Deregulation Bill

Baroness Eaton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hanham (Con)]

My Lords, I have been mentioned a couple of times by my noble friend beside me, and I am very grateful to him for explaining the policies of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the use of parking moneys, and why our roads are so beautifully kept. I remind the Committee at this stage of my co-presidency of London Councils and my former membership of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for the fact that I was rushing down from a Select Committee and was about three minutes late for the start of the debate.

I support what has been said about this being a local authority matter. If anybody who has been involved in local government knows anything about it, there are two things that really irritate residents. The first is planning and the second is parking. How parking is controlled and enforced is totally a matter for local authorities. Noble Lords know as well as I do that Westminster City Council has completely different parking regulations to those in Kensington and Chelsea. They were very difficult to cope with to start with, but everybody has not got used to the fact that you cannot just totally rely on the same things. They have different rules of enforcement, too. Kensington and Chelsea does not employ cameras for parking enforcement, while other councils do. Whose choice is it that that should happen? Why is not that the choice of the borough—how it enforces it? If you do not have cameras, you have to put people on the streets. I came across two today, and one was on a scooter with his little yellow hat on, while one was on his bike with his little yellow hat on. They were running up and down the road. You have to have a bigger army of those to keep up enforcement if you cannot use cameras.

Where is the mischief that has brought about this proposal? Who has been complaining about cameras for parking enforcement? Cameras are used for all sorts of things in our streets, some of them extremely helpful. Some cameras catch criminals and help to protect people who are walking up and down the street. Some provide for the traffic flows. It is very annoying being caught by a camera. I can declare that I was caught by one while sitting at a box junction a little while ago. I did not know that there was a camera there, and I was a bit stuck. I got a traffic fine, and rightly so, because what I was doing was against the law. I was not doing what the law said and hoping that I would get away with it, but I did not. That is because I was breaking the law, and when people go against the law on parking arrangements brought in by local councils, which decide on the parking restrictions, it is up to the local authority to enforce it themselves. That is particularly essential for major cities, where there are really tight areas for parking, as well as in small county towns, which are different to anywhere else.

My former position as a Minister in the DCLG leaves me in no other position than to say that I do not know at all why the department has set off down this road, and it would be a frightfully good thing if it got away from it.

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Tope, I am not an ex-councillor. I am not sure that it is a misfortune or fortune still to be an elected member of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. My ward has in it two large upper schools and a very large primary school. Because of the topography and the nature of the communities of Bradford, which noble Lords will know is a very large area, many children, however large or small, are brought by parents in cars. The ensuing chaos is something that you cannot believe. Not only is it chaotic and dangerous; it is also detrimental to economic growth in the area. When cars cause obstacles to vehicles passing through a community, it delays important business traffic and people choose not to open businesses in places where they cannot get quickly to their destination. If councils do not have the opportunity to use everything possible to control unsightly, difficult and inconsiderate parking, we will have even more chaos.

I could not agree more with all my colleagues on the Benches in front of me: it really should be a matter for local authorities to determine how this is dealt with, certainly not somebody who thinks that a zig-zag line outside a school is the only place where there is a problem. We even have situations, because of inconsiderate parking, in which emergency vehicles cannot get through at school times. This is therefore a step too far, which the Government should not be considering.