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COWBOY CLAMPERS CHARGE £250 A MINUTE

One driver claims he was fined £250 by a parking enforcement company

Tuesday July 20,2010

By David Pilditch

Comment Speech Bubble Have your say(9)

A PARKING enforcement company has been accused of highway robbery after fining drivers £250 a minute – just weeks after a crackdown on cowboy clampers was promised.

Courier David Wood, who left his Mercedes van for less than five minutes, said he was ordered to hand over £1,180 on the spot by four burly men in stab-proof vests.

In just one morning their company, City Watch, immobilised a dozen cars and vans on a small industrial estate, raking in fees estimated at more than £5,000.

Yesterday, outraged campaigners accused the company of “robbery and extortion”.

Mr Wood, 45, told how he had been delivering a package to an electronics business at Hadleigh Road industrial estate in Ipswich, Suffolk.

He said: “There was no room on the forecourt so I stopped in the road, grabbed the package and ran upstairs.

“I was inside for a couple of minutes at the most but by the time I got back my van was clamped.

“They told me I had to pay £1,180 to get the clamp removed. I was staggered but I had dozens more deliveries so I had no choice.

“The clampers were very intimidating. They said if I didn’t like it I could appeal and told me to look up the details on the internet.

“I had to pay there and then with my credit card. They put it through a hand-held machine and gave me a print-out and another piece of paper.

“It’s a ludicrous amount of money for a few minutes’ parking. It was like they plucked the figure from the air – there was no breakdown.”

Another driver, from couriers UPS, was clamped while he was in the back of his van sorting deliveries. Police were called but advised clamped motorists that they were on private land and it was a civil matter.

Outraged businesses have complained to the management company that runs the estate.

One company, Home Delivery Services, had five vans and several customers’ cars clamped. It claims it paid clampers more than £4,000.

Spokeswoman Teresa Bianchi said: “Some of our branded vehicles were unfairly clamped and we are looking into the matter.”

In June, the Home Office announced it was looking at proposals to abolish private clamping in England and Wales, 20 years after it was declared illegal in Scotland.

But motoring organisations are still being flooded with complaints of “legalised mugging” from outraged motorists who have been clamped and then charged extortionate fees to release their vehicles.

Almost 2,000 companies have the power to penalise drivers with on-the-spot fines.

Under the plans, companies in the £250million-a-year industry would only be allowed to immobilise cars if they had a local authority contract.

Paul Watters, of the AA, said: “This has nothing to do with parking control.

“It is legalised mugging. This is nothing to do with deterrents – it’s money-making gone berserk.

“If we had the regulations in place that the Home Office plans to implement this would not have happened.”

Neil Herron, spokesman for unofficial parking watchdog Motorists Legal Challenge Fund, said: “This is about holding someone’s vehicle to ransom. The way the law stands there is no independent body you can appeal to.”

Last night it was revealed that City Watch’s contract had been terminated. A spokesman for Lynden Property, which manages the estate, said: “We received a lot of calls from businesses on the estate on the first day they took over.

“We do not receive any revenue or income. We gave them a contract because under the terms of our insurance all roads on the estate have to be clear of traffic and we are seeking ways for people unfairly clamped to get their money back.”

A spokesman for City Watch, which operates from a Post Office box number in Enfield, north London, said: “We will not be making any comment. Our duty is to protect our clients’ interests and we are holding talks with them to sort things out.”

Four months ago the British Parking Association said City Watch was not meeting the “required standards” by charging in excess of the amounts specified in its code of practice and had left its Approved Operator Scheme.

Amazon.co.uk Widgets

GRR

20.07.10, 10:04pm

Be very careful.

It is OK to cut the lock and replace it with another one but these cowboy scammers have the (lopsided) law on their side if you damage the clamp.

Alternatively,if you can cut or pick the lock,remove the wheel clamp and put it in your car. Then send them an 'Invoice' for £250 for the safe return of the clamp.

BTW. Don't let Mr.Plod see you with a baseball bat or pickaxe handle-they might get the wrong idea.

• Posted by: Freeman01 • Report Comment

CAR TOOL KIT NOW INCLUDES ROTARY CUT OFF TOOL

20.07.10, 4:40pm

If you get clamped just plug in your rotary cut off tool and pretty soon the clamp is off. Also carry a baseball bat in your boot in case the crooked clamper come back whilst you are rescuing your motor.
Tool kits are a must carry.

• Posted by: GRR • Report Comment

AGENT 1060-APOLOGIES FOR WRONG NAME.

20.07.10, 12:26pm

You may also be interested in this:
The following are extracts from Hansard concerning the Crime and Security Bill.
Q 15Tony Baldry [MP for Banbury]: I was concerned by Mr. Troy’s suggestion that in this part of the Bill we were simply displacing clamping to private firms’ ticketing. It would be helpful if we could remind ourselves where we are. This is a trespass. It is a civil tort. It is not a criminal offence. Professor King in his opening comments talked about the punishment not fitting the crime. There is no constitutional right for a private citizen to punish another private citizen. We are where we are because of the case of someone who parked in Exeter: the divisional court said that if you park where a sufficiently clear notice is placed, you are inviting someone to clamp you. But that case gave no authority for fines. It gave no authority to impose a ticket. Otherwise you have to go to the small claims court or prove damage. What possible authority, Mr. Troy, do your members have to impose tickets on individuals? If you are to go around imposing tickets on individuals, clearly the Bill needs to deal with that as well, does it not?
Patrick Troy [Chief Executive, British Parking Association]: Absolutely. It should deal with both issues in order to control both issues. This is an entirely unregulated sector. What the private companies do on private land is unregulated both from their perspective and from the public’s perspective. Therefore, there needs to be some form of regulation. Through the DVLA route some legitimacy has been given to ticketers because only those ticketers that are members of an accredited trade association can access keeper details. That gives the ticketing fraternity some legitimacy. But the Bill needs to address both these areas if it is to control parking properly
Q 16 Tony Baldry: But if I park on your land and you send me a ticket in the post, which I tear up and then throw away, your only redress is to issue proceedings against me in the small claims court where you have to prove that I caused damage by parking where I parked and you have to prove the measure of that damage. That is right, is it not?

Patrick Troy: That is absolutely right and it goes deeper than that. Our concern is that, currently in an unregulated environment, the person who committed that act—the driver—is liable and the operator does not know who the driver is. So they will obtain keeper details from DVLA and will write to the keeper saying, “The driver has committed a contravention here. Who is the driver, please?” The keeper can say, “I don’t know who the driver was” and not admit that they were the driver or that they know who the driver was. The difficulty is that eventually operators will say that if they cannot recover their outstanding due, they will have to switch to some other form of enforcement, which is clamping. That is what I was saying earlier about distorting the two sectors. There needs to be regulation for the whole sector and not just one element of it.
Q 24Shona McIsaac: I find that an astonishingly low number, because I got my office to go through my records to find complaints about clamping and charges, and I have had 17 cases in the past three months alone.

Patrick Troy: Are these complaints of members of ours or non-members? That is the critical thing .

Q 25Shona McIsaac [MP for Cleethorpes]: UK Parking Control is one of your members. That company gives rise to the vast majority of complaints from my constituents. One has come in in the past couple of days. These notices look very formal. The charge is £100. You were talking earlier about what is a reasonable amount; frankly, my constituents do not think that that is reasonable. They describe these people as cowboys. They resent these companies, which they see as cowboys, using intimidatory tactics to get hold of their personal details.

Patrick Troy: Two things that consumers most when they use car parks, whether local authority car parks or private. One is the size of the penalty charge and the other is the lack of signage. We tackled those two issues head on in our code of practice. You will find that the charge is more or less similar to that in the local authority sector. We try to base it, as far as possible, on that.

Q 26Shona McIsaac: I do not think that any of my local authorities charge a flat rate of £100 for a parking contravention—absolutely not.

Patrick Troy: It is usually discounted by 50 per cent. so you need to compare the two. The current rate in London is £120 discounted to £60.

Shona McIsaac: That is London.
Patrick Troy: Yes, I do not know the rate outside London off the top of my head. What I am saying isthat, in trying to arrive at a charge to put in our code, we have tried to ensure that it reflects as far as possible what the local authority is charging.
Q 27Shona McIsaac: The notices that people are getting are actually a parking charge, not a penalty notice. There is a distinction.
Patrick Troy: Absolutely.
Q 28Shona McIsaac: So this is the parking charge. My constituent says in his letter that he found it “somewhat excessive” to be given a parking charge of £100 for 40 minutes parking at a fast food outlet. The local authority charge is around £1.10 an hour. That is what people are comparing it against.
Patrick Troy: Absolutely.
Q 30Shona McIsaac: In your introduction you talked about your industry’s bad image and about some of the bad practices, but my constituents are complaining about the practices of companies that are meant to be some of the best, according to your association. The company under discussion covers McDonald’s and operates throughout the UK.
I do not know if the same company is responsible for motorway parking. A number of constituents have told me that, while driving at night, they have parked for a little sleep. The notices are not visible, particularly at night, and they are usually small, cheap and very rarely near the entrance to a car park. I will read out what my constituent says, because it summarises part of the problem with both clamping and parking charges—the same industry using those two different ways to get money out of people. My constituent describes the
“seeming increasing number of private parking companies who seem to somehow get away with putting up a couple of CCTV cameras, some cheap signs and by contacting the DVLA”,
he says, “merrily” extort money from people who do not know the law.

Patrick Troy: There are two points there. One is that the whole purpose of establishing this scheme is so that you and members of the public can let us know if there are problems of that nature. Our members will not be perfect either, so we need to have in place—and we do have in place—a process by which we can ensure that those operators will comply with the code. They will not be compliant in all cases.

Q 31Shona McIsaac: Is it part of your code—this relates across the board to clamping and anything we introduce in the future—for companies to put on parking charge notices or anything else what people can do to seek redress? Why is it not part of your code to say, “If you have a complaint about this charge, please contact us”? There is nothing.
Patrick Troy: There certainly should be, and I would be interested to see that. There is a requirement in the code for the operator to have in place a dispute resolutions process, whereby the recipient of the ticket is able to discuss the issue with the operator. As I said earlier, I do not think that that is sufficient; I think that there needs to be an independent appeals service to deal with that, because clearly the operator has a vested interest in the outcome. If that information is not on there, please let me know and I will investigate.
Shona McIsaac: It certainly is not on here. UK Parking Control Ltd is one of the biggest private parking companies in the country, I believe, and as I said, one of its biggest customers is McDonald’s, so if it is issuing these notices, it is doing so the length and breadth of the country and is therefore breaking your code of conduct.
Patrick Troy: Please let me have that notice.
Edmund King [The AA]: We have a lot of evidence that big car parking companies do not abide by the code. I have here a receipt from Parking Control Management. The other issue relating to charging is double-charging, and in this case, there is a wheel clamp release fee of £130. Despite the fact that the individual in the case was going to the library to pay the 15p fine on her library books and was only away for 20 minutes, she was also charged a £200 removal fee straight away and then a £40 storage fee. So the total charge was £370. That was automatic double-charging. Again, there is nothing whatsoever on this receipt that says anything about an appeal or anything else.
That is a major problem. Many of the companies can just make up the charges. We know of companies that, if you call the police, will impose a “call police nuisance” charge, which can be anything from £50 to £150. Another company will have a “swear box” charge that they add on to a charge. That shows that the charges are absolute nonsense—people just make them up. We have certainly had complaints about members of the accredited association not abiding by the code of conduct. That makes the point that any code must be absolutely mandatory and it must be enforced.
Dr. Brian Iddon (Bolton, South-East) (Lab): I am getting the impression that wheel-clamping should be banned completely and that we should move entirely to a ticketing programme. If someone’s vehicle is causing an obstruction, the police will remove the vehicle, whether it is a private vehicle or a company vehicle. The police would have the power to remove a vehicle under the law as it stands now.
I do not see any point in allowing clamping to take place. What is the opinion of our three witnesses? I ask, because the advantage of moving to a ticketing system is that, in order to get the information from the DVLA, you have to be a pukka company and not a cowboy company. If you laid down a code of conduct, you could police that code of conduct.
Edmund King: If the problem is illegal parking, to immobilise a vehicle to ensure that it is parked illegally for a long period of time is absolute nonsense. The courts in Scotland in 1991 actually found clamping on private land to be extortion and theft. In our view, many cases in England and Wales are extortion and theft.
When wheel-clamping was outlawed in Scotland, landowners employed other means to protect their land, which they have a right to do—motorists should not park wherever they want, whenever they want; we are absolutely clear about that—but there has not been a massive outcry in Scotland since 1991 when clamping was outlawed. People put up fences or tackle the problem in other ways. I would suggest that in a civilised society, immobilising a pensioner’s car and towing it away after 20 minutes is outrageous. The best thing would be if clamping could be outlawed.
Q 32The Chairman: But you did not answer, Mr. Troy, nor other witnesses, Shona McIsaac’s sensible question: what about somebody who parks on land after dark, can see no sign, no indication that it is illegal to park there—

Shona McIsaac: Such as a motorway service station.

The Chairman: Is there no responsibility on those who either own the land or will be clamping or ticketing on the land to put up signs that are visible both day and night, to ensure that people are aware of the problems they might encounter if they park there?

Edmund King: That is a valid point, but in some of these cases we have evidence that it is not in the interest of the landowner to have clear signs. Many of them have deals with the clampers whereby they are paid £50 a clamp. If there are clear signs, motorists will not park there and the landowner will not get their money. In many cases it is not in their interests. We also have evidence of other cases where, if there are signs, the clamper will park their vehicle in front of the signs to hide them, otherwise people would not park there.
Q 46Mr. Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent, South) (Lab): My first observation is that although I am sure that local authorities do a very good job in the main, there are exceptions. Indeed, not many months ago there was a huge outcry in Stoke-on-Trent when the local authority sign in one of the city centre car parks led everybody to believe that there was free parking after 6 pm, until they all came back to find tickets on their windscreens. There is some work to be done to ensure that local authority signage is up to an acceptable standard. I would be interested in any comments you may wish to make about that.
My main substantive question relates to the way we are looking at the whole issue. Are schemes of registration, land registration and so on not a far too complex way of resolving the problem? Ultimately, it is about landowners looking for the cheapest way—or a revenue-making way—of solving their parking problems. Should we not put it back to the landowners? We should say, “If there is a private piece of land that you don’t want people to park on, fence it. If you are a local business and you only want people who use your business to park on your land, put a barrier up so they will need a ticket or a code to exit. If it is a commercial private car park, take a barrier-type approach with a clear display of charges when you approach the barrier.” Are we not looking at things from the wrong point of view? Would it not be better to put the onus on the landowner to take whatever action is appropriate to resolve the problem, even though it might cost them some money, rather than the poor motorist?

Edmund King: I concur with those conclusions. Having looked at the problem for over 10 years, having seen legislation come in and having seen numerous consultations on it, I can say that many of the proposals would improve things in one aspect and then transfer the problem elsewhere. We have heard that from clamping it goes to towing or to ticketing. Unfortunately, no matter what legislation we bring in, it still appears that there would be loopholes. My view is that we should look to what happened in Scotland and try to change the law in that way.
Shona Johnstone: With regard to the second part, that would certainly be one option. On your first issue, yes, I am sure we can all find examples where local authorities have not always got it right.
Patrick Troy: May I echo that point? The point I tried to get across earlier was that no one is perfect in the parking management world. I have been involved in it for the past 25 years. There will always be circumstances where a silly decision is made. That is why the independent appeals service is so important to try to close down those issues. As I understood your question, it was why can’t we just do away with all this and put barrier systems in place? The problem with that is that it is horses for courses. The best example was given to me early on in my current post. We manage motorway service areas. They are managed by private operators. You simply could not have a barrier system. You have to allow the free flow of traffic into motorway service areas. At the other extreme is the pub landlord with a small car park with only five or six spaces but which is close to a big retail outlet or a station. It is not practical for that landlord to put in a barrier system. There has to be some other solution in certain circumstances. I would accept that those circumstances are perhaps not always right at the moment.
Q 47Mr. Flello: Perhaps there would be a greater burden of cost on the pub landlord with only five or six parking spaces, but nevertheless it would be doable. In the first example, given that most motorway service stations have a long slip road that you can either turn off to park or carry on down to fill up with fuel and then rejoin the motorway, I am not sure that the proposal is that impracticable for a motorway service area. I take the point that there are areas where you could look at it, but surely it is much simpler to say to the owner of the land, “You resolve the problem, but you can’t clamp, you can’t ticket. If you don’t want any parking there, fence it off. If you are not bothered about it, fine, let people park there.”

• Posted by: Freeman01 • Report Comment

AGENT 1066

20.07.10, 11:43am

Section 40 of the Administration of Justice Act

“S40 Punishment for unlawful harassment of debtors.

1. A person commits an offence if, with the object of coercing another person to pay money claimed from the other as a debt due under a contract he-
* harasses the other with demands for payment which, in respect of their frequency, or the manner or occasion of making any such demand, or of any threat or publicity by which any demand is accompanied, are calculated to subject him or members of his family or household to alarm, distress or humiliation;
* falsely represents, in relation to the money claimed, that criminal proceedings lie for failure to pay it;
* falsely represents himself to be authorised in some official capacity to claim or enforce payment; or
* utters a document falsely represented by him to have some official character, or purporting to have some official character which he know it has not.
2. A person may be guilty of an offence by virtue of sub-section (1) (a) above if he concerts with others in the taking of such actions as is described in that paragraph, notwithstanding that his own course of conduct does not by itself amount to harassment.”

Also the CPUTR 2008 is relevant.

I agree that non existent/misleading or badly written signs pretend to add legitimacy to these cowboy operators and the Police mistakenly-IMV-rely on the Law of Contract to avoid involving themselves in these criminal activities.
They are still wrong.

• Posted by: Freeman01 • Report Comment

IS THIS TRUE?

20.07.10, 11:26am

@ Freeman01.

I do not decry what you say. I am only curious as to whether you have a legal opinion to back it up?

Having worked with the law for many years, I am aware that a lot of research is necessary to get an authoritative legal opinion. The most common situation is that another Act has amended the one on which you rely.

The other factor is that one generally drives past a notice to get to where the clampers operate. This frequently includes words to the effect that drivers of vehicles that pass the notice accept "the contract". This, I believe, is why the police so often respond that ti is a civil matter.

• Posted by: agent0060 • Report Comment