4:25pm Friday 13th August 2010
THEY won’t believe I’m saying this, but I am genuinely sorry our district councils are about to lose control of parking enforcement services.
We learnt this week that, due to funding problems, private firms will now be employed again to patrol the streets and book errant motorists – and that to my mind is a backward step.
Devotees of this column may be surprised to see me saying this because I haven’t quite forgiven Wycombe District Council for the parking penalty fine it made me pay last year after I mistakenly bought a ticket from the wrong machine and therefore underpaid.
I was livid because, quite clearly, I’d made an error and my council was refusing to back down and show any leniency.
But, despite all of this, I much prefer my council to be in total direct charge of parking on my local streets. Private firms are all well and good, and are probably more cost effective, but they are there to make money. No one begrudges them that, but surely the main aim of a council is, in contrast, to serve its people.
Councils are more directly accountable than private businesses, even if those businesses are contracted to the council.
I understand the parking services lost our local councils a fair bit of money, but actually they shouldn’t exist to turn a profit.
The point of parking regulations is to free town centres of dangerous and stifling congestion. If that ends up costing the taxpayer a few quid, then it’s a price worth paying – even in a recession.
I often drop my son off at primary school, and ensure I park legally and safely in a nearby road.
Other parents don’t bother because they are clearly far busier than me, and they insist on double parking on a busy road or shoving their cars/people carriers onto the pavement. It’s often a job to walk around these vehicles without getting a car door slammed against you.
It also makes crossing the road outside the school just that bit more dangerous.
The irony of this is that only rarely do we see parking wardens try to tackle these cars. When they do, the vehicles quickly move off and I doubt anyone has ever been fined for doing this.
In stark contrast, the motorists who park legally around the corner have to be careful they don’t stray past 9am when the wardens arrive and when parking fees are in force. I’ve seen them often appear just before 9am, normally in pairs, viewing the cars that are about to be illegally parked in a few minutes’ time.
This makes me mad, because I wish they showed the same diligence for the ones deliberately double parked around the corner outside the school.
It seems, rightly or wrongly, that the culture is to catch people who make sloppy errors – as opposed to clamping down on those who flout the law repeatedly on purpose.
So next term, I was going to make an official approach to one of the constituency councillors and ask him to divert the resources to the appropriate enforcement.
I felt I could do this with my local council because it is there, after all, to make our communities safer.
Once the contract, however, goes to a private firm, I doubt I will be able to have the same democratic leverage. Maybe I’m wrong, who knows, but it’s like everything in our democracy these days.
Our new Prime Minister is quite laudably attempting to build a ‘Big Society’ where we are all accountable for running our own communities. But how possible is that when our communities are being run remotely from County Hall in Aylesbury, and our services our outsourced to private commercial businesses?
If our town and district councils are unable to directly run things locally, there seems to be very little point in local authorities any longer.
Our NHS is in a mess and we have the prospect of a giant high speed rail network running through our countryside despite our wishes.
The loss of control of parking enforcement is pretty small fry compared to these other issues, but it typifies the lack of control our local communities have on anything these days.
For instance, a builder wants to stick homes in your neighbourhood. Your council backs you and stops the plan, but it then goes to a national Planning Inspector and is passed.
So yes, I would like a Big Society, Mr Cameron if that means residents feel they have at least some power, some local democracy.
At the moment, most of us feel utterly powerless in south Bucks. We can’t run our own fully-functioning hospital, our green belt is at risk... and now we can’t even own our own parking wardens.
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