Protection of Freedoms Bill

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, on the Front Bench, because I told her that I would go away and stop being a nuisance. But before I decided to be a nuisance again, I established that it was not to her that I was going to be a nuisance but to my noble friend Lord Attlee.

I will not be that much of a nuisance, because having listened to the debates so far I found myself completely ambivalent about the merits of the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, the words of my noble friend Lord Lucas and the cautionary remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. I shall reflect on all that.

The point that interests me is on the appeals system. The noble Earl, who is answering this debate, presumably knows something about this from his transport connections. With appeals on ordinary parking offences we already have a pretty shambolic system. In London there are the London parking adjudicators; outside London there is another set of parking adjudicators, who are all part of the tribunal system, which is what I know something about. Outside London it depends on whether your council decides to opt in to decriminalise parking or pursue it in the ordinary, old-fashioned way through the magistrates’ courts. I do not think that the variation in the sort of justice depending on where you live is terribly sensible.

From reading the briefing that somebody—presumably the Government Whips’ Office—helpfully sent me, I have couple of questions. The briefing says:

“Government amendments to Schedule 4 have been tabled to make clear that notices to keepers and drivers must include relevant information about what impendent appeals/dispute resolution arrangements are available to them, in addition to any internal arrangements. We have also made a commitment not to commence the keeper liability provisions of Schedule 4 until the parking industry establishes an independent appeals body”.

I understand both those sentences on their own but I do not understand them taken together. Are we talking about an insistence that the industry must have a single approved appeals system, whether approved or not? Or are we saying that everybody who becomes eligible to benefit from Schedule 4 must have their own appeals system, and will that be approved or not? I simply do not know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that if there is to be a single approved appeals system that everybody has to join to get the benefits, that seems sensible. If there is to be an endless series of different appeals systems chosen by different providers, whether approved or not as providers or an appeals system, I do not think that is sensible. It puts me in mind of an absolutely daft proposal produced by another government department two or three years ago to have rival ombudsmen in a particular industry—I think that it was electricity or telecoms—chosen by the providers, not the customers. The worst providers would choose the least effective ombudsmen. This is just not a sensible way to run a railway. I would like to know the answer to my questions.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

I want briefly to support Amendment 42. I mentioned even more briefly at Second Reading that I am particularly keen on eradicating blue badge abuse. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for tabling the amendment, because it highlights where my concern most closely fits. I declare an interest, in that I have a blue badge. I support legal clamping but would like to stop illegal operators.

This is a personal view, but there are two groups of abusers. First, there are those people who steal or buy blue badges, which is an increasing market and can be very profitable. In some areas, it has been shown to have increased sevenfold to tenfold in recent years. Also in this group are those who borrow their grandmother's badge and see it as a right to use the family badge. The worst offenders are those who take grandma out and leave her in the car. We have laws for not leaving dogs in cars, but sadly not for grandmothers. When she was younger, my daughter and I used to play a game at the local shopping centre, which was “Count the grandma”.

In the second group, there are those who do not have a blue badge and who may be stopping for five minutes, while popping into a shop or picking up family, who blatantly abuse the system and stare out those who possess blue badges legally. Perhaps there is occasionally a good reason for stopping in those spaces, but I am passionate about blue badge abuse—not just for the abuse in itself but because I believe it shows a wider indication of attitude towards disabled people. I believe it is important to crack down on this. At a time when the media portrayal of disabled people is perhaps at its worst, the Glasgow Media Unit recently looked at some comparative data of media portrayal of disabled people from 2005-06 and 2010-11, which showed that the portrayal was significantly worse than at any time in the past 10 to 15 years. Recent articles have shown disabled people as benefit scroungers and workshy.

I spend a lot of time driving around the country and what I see, too often, is disabled people with hidden impairments being verbally abused because the system is not fully understood. It is only a few steps later that we see why some people think it perfectly acceptable to abuse the system rather than understand the reason for it. There is shocking abuse around the country. I see people who suddenly develop an incredible change of gait when they see me getting out of my car with my wheelchair, or whose limps mysteriously disappear as they walk around the corner. I do not mean to make light of this but it is really important.

It is not just about being close to the shops or the supermarkets—some supermarkets have tried very hard to combat this—but about being closer to work. It is about integrating disabled people in society and having a wide enough space to get a chair in and out of a car. It may be about getting your wheelchair and a child in and out of the car. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to give my car keys to complete strangers and ask them to pull my car out of a space, when someone has just parked across the yellow hash lines between spaces. Wherever I go, at any time of day or night and pretty much every day of the week, I see people abusing blue badge parking spaces. While I do not generally agree with increasing powers, I believe that we need to do more to protect disabled people who have parked legally. I believe in clamping for blue badge abuse, and perhaps we could do even more to protect parking for disabled people.

[The Earl of Lytton]

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.