New parking ticket blitz feared

Motorists face a parking ticket blitz after the launch of a £1,196 bonus scheme to reward attendants for handing out more penalties.

The bounty is revealed in internal documents seen by the Evening Standard. It has been launched by parking giant APCOA, which operates in eight boroughs across London, in what motoring organisations believe is a move to boost profits.

Parking attendants operating on behalf of Westminster can win the bonus in 13 payments over a year.

Today the RAC Foundation said the scheme plunged parking enforcement in London into disrepute. It would result in a flood of bogus tickets as attendants raced to ensure they qualified for the bonus, it added. One insider claimed attendants had already begun issuing illicit tickets.

Documents seen by the Standard show half of the bonus depends on the number of tickets issued and that APCOA officials have set new targets. Attendants achieving 97.5 per cent of the target get the full bonus. But if they fail to meet 90 per cent of the target, they forfeit it altogether.

The rest of the bonus depends on the quality of the attendants' notes and their use of the handheld computer used to record and issue tickets. The scheme operates only in Westminster but is widely expected to spread.

"Absence without leave" periods cancel the entire month's bonus, the internal memo reveals. So do more than two periods of sickness. Each sick day means a 20 per cent cut to that week's bonus at the rate of £4.60 a day. APCOA gave the first week's bonus in full as a "token of goodwill".

One insider said attendants were "fighting over tickets like pigeons over a scrap of bread", adding: "Many are showing no mercy and some are issuing dodgy tickets. Drivers should now double-check before parking anywhere - and keep a stopwatch on it." Cars even marginally over a white line or sitting at expired meters would be instantly ticketed, as would motorists who walked off in search of a payment machine.

RAC Foundation spokesman Kevin Delaney said: "This is very misguided. If you tell attendants their payment depends on tickets, that is when the less scrupulous ones falsify penalty charge notices and motorists lose all faith. The whole system comes crashing down."

Westminster and APCOA confirmed the documents were genuine but denied there was a bonus or bounty scheme.

The council said it had launched a programme of "quality improvements to eliminate invalid parking tickets ", adding: "Attendants are not rewarded for the number of parking tickets issued."

APCOA insisted there were no targets, only "levels" set according to historic patterns, and the number of tickets issued had not risen since the scheme was launched.