fact they are notices of breach of contract, as I understand it. Finally, there needs to be strict control of the use of DVLA data in how those companies go about recovering penalties.
The most unfair part of all this is that the objective of the exercise is often entrapment—we have heard the description of a ransom strip, which indeed happens. We must stop the objective of the exercise being to trap motorists and then to sting them with wholly disproportionate penalties. The objective should be the provision of parking to facilitate people’s everyday lives, when they go to shops, to government offices or to whatever else would draw them into town, city and village centres. They should pay a fee to park, but the objective of the exercise should not be to trick them into penalties. That is iniquitous and I hope that the code will focus on it.
Progress has been made already. Reference was made by my noble friend Lord Hunt to the abolition of clamping on private land through the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Parking operators would lurk around the corner in a van and an intimidating individual would spring out, apply a clamp and basically threaten to hold the vehicle to ransom until a very large sum of money was paid up. That injustice has been corrected through the welcome provisions of the 2012 Act, but it has been replaced by a technologically enabled variant of exactly the same process. There is no longer the physical intimidation, but there is now the technology
and government-enabled pursuit, often through aggressive means, of individuals who have overstayed their parking. Very large sums are demanded and people are intimidated into paying up rather than face the prospect of county court judgments that could be ruinous.
So we have come a very long way from the days when the traffic warden—that uniformed public servant—was in charge of these matters. It is probably fair to say that these individuals were not universally considered or portrayed as sympathetic characters, but at least the rules were simple and straightforward. Now we have private companies, some of which in their correspondence masquerade as official enforcement agencies and charge disproportionate penalties.
I very much welcome the Bill, which is a commendably simple and straightforward piece of legislation, at the heart of which is the development and deployment of a code of practice for private parking operators. Non-adherence to the code will have a terminal effect on an operator’s ability to access official DVLA data and to maintain its accreditation. As has been said, if it fails to abide by the rules, it will be put out of business—and that is the most powerful sanction imaginable. The bar for the code of practice really should be set high.
One measure of a good Bill is that one is surprised that it is not already the law of the land. This Bill falls directly into that category. When I read the account of proceedings in another place, I was struck by the total support from all sides of the House, as well as from representative organisations outside in whose interests it is to ensure that the issue is properly dealt with. It is a great example of Parliament standing up for the rights of the individual, and I give it my full support.
2 pm