Parking (Code of Practice) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it will not surprise anyone that I, too, welcome the Bill. I have some history in this area. I have a long involvement with an organisation called the London Motorists’ Action Group, mostly concerned with fighting Westminster and Camden. My noble friend Lord Leigh will share my views on their attitude to motorists who wish to park. I am delighted that things are better in Watford, although not at Waterfields, I notice, which has one of those private car parks that operates a cliff edge: two hours free; for the first second after that, £85. One thing that must be got right in the code is that operators whose finances depend on extracting penalties from motorists, as many of these companies do, should not be allowed to continue in business. If they are operating parking and basically running it off the fees that they get for parking at a steady rate, that seems all right. If they are getting very little from that and most from extortionate penalties, that seems to me a very antisocial way to behave, and I very much hope that that will not be allowed by the code.

In regard to that, I very much hope that the Minister will offer us a meeting between Second Reading and Committee. That would help cut down the amount of talking and amendments that we have to get through at that stage. We all support the Bill, but we all have ideas, and we would like a better understanding of the details than we can get from a short speech by the Minister at the end of Second Reading.

Like others, I want clear and fair rules. It should be clear that waiting is not parking. That is something I have been on the wrong end of in a private car park. Given my history, I tend to be quite competitive about these things and in the end they give up and go away, but it is not fair that people in general should be subject to threatening letters just because they have paused for a moment while remaining entirely in charge of the car. Setting someone down in a hospital car park is not parking, and the code should not permit it to be charged for.

For this to work, we need a good flow of information. Rather than push this through some bureaucratic mechanism, we should require information to be published. Anyone running a private car park should be required to publish on the website—which they must have to enable appeals and so on—information about how many people park there, how many fines they issue, what is going on in that car park which affects the motorist and how they should look at the consequences of parking there. Public indignation is the cheapest and best way to ensure that, in a very diverse and scattered industry, we get good performance.

On penalties, there seems to be an idea that £100 is a reasonable amount to charge people for overstaying in a car park. Mostly, that is done by mistake. Yes, it is certainly reasonable to charge a fee to cover the cost of digging the money out of someone who has forgotten to pay, but it is absolutely unreasonable that that could be £100: £30 might be more like it, I guess. Again, that matter should be in the code; we should not allow excessive premia for people who have merely forgotten to pay.

Indeed, in everything we do, we should encourage compliance. Noble Lords may remember the early days of the London congestion charge, when the system was designed to catch people out and incur fines. Then, the system became compliance-friendly: you could sign up so that if you drove into the congestion charge zone, you were automatically charged that day’s fee. Modern technology from several competing companies out there enables this to be done on a small scale in private car parks. We ought to insist that any space for more than a few cars should use these motorist-friendly systems to charge people for parking. You should be able to register, particularly if you use a car park or an operator with any regularity, and be charged automatically when your vehicle is recognised going in and out of the car park. The system is simple and reliable; we ought to insist on it.

On the internal appeal system—the bit before the external appeal system—we ought to insist that companies document what is going on so that their performance can be reviewed. It is not right that appeals get rejected on principle; people do not want to risk adding 50% to their penalty by going to the external system. The internal system must be well run and fair, and it must be possible to check that. The external system needs to be effective and cheap, which is difficult to achieve. We ought to allow the external system to be pretty robust in saying when an appeal is hopeless and dismissing it in short order, otherwise it gets far too expensive to operate.

On the other hand, the person reviewing the system ought to have legal expertise. In my one involvement with Poplar, I was astonished by how little the person conducting the appeal understood about the law of the land. I do not think that they had any legal training at all. The appeal system needs some kind of quality control—someone to review and check things to make sure that what is going on is up to the standard we expect.

The key to this is building a self-improving system with a clear and strong flow of information on what is good practice, what is going wrong and what is being done to improve things so that, over time, we can push towards better practice and not be satisfied with anything like the current system. I am delighted by the way the Bill has been drafted, which offers us the opportunity to get where we need to go. I look forward to my conversations with the Minister.