Lambeth Parking: History

How the Tories and Liberals created parking misery

The Tories and Lib Dems ruled Lambeth together in a right-wing coalition until they were thrown out by the voters in May 2006. As soon as they seized power, they started to renegotiate Lambeth’s parking contract. In August 2003, they signed a new contract with private company Control Plus. It was the start of three years of parking misery for Lambeth’s residents.

The Lib Dem-Tory contract included a clause their councillors tried to keep hidden, claiming it was ‘commercially sensitive’. But the local press exposed the secret clause after being handed a copy of the contract. The clause showed that the Tories and Lib Dems had agreed to pay their private contractor massive profit bonuses for issuing more and more parking tickets. With the level of profit linked to ticketing targets, traffic wardens came under heavy pressure to issue twelve tickets for every shift they worked – whether they found that many illegally parked cars or not. The effect of this was a massive increase in unfair parking fines. Appeals shot up 70% in a matter of weeks as thousands of residents found they were getting £50 fines when they had parked their cars perfectly legally.

As outrage reached unprecedented levels, Labour forced the Council to set up an all-party parking commission. The commission included one Tory, one Lib Dem and one Labour councillor. After weeks of evidence-taking, they published their findings. Their key proposal was that the Council should scrap the profit incentives that were the root cause of overzealous ticketing.

Labour immediately called a vote of the full council to scrap the profit incentives. But the Lib Dems and Tories voted instead to keep them in place. Even the Lib Dem and Tory councillors who had been members of the parking commission voted against their own recommendations.

So Lambeth’s parking misery continued for three years. Parking revenue doubled to £8 million a year as the Tories and Lib Dems became addicted to the money they were milking off innocent motorists.

By the time of the council elections in May 2006, only Labour was committed to removing the financial incentives immediately. With the Lib Dems out trying to persuade voters to support them again, they quickly realised that their record on parking was going to cost them thousands of votes, so they decided to do what Lib Dems in a fix always do – they lied. They put out leaflets claiming they were AGAINST parking profit – and tried to pretend they’d had nothing to do with the Council they’d been running for the previous four years. Happily, voters rumbled their deceit. Tory and Lib Dem councillors in affected areas lost their seats with massive swings to Labour. And with Labour back in charge at the town hall, the Lib Dem and Tory profit incentives were removed from the contract within weeks. Something the Lib Dems and Tories should have done three years earlier.