Local Authority Parking Enforcement

Richard Burden Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell.

I add my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) and her Committee for the important and detailed report that we are discussing. It is also excellent to see my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) in the Chamber. I was sorry to hear that in the report his party affiliation was spelt with a small “l”. However, whether he was listed as “Labour” or “labour”, he was an ’ell of a Minister and an ’ell of a shadow Minister as well. I thank him for his comments.

I hope that the Minister will not only answer the questions put by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside, but take up the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse—in particular about out-of-hours deliveries, which give rise to important parking issues and issues for other road users, such as pedestrians. Those issues could be important for future cycling strategies and the promotion of cycling safety.

I welcome the opportunity to add my comments on the report, which covers a whole range of areas, from the vitality of our high streets to the confusion all too often caused by parking signage. I also have the chance to explode some of the myths about parking that are circulating and to put the debate on to a more rational basis. It is a little surprising and disturbing to see the high levels at which some of those myths are being promulgated.

Parking issues are raised with me, as a constituency MP, again and again—I am sure I am not alone in that—and the Chair of the Select Committee made the point that parking is a matter of great importance to the public. It might not get the headlines that High Speed 2, airports or rail fares get, but it is important none the less, because getting it right is about achieving the incredibly difficult objective of a simpler and more streamlined door-to-door journey. Get parking wrong and we block people from reaching their destination, causing inconvenience to an awful lot of other people as well; get it right and we enable people to get better access to employment, leisure and high streets, quickly and conveniently.

As the Committee has established, parking is a local issue. If it is going to work, it needs to be fully integrated into local authority transport policy, alongside action on public transport. We expect councils to take responsible and common-sense approaches to parking enforcement. As the Committee reported, that means balancing a number of objectives—improving safety, tackling congestion, improving the environment and managing local traffic—and getting that right is a big challenge, particularly in the UK, a country with one of the highest population densities in the world where local traffic is predicted to increase by more than 40% by 2042. We want safe and sustainable towns and cities, and ones that can support economic growth and be enjoyable places to visit and be part of.

I welcome the Committee’s recommendation that we should leverage local knowledge and expertise to ensure that parking provision meets specific requirements. That means bringing businesses, community groups and residents around the table to find the solutions appropriate for different areas. I want to ask the Minister about the Select Committee’s innovative proposals to ensure that local parking delivers for communities. The report has come out, the recommendations are there and the response has come back, so will the Minister confirm today what policies the Department will adopt in practice to make progress? While he is answering that, perhaps he will also comment on whether the Government will consider the provision of any business rate relief for businesses that invest in affordable town centre parking solutions.

We need not only to ensure that local responsibility is underpinned by clear Government leadership, but to interrogate things a little more. How far is that leadership in place at the moment? The Government talk a lot about localism, but in reality Ministers have all too often devolved responsibility for traffic, road safety and parking policy to councils while depriving them of the resources with which to do those jobs effectively. Local authority budgets have been cut by 40% since 2010 and many councils are struggling to deal with competing transport priorities. The Committee’s call for better national oversight on parking is therefore important.

The report called for strengthened statutory guidance, to clarify and support councils in their parking powers and practice as a priority. As has been said, that might include a national five-minute grace period, which already exists in some local authorities, to underpin a common-sense approach; providing greater support to councils on how they can use parking policy to cut congestion, improve road safety and support growth; promoting best practice and innovative solutions, looking at how initiatives such as the workplace parking levy in Nottingham work; and annual local authority parking reports to improve transparency.

Raising revenue from parking is unlawful, but in reality fewer than one in five councils makes surplus income from parking, and that is not from fines, but from on-street parking. As the Committee pointed out, however, the “cash cow” perception remains, even if that does not reflect the reality. We need clear and accessible reports to clear up the myth and ensure that people have a balanced view of what is and is not going on. The Government have agreed that better oversight is needed and they made multiple references to the revision of statutory guidance in their response to the Committee. Given that that was a priority in the Committee’s report, when are we going to get the statutory guidance?

In addition to recommending increased clarity for local authorities, the report rightly underlines the need to make parking simpler for road users. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside said, most people do not intend to break the law, but all too often they are fined because mistakes have been made, and those mistakes might come about because of poor and confusing signage. The Committee was right to call for clarity on the patchwork of pavement parking rules throughout the country, which are confusing for motorists and often dangerous for vulnerable road users. The Committee also urged clarity on the rules for loading and unloading by haulage firms—what my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse said on that was important—and action to rectify persistent problems with poor signage.

We are all anticipating the Government’s review of the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002, but what my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse said about the timing of that struck a chord with me. I want to know what “in the spring” means. I have become a little sceptical about the Government’s seasonal promises. At the end of 2012, we were told that a Green Paper on young drivers could be expected in the spring, then in the summer and then before Christmas, but now it does not look as if we will get it before the next general election. Given that fiasco, I hope the Minister will tell us what “the spring” means and whether the review will be produced.

It would be good if the Minister provided us with an expected publication date and set out how a review that plans to increase local variation will ensure national consistency as well. Will he also tell us what action the Government intend to take to make the pavement parking rules clearer than at present? We support innovation and local authority flexibility, but the fact remains that, if it is going to work, parking policy must be developed with the road user in mind, and in a way that road users can understand.

Sadly, to put it bluntly, under this Government we are not getting a coherent response from Ministers. In fact, I think there is a bit of a mess. I welcome the Secretary of State’s decision to freeze the maximum penalty charge—households are struggling with the rising cost of living and it is obviously not good if they are hit hard by charges as well. But I find it difficult to reconcile what the Government are saying now with what they said just three months before the announcement of the freeze, when the former Transport Minister, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), was proposing to hike parking charges. There does not seem to be great continuity in the Government’s message.

I raise that issue because we are seeing another example of ministerial confusion today, about proposals to ban CCTV for parking enforcement. The Transport Committee pointed out that we need clarity on how cameras are and should be used, as CCTV should be used only where safety and congestion are major issues—for example, around schools, bus stops and pedestrian crossings—and where traditional parking enforcement is difficult. But the move to ban CCTV, if that is indeed what the Government are suggesting, has been opposed by pretty much every single group I have met, including road safety campaigners, local freight groups, bus operators, parking associations and the cross-party Local Government Association.

I have yet to see any evidence base for such a ban. I am prepared to consider it if I see the evidence, but I have not seen any. Ministers have no idea how much revenue councils make from CCTV parking enforcement charges and apparently will not even make an estimate. Given that, we might think it is not a significant problem. If the ban on CCTV goes ahead, however, it could have serious consequences. First, it could have financial consequences. More than 75 councils have made substantial investment in the technology. Mobile CCTV cars cost between £50,000 and £60,000 each, and in a context of slashed council budgets that is a significant sum.

More important than the cost, as many Members have said in the past few months, is the impact the ban could have on road safety. As far as I can tell, CCTV cameras have proved pretty effective in improving safety in high-risk places, such as around schools. To give an example, in Oldham, an 11-year-old girl who was nearly hit by a car outside her school in 2012 campaigned to secure what is called Oscar—the Oldham safety car—a CCTV vehicle that has reduced the number of injuries near schools and improved safety awareness. CCTV for school parking is popular with families. A recent survey showed that 80% of parents in Bromley support its use in those sorts of circumstances. We share the concerns of parents about a policy that could have an impact on the safety of children.

I am therefore shocked that the Government seem prepared to ban CCTV without any economic or safety assessment at all—if indeed that is what they are going to do—and would like the Minister to clarify the following points. First, are the Government proposing to ban CCTV? If they are, what is the evidence on which the proposal will be based, because anecdotes are simply not sufficient? Why will the Government not produce a regulatory impact assessment for the policy? What estimate has the Minister made of the financial support that will need to be given to councils to cover abortive car projects and fund more on-street enforcement? What impact will that have on departmental spending? If the ban on CCTV for civil parking enforcement goes ahead, will primary legislation be required?

Those are genuine questions. Something tells me that they are probably being asked by the Department for Transport as well; it would not surprise me to find that the Minister has been asking one or two questions along those lines himself. There is a rumour abroad that the policy is a bit Pickled. If it is, the sooner we get some clarity on it, the better. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr Pickles)—just to bring him in—has been saying that he wants to give our nation’s high streets a boost, but if that is how he wants to do it, I can think of ways that would be a lot more effective.

How about backing Labour’s pledge to cut business rates for small companies, for example, or creating a British investment bank that has a duty to lend to small and medium-sized enterprises? How about acting on calls from organisations such as Living Streets, which found that supporting high streets actually requires making public spaces more attractive and more accessible, rather than simply providing free parking?

Good traffic and parking management are vital for creating accessible and attractive town centres that can thrive. How will banning the use of technologies such as CCTV achieve that? If I am right in saying that the Department for Transport is not happy and that pressure from another Department is influencing policy on the issue, will the Minister explain why he and his Department are letting another Department dictate transport policy?

There are clearly important issues about parking that need to be addressed. The Transport Committee’s report contains excellent recommendations, and there is consensus across the House on the need for transparency and common sense in local parking policy, underpinned by strong leadership from Government. Sadly, it looks as though Ministers are wasting a lot of time on a bizarre policy to ban CCTV that has no evidence base but does have potentially damaging consequences. It would be better, to be honest, if they were to produce clear time scales and action plans to back up their response to the recommendations in the Select Committee’s report.

I hope that the concerns and issues raised today—principally those raised by the Select Committee, but also those I have raised—will encourage the Minister to think again on the issue of CCTV and start a constructive dialogue on the future of parking in the UK.