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Transport for London (Supplemental Toll Provisions) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful for the time the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and many people from TfL have taken to address my problems with the Bill. However, some of them remain outstanding, and I shall go through them briefly. I started out with great concern about the scope of the Bill. The New Roads and Street Works Act is capable of very wide interpretation, but I have been satisfied by what the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said today and by what TfL has said to me. I understand that the ultimate protection we have against the wide extension of the Bill is that a toll order that involves an existing highway is subject to special parliamentary procedure unless the Secretary of State certifies that there will be an equivalent toll-free facility for the road user. I hope that the Minister will confirm that, or I will be very concerned about the wide exemptions from planning permission and the other freedoms given under the New Roads and Street Works Act were this to become a widespread practice in London. In application to a new bridge at Becton, I do not see that it holds any terrors for me. My remaining concerns about the Bill are principally focused on the powers that it gives TfL’s contractors to enter vehicles. TfL has explained to me that it imagines that it will have a system of automatic detection of vehicles that go through the toll. That is quite a long way in the future as we are looking at 2012 for the opening of this bridge. Perhaps it will be swung out to the congestion charge at the same time; I do not know. It will be partly based on some kind of transmitter or chip inside a vehicle that will register the passing of an unauthorised vehicle and provide some kind of automatic imposition of the toll. To deal with situations where that chip or mechanism has been tampered with, there is a provision in the Bill that TfL contractors can demand entry to your car. If you refuse them entry you will be subject to a fine at level five or six months’ imprisonment. So it is a pretty hefty sledgehammer which TfL wish to take to crack this particular nut. My first problem is that TfL’s contractors can be any old person. It employs a range of firms, one of which is Drakes, which was the subject of the recent whistle-blower programme in respect of its bailiffs’ activities. These people are not licensed in any public way, yet we are going to give them power to enter somebody's vehicle at any time of day, and—looking at the additional powers in the Bill—not only on the street, but in a ““public”” car park such as a supermarket, a hospital or an office, which are places one might regard as private or semi-private. You can imagine yourself being confronted by some lumpy individual at 10 o’clock at night in the dark of a Marks and Spencer’s car park, demanding entry to your car, and saying that if you do not let him in, you are in for six months’ inside. I find it an extremely difficult bridge to cross as to whether these are the sort of powers we should give to unlicensed contractors of uncertain reputation. I am told by TfL, although it is not something which I have investigated, that there is some legislative chain which leads back under the current legislation to mean that this power would have to be exercised either by a police constable or in the presence of a police constable. If that is the case, the Bill should state it. Let us have that provision in the Bill as something which is fixed and permanent. To have something which is subject to ministerial whim, to statutory instrument and to uncertain interpretation of lawyers is entirely unsatisfactory. Let us also have a system for properly licensing the contractors who carry out the work. There is a system in place, the Private Security Industry Act, by which wheel-clampers are licensed. That is being extended by the Department for Constitutional Affairs to cover bailiffs and others. Its intention is that the same regulatory body will be expanded and given increased powers to cover them. That would seem to be an entirely appropriate body to carry out the licensing and supervision of those increasingly powerful contractors that Transport for London uses, particularly since, in the case of Drakes and, I imagine, one or two others, these people will eventually be subject to that body anyway; those firms are probably using the same personnel as bailiffs or for TfL enforcement alternately. Therefore, I do not think that this provision would create great problems. It would put these people on a proper footing with a proper set of responsibilities and a proper set of guidance, and it would give a proper way for the public to deal with situations where they overstep the bounds of reasonableness or misbehave themselves, such as will be provided for other people who find themselves in similar situations when TfL is not involved. Such a provision could not be put in the Bill because the system is not there yet. However, an undertaking by TfL that it will pursue and be happy to talk to the Department for Constitutional Affairs about this, and that it will aim to have its contractors properly regulated when the new system comes into being in a year or two’s time, is necessary to give us the comfort required to allow these additional powers for Transport for London contractors. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, hinted, some national problems also come to bear here. Increasingly, we are finding penalties imposed on the owners of vehicles rather than the people who are in charge of them at the time. As far as I can see, we have not as a nation taken any steps to ensure that the DVLA is up to the strain of imposing responsibility on the owner, when the owner is defined by the DVLA. People increasingly buy cars through the internet or magazines. If you buy a car in that way, you have no way to check whether any fines or other charges are outstanding on that vehicle. There is no central registration of those charges. There is no means of ringing up the DVLA to check. There is certainly nothing on the internet to enable you to call a number to ask whether the position is outstanding on that vehicle. That would not present a problem under any form of data protection, because we already do that for the hiring status of vehicles, to find out whether there is any outstanding hire purchase on a vehicle. That is not beyond the wit of man. The Government may care to know that Transport for London is considering providing such a facility itself off its own bat for its own charges. That helps a bit but does not help for the more general picture. In the spirit of fair play, if the Government are imposing those additional burdens on the owners of cars for their convenience, they should provide as a convenience in return the ability for people to find out what is outstanding on their vehicle or a vehicle that they intend to purchase. That is not a complicated or difficult thing to do but would have great benefit and would enable the Government to roll out the principle of the owner being responsible much more widely, effectively and fairly. That will come back to this House in the not too distant future when we consider the London Local Authorities and Transport for London Bills, in which we are considering giving individual London local authorities and Transport for London the power to clamp and take away a vehicle on which there are three or more penalty charges outstanding. But there is no way that anyone has of knowing whether their vehicle has that status and no way that a London local authority has of knowing whether the owner information shown is correct or whether the person responds at their existing address. The whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen. If it is imposed on a large scale, a lot of people will find their vehicles removed for no good reason. They will then find that they have to pay enormous sums—£1,000 or more, even if there are only three tickets outstanding—to recover their vehicle, or face a wait of three months or more to recover it through argument. There is no clear way provided to deal with disputes about whether the vehicle has been taken correctly. People may find themselves arguing with a number of London authorities, each of which has one penalty notice that it says is outstanding against them. So that is a really problematic area. More and more, local government wants to use those facilities to improve its ability to recover money due to it. I thoroughly approve of that, but if we are to do that, we must centrally provide the proper facilities to enable it to happen well. I shall not charge TfL with any of that responsibility; I am merely taking the chance to berate the Minister about it. I shall be much harder when it comes to the next TfL Bill, which would result in real damage. For today, I should be grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, can confirm whether TfL is serious about providing its customers, as it were, with the ability to find out what is outstanding on their car or any car, so that the powers in the Bill will not bite on a citizen who has acquired a car from a habitual congestion charge offender. However, there are things that I want to impose on TfL. We are considering a system that is not intended to be a disincentive to travel. When the congestion charge was introduced, it was deliberately made extremely hard to pay it, and it was deliberately made very painful for you if you forgot. After 10 o’clock at night, there was no escape; you paid the £50 penalty. There was no easy way of buying a book of tickets in advance and then simply ticking them off and being told when you had only two left. You could not pay by direct debit. All sorts of helpful ways in which payment could have been made were not implemented. We are getting slow and gradual improvement in that. I disapprove of this. I should be extremely upset if a Conservative mayor treated me that way. I expect it of the current mayor. There is some sense in it in that it is meant to be a penalty and a disincentive, and making it nasty and full of teeth is, in a way, a reasonable thing to do. That does not, however, apply to a toll. We are providing this bridge to make it easier for people to travel between one place and another; indeed, we should encourage them to do so. We should therefore not deal with the toll as if it were a penalty and a disincentive. We absolutely must have a promise from Transport for London that, if it is going to take these powers and impose these penalties, it will make it as easy as possible for people to pay and that it will look for all sorts of innovative and useful ways to make as certain as possible that people using the bridge do not forget that there are many ways in which they can pay. Transport for London must also ensure that when people fail to pay, by mistake or through inattention, they do not get slammed with a £50 fine that is part of a penalty regime. Of course people should pay a little extra, but it should not be a massive penalty or a trap for the unwary. A service is being provided. If someone is late in paying, the fee could be doubled, and then upped if it was not paid for a long time, but the regime should not be punitive. I really would like some comfort from TfL that it will approach this in the spirit of service to the user, rather than trying to extract the maximum possible revenue from those who are forgetful.