Parking law makes criminals of us all

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I am an equable sort. I take London as it comes, pay my taxes and submit to parking fines when I find I have overstayed the meter's welcome. I say that people who complain about these things cannot stand the city's heat and should leave the kitchen.

Not for the present. The new draconian parking controls have enraged me as much as thousands of other victims. They are the worst advertisement for local government. Burglars and muggers may enjoy the liberty of the streets. Swindlers and car thieves may roam free. But let any of them offend a yellow line by one minute and the force of law and order will be on them in a flash. In London it is easier to shift a kilo of cocaine than linger on a parking meter. Parking offences in the capital must enjoy a near 100 per cent clear-up rate.

I recently parked a car in Covent Garden and fed a meter with the correct, exorbitant fee. It registered two hours. Returning an hour and a half later, I found myself ticketed and the machine registering an hour and a half of penalty. It was clearly "fixed". I was sighing over life's misfortunes when I saw a warden. I pointed out that the ticket showed me four minutes overdue half an hour back, so the meter could not be correct. It must have been "overwound".

The warden told me to write in, which I did. An official by the name of Martin Burke told me, in as many words, that I was lying. I should pay £40 forthwith or he would levy £80.

THIS was not my only brush with the law. Some weeks prior to 3 June my street was plastered with orange stickers giving advance warning of suspended parking for the Jubilee. No problem here, except that one of the stickers, well hidden by a tree, was then altered to a week earlier to accommodate a removal van. No note was placed under windscreens or through adjacent doors. None of the customary courtesies was shown. On the day in question, wardens simply pounced and vehicles were towed away. Owners had to pay £135 to get their cars back, no question, no apology. London's car pounds are understandably stuffed with notices warning visitors not to assault or abuse the staff.

Dickens would have had Mr Pickwick scratch his head at all this and dispatch it to the department of hard knocks. I happen to agree that car use in London should be discouraged. Car parking should be expensive and bus lanes ubiquitous. In the great road debate I am on the side of the angels of public transport.

But driving a car in London is not as yet illegal. Rules on parking are like rules on litter. They are not very important, but they are token of something that is, the fair enforcement of good government. The privatisation of parking control-has bred fury among those who use road vehicles. Movement for everyone is a mess because nobody knows what routes are normally passable nor can predict parking regimes.

This embraces those who drive vans, taxis, buses, ambulances, as well as the hated private motorist. All are entitled to a measure of certainty in navigating the road system. All are now cursed by anarchic roadworks, crazed traffic lights, unused cycle lanes and bumps that make any journey a nightmare of bangs and thuds. These bumps are to traffic control what a cuff over the head is to education. Most modern cities use chicanes to slow traffic. Why is London so primitive?

The reason for the sudden epidemic of punitive parking control is money. Meters and fines are the one source of revenue which local boroughs can call their own.

Fines alone bring in more than £100 million a year. This is serious money, mostly raised by subcontracting on a crude profitshare basis to private enforcers. By giving private companies such as Apcoa de facto police powers, councils can terrorise motorists into treating penalty payments as a sort of random supertax. If London's other public services were run with the same ruthlessness, they might be the most efficient in the world. Parking control is the only service where councils get to keep their efficiency gains.

Private tax farming in Britain went out in the Middle Ages. The reason was that it alienated the public and led to taxgatherers being butchered by taxpayers. Tollgate keepers, like those on the Edgware Road, used to live in fear of their lives. Government eventually took the view that taxes should be collected by public officials and enforcement should be seen to be fair. In central government that still applies.

Both Camden and Westminster extorted £175 from me for offences that I could not reasonably know I was committing. Their abuse was followed by a denial of the normal courtesies of public administration. The matter may seem trivial and I can afford it. Poorer car users might regard such fines as what the human rights lawyers call "cruel and unnatural punishment".

Ken Livingstone is going to stand, or fall, on the strength of his proposed congestion charge. He is directly elected. The boroughs of whom I was victim opposed direct election for fear of their leaders becoming well known and thus accountable for their money-raising rackets. They might find it harder to "farm" their parking revenues.

Camden's leader is Jane Roberts, Westminster's is Simon Milton. I bet if either stood for direct election, we would find a more considerate enforcement of laws which most people have no wish to break.