Parking fines are the new instrument of the left
The Guardian
Simon Jenkins
16th June 06
Intransigent wardens chasing targets and bonuses are hated by car owners and are a PR disaster for councils
I was impressed. I left the car unlocked and dashed into the house to collect a key while a traffic warden inspected my (valid) permit. In the 30 seconds I was away, a local mafioso spotted my absence, snatched the laptop from the front seat and leapt into a getaway car under the nose of the warden. By the time I had returned and registered what had happened he had vanished, and his colleague across the road "didn't see nothing".
After two days of getting no reply from any police or wardens' office I gave up, which is how government claims that crime is falling. The truth is that Ghengis Khan could rape and pillage his way across Camden with impunity, but if his yak strayed one inch from a parking bay he would be found swinging from a lamppost with a parking ticket stuffed in his mouth.
The consequence of the government denuding local politics of substance has been to render the trivial important. In London and most big cities there is now politics, damned politics and parking. In what was the old borough of St Pancras, revolution used to be declared and red flags flew from the town hall. Not any more. Schools, clinics, housing, social services are all ordained elsewhere, as is tax revenue. The one area of creative discretion left to councils is traffic, and it has duly become the playground of the ideologues.
In the London Borough of Camden (as in Islington and other like-minded parts of town) parking policy must now stand proxy for socialism, the class struggle, global warming and carbon criminality, not to mention sexism and racism. Parking awareness cells and parking-consciousness-raising groups exist on every corner.
Not a day passes without a white line repainted, a pavement relaid, a speed bump resculpted. In Camden the earth moves every day. And the politics is real. Last month the local voters rose in a rage and gave Labour its worst result nationwide. They chucked the party out of power and voted in a Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition whose most strident pledge was to abandon car clamping.
This has been long in the brewing. Children in Camden learn to park before they can walk or attend gamelan classes. They are branded at birth with their residents'-zone code and practise three-point turns with their Mamas & Papas 4x4 strollers. They can sense a yellow line under six inches of leaf mould and wake screaming when they hear the approaching rumble of Camden's tow-away Panzer division. A ghoulish Kentish Town pastime is to go to the car pound after dinner and watch the gibbering bourgeoisie weep over their £350 recovery fines and the mangled wrecks of crushed Range Rovers.
Traffic offences are the one area of social misbehaviour for which Britain shows zero tolerance, and the reason is easy. They are the law and order of middle-class guilt. Rules are easily enforced through subcontractors. For some leftwing councils, parking control is a lucrative way of advancing the class struggle. The new barricade is a Volvo estate smashing its sump on a recently enhanced speed bump, or a towaway gang removing an entire phalanx of BMWs. The 500 deaths claimed last year by the London ambulance service as due to speed bumps are martyrs in a noble cause.
Parking revenue has become big money to all local councils, reportedly as much as a penny on income tax. London rakes in £500m of this. Even Tory-controlled Westminster's parking revenue, at £130m, is three times its council-tax yield. It is more a parking authority than an elected council. But since Gordon Brown insists that the money be spent not on schools or social services but on transport improvements, the distortion of priorities is crazy.
Camden has so much money for road works that its mascot is a plastic cone and its borough anthem a pneumatic drill.
In recent years maximising revenue from this source has become an obsession of Camden Labour. The local NCP contract target last year was 250,000 tickets, 28,000 clamps and 7,000 tow-aways. The Hampstead and Highgate Express portrayed the then leader, Jane Roberts, as little short of Pol Pot. Even the most careful car owners found themselves trapped into spending hundreds of pounds a year on disproportionate fines for trivial offences.
An inch beyond a line, a two-minute overstay, a tiny error in a scratched permit or a voucher left in the wrong part of a windscreen meant a deluge of tickets, clamps and tow-aways. Recovery began at £155 and could top £500 if the hapless owner had the capitalist impertinence to be away on holiday. Waiting hearses were clamped, as were Samaritan vicars, doctors attending accidents, and RSPCA inspectors rescuing adorable cats. The council was careless of the fate of its wardens (who demanded flak jackets), and of its own public relations. Since the election, Camden's policy has been reversed faster than poll tax was in 1990, but the cost in lost revenue may be punishing.
Local councils cannot be blamed for this politicisation of parking. While the Treasury caps rates, it carefully leaves "charges" to local authorities to levy. As capping has bit ever deeper into fiscal freedom, the pressure to squeeze ever more from parking, especially lucrative fine income, has been intense. Most citizens accept that they should pay to use an urban street, even one in which they live. What few tolerate is the draconian and arbitrary way of imposing the charge, enforced in broad daylight by incoherent officials whose bosses have not the confidence to allow them discretion or mercy to their victims.
Parking wardens, like the one who must have witnessed my theft, are for millions of Britons the sole point of human contact with government. They have replaced policemen and lollipop ladies as the most ubiquitous figures of communal authority. Yet they are rarely local, and are untrained and unsuited for this exalted role. They may not fraternise and they turn a blind eye to crime or antisocial behaviour other than illegal parking. Officials, who common sense says should become the friendly link between citizens and government, are frigid recipients of public fury. Tony Blair could not have invented a better way of making the public hate local government.
Needless to say, Whitehall has read and digested the Camden result. But rather than leave local councils to get the message and change their policies, the transport department is to intervene. It is drafting nationwide regulations to override local ones. These will ban bonuses and targets for wardens and stipulate the grading of penalties and the time allowed before clamps are applied. There will even be a "national computer database" for persistent parking offenders. Blair and David Cameron will row over who is "tough on parking and tough on the causes of parking".
In other words, rather than leave democracy to do its work and free councils to raise other taxes, Blair will punish every council for the sins of Camden. He will nationalise parking policy. The remit of central government will reach the very kerbside of the nation.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
Simon Jenkins
16th June 06
Intransigent wardens chasing targets and bonuses are hated by car owners and are a PR disaster for councils
I was impressed. I left the car unlocked and dashed into the house to collect a key while a traffic warden inspected my (valid) permit. In the 30 seconds I was away, a local mafioso spotted my absence, snatched the laptop from the front seat and leapt into a getaway car under the nose of the warden. By the time I had returned and registered what had happened he had vanished, and his colleague across the road "didn't see nothing".
After two days of getting no reply from any police or wardens' office I gave up, which is how government claims that crime is falling. The truth is that Ghengis Khan could rape and pillage his way across Camden with impunity, but if his yak strayed one inch from a parking bay he would be found swinging from a lamppost with a parking ticket stuffed in his mouth.
The consequence of the government denuding local politics of substance has been to render the trivial important. In London and most big cities there is now politics, damned politics and parking. In what was the old borough of St Pancras, revolution used to be declared and red flags flew from the town hall. Not any more. Schools, clinics, housing, social services are all ordained elsewhere, as is tax revenue. The one area of creative discretion left to councils is traffic, and it has duly become the playground of the ideologues.
In the London Borough of Camden (as in Islington and other like-minded parts of town) parking policy must now stand proxy for socialism, the class struggle, global warming and carbon criminality, not to mention sexism and racism. Parking awareness cells and parking-consciousness-raising groups exist on every corner.
Not a day passes without a white line repainted, a pavement relaid, a speed bump resculpted. In Camden the earth moves every day. And the politics is real. Last month the local voters rose in a rage and gave Labour its worst result nationwide. They chucked the party out of power and voted in a Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition whose most strident pledge was to abandon car clamping.
This has been long in the brewing. Children in Camden learn to park before they can walk or attend gamelan classes. They are branded at birth with their residents'-zone code and practise three-point turns with their Mamas & Papas 4x4 strollers. They can sense a yellow line under six inches of leaf mould and wake screaming when they hear the approaching rumble of Camden's tow-away Panzer division. A ghoulish Kentish Town pastime is to go to the car pound after dinner and watch the gibbering bourgeoisie weep over their £350 recovery fines and the mangled wrecks of crushed Range Rovers.
Traffic offences are the one area of social misbehaviour for which Britain shows zero tolerance, and the reason is easy. They are the law and order of middle-class guilt. Rules are easily enforced through subcontractors. For some leftwing councils, parking control is a lucrative way of advancing the class struggle. The new barricade is a Volvo estate smashing its sump on a recently enhanced speed bump, or a towaway gang removing an entire phalanx of BMWs. The 500 deaths claimed last year by the London ambulance service as due to speed bumps are martyrs in a noble cause.
Parking revenue has become big money to all local councils, reportedly as much as a penny on income tax. London rakes in £500m of this. Even Tory-controlled Westminster's parking revenue, at £130m, is three times its council-tax yield. It is more a parking authority than an elected council. But since Gordon Brown insists that the money be spent not on schools or social services but on transport improvements, the distortion of priorities is crazy.
Camden has so much money for road works that its mascot is a plastic cone and its borough anthem a pneumatic drill.
In recent years maximising revenue from this source has become an obsession of Camden Labour. The local NCP contract target last year was 250,000 tickets, 28,000 clamps and 7,000 tow-aways. The Hampstead and Highgate Express portrayed the then leader, Jane Roberts, as little short of Pol Pot. Even the most careful car owners found themselves trapped into spending hundreds of pounds a year on disproportionate fines for trivial offences.
An inch beyond a line, a two-minute overstay, a tiny error in a scratched permit or a voucher left in the wrong part of a windscreen meant a deluge of tickets, clamps and tow-aways. Recovery began at £155 and could top £500 if the hapless owner had the capitalist impertinence to be away on holiday. Waiting hearses were clamped, as were Samaritan vicars, doctors attending accidents, and RSPCA inspectors rescuing adorable cats. The council was careless of the fate of its wardens (who demanded flak jackets), and of its own public relations. Since the election, Camden's policy has been reversed faster than poll tax was in 1990, but the cost in lost revenue may be punishing.
Local councils cannot be blamed for this politicisation of parking. While the Treasury caps rates, it carefully leaves "charges" to local authorities to levy. As capping has bit ever deeper into fiscal freedom, the pressure to squeeze ever more from parking, especially lucrative fine income, has been intense. Most citizens accept that they should pay to use an urban street, even one in which they live. What few tolerate is the draconian and arbitrary way of imposing the charge, enforced in broad daylight by incoherent officials whose bosses have not the confidence to allow them discretion or mercy to their victims.
Parking wardens, like the one who must have witnessed my theft, are for millions of Britons the sole point of human contact with government. They have replaced policemen and lollipop ladies as the most ubiquitous figures of communal authority. Yet they are rarely local, and are untrained and unsuited for this exalted role. They may not fraternise and they turn a blind eye to crime or antisocial behaviour other than illegal parking. Officials, who common sense says should become the friendly link between citizens and government, are frigid recipients of public fury. Tony Blair could not have invented a better way of making the public hate local government.
Needless to say, Whitehall has read and digested the Camden result. But rather than leave local councils to get the message and change their policies, the transport department is to intervene. It is drafting nationwide regulations to override local ones. These will ban bonuses and targets for wardens and stipulate the grading of penalties and the time allowed before clamps are applied. There will even be a "national computer database" for persistent parking offenders. Blair and David Cameron will row over who is "tough on parking and tough on the causes of parking".
In other words, rather than leave democracy to do its work and free councils to raise other taxes, Blair will punish every council for the sins of Camden. He will nationalise parking policy. The remit of central government will reach the very kerbside of the nation.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
posted by Neil Herron at 10:31 AM
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