BPA ACTIVITIES MONTHLY ROUND-UP
There have been so many developments in the parking sector, it is hard to know where to begin. BPA technical director, Kelvin Reynolds, gives a whistle-stop tour of the last 12 months
AS
busy bee (PA)
AS A MEMBER
It’s fair to say the DVLA now
has a much better understanding of the needs of the parking sector to enable it to enforce effectively
BPA President Paul Necus presents the 2011 Master Plan
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, it’s not what the BPA can do for you but what you can do for the BPA… June is election time for BPA Council, and the time when every member should consider whether they can contribute to the wider parking sector as a member of BPA Council. Failing that, every member should be considering how s/he will cast their vote in the Council elections. As a membership Association, members can infl uence how it is governed and what it does, but only by participating in BPA activities. It’s also that time of year when BPA Council
W
fi nalises its annual Master Plan to be launched at the President’s Reception, following the AGM in July. While we are busy looking forward to what we need to achieve in the coming 12 months, I would like to use the opportunity to take stock of what we’ve achieved in the past year – what can be described as ‘mission accomplished’; what remains as ‘work in progress’ and should re-appear in the next master plan; and what has now become important enough for us to want to change and therefore include in the new Master Plan. The 2011-12 Master Plan included a call for an independent appeals service for the entire private parking sector and universal keeper liability: done that! We also called for compulsory membership of an accredited trade association for all parking operators who undertake enforcement on private land. We got that debated in
16 JUNE 2012
hat are the benefi ts of BPA membership? This is a question I am often asked.
the House of Lords, and had support from Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) and Consumer Focus. This was narrowly defeated, but it’s still on our agenda. We wanted the DVLA to work harder to improve the accuracy of its vehicle and keeper registers and to increase enforcement of non- compliance with the registration rules. This remains a work in progress but it’s fair to say the DVLA now has a better understanding of the needs of the parking sector and what support the sector needs to enable it to enforce effectively. The DVLA is also an active participant in a number of BPA groups. We called on the government to allow local authorities outside London to enforce moving traffi c contraventions in addition to parking enforcement, an issue we joined forces with the Local Government Association to campaign upon. At Parkex, Norman Baker MP indicated that government was understanding the need to do this in some areas of the country, and that we should expect announcements soon. Penalty charges associated with civil parking enforcement have been subject to consultation in London, Scotland and Wales. Government proposals to alter the way penalty charges are set in England have been announced as part of the red-tape challenge, and so we have infl uenced thinking here
too, as this was part of our master plan objective to ensure that penalty charges throughout the United Kingdom are reviewed on a regular basis.
Both civil enforcement offi cers and parking attendants, undertaking enforcement activities, previously handled by police offi cers, deserve better protection when subject to assault, and we have been successful in this call. Lord Justice Leverson said, in his reply as chair of the Sentencing Council ‘…for more serious assaults, occasioning actual bodily harm (ABH) for example, an assault on a PC and an assault on a CEO would be treated similarly, using the ABH guideline and adjusting the sentence according to the court’s assessment of the importance of the fact that the victim was serving the public in the course of their
www.britishparking.co.uk
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