Common sense about parking

Rob Waller: 28 October 2009 in Government

It is very nice when nursing a grievance to find an authoritative source of sympathy. We moved to our town centre home a couple of years ago. Residents need a permit to park in the street, and also need to give visitors a temporary permit. We quickly discovered that this system, designed to protect us (from shoppers and workers taking all the spaces) also serves to trap us.

One time we forgot to rub off the year as well as the day and month on a visitor's permit and received a parking ticket. We appealed because at the time we didn't actually realise what we had omitted to do. We thought the traffic warden had just failed to notice the ticket and we asked to see the photo they should have taken.

Our appeal just received the curt response that 'the photographs do not show a valid permit on display', to which I responded, 'Are you saying there was no permit displayed, or are you saying there was a permit displayed but for some reason you consider it was not a valid one?' They gave up.

The Tribunal backs the citizen
The Traffic Penalty Tribunal is the body that deals with appeals against parking penalties. Their annual report is a surprisingly good read, full of robust common sense, and it emerges that our experience is extremely common. For example, the Tribunal devoted a substantial section of one report to a discussion of fluttering tickets, and sticky tickets that lose their stickiness. And their latest report cites cases where dogs, a python and a parrot are implicated in the driver's failure to display a parking permit.

The Tribunal reports that 'adjudicators comment that there is overuse of standard letters and paragraphs and are concerned that, in pursuing an objective of replying swiftly to representations, the representations themselves may not be being properly considered or addressed.' They say that 'in many examples of Councils' letters rejecting representations we find that the Council have either: failed to address the issue, often giving reasons for rejection that have no bearing on the issue raised by the vehicle owner; disregarded compelling evidence supplied by the vehicle owner... It is perhaps not surprising that in these cases motorists question the reasons for receiving a rejection to their representations and form the opinion that the Council has other objectives' (that is, raising revenue).

A wider problem
I think the world of parking regulation nicely represents some general problems of government communications - mixed motives arising from the tension between service provision and enforcement, a simple lack of skills (parking documentation is notoriously badly written and designed), and problems in the drafting of underlying legislation. The latter is undoubtedly part of the problem in the case of parking enforcement:

'I note that the Criminal Procedure Rule Committee has the statutory objective, "to make Criminal Procedure Rules that are simple and simply expressed with a view to securing that the criminal justice system is accessible, fair and efficient" says Caroline Sheppard, the Chief Adjudicator, in her 2006 Annual Report. 'In the light of that I question why, in 2006, the draft Regulations still contain expressions such as "permitted to remain at rest" when what they mean is "parking"'.

We resolved our problem by being persistent, articulate and, well, middle-class. We could fight our way through the complex language of the parking enforcement notice and the letters - through phrases like 'valid dispensation' or 'consideration will be given to any formal representation'. Not everyone can, and many people who can't end up meekly paying up the £70 that I can afford and they can't.

The Traffic Penalty Tribunal makes the point that people are being fined not only for breaking the rules (when they fail to pay for a ticket) but also for poor administration (when they fail to display it effectively). This goes for many areas of life, and the poor administrators amongst us pay dearly for it.