Dear Mr Hood,

Re: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 - INFORMATION REQUEST

Thank you for your Freedom of Information request received on 30^th March 2010. Your request has now been considered and the information requested is provided below:

It was reported in a national newspaper recently that a number of London "councils are wasting thousands of pounds… by suing THEMSELVES over parking tickets." One of those councils cited was the London Borough of Hackney.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, could you please tell me:

1. If there is any truth in this accusation?

The Parking department does not discriminate between council owned and public owned vehicles. There is no current litigation between the Parking department and any other council department.

2. How many times in the last 5 years has the council issued parking

tickets to its own vehicles?

3. How many times did the council appeal against those parking tickets?

4. How many times was the appeal successful?

5. How many parking tickets were paid without appealing?

I can confirm that we do hold this information but unfortunately it is not in an easily retrievable format nor is there an automated mechanism that would allow us to easily collate the required data.

We have a large volume of vehicle records on our parking system and all these records display vehicle keeper details as prescribed by the DVLA.  Our records do not distinguish private vehicles from those hired or owned by the Council.  In light of the technical limitation of our system, we estimate that the collation of the information you seek will take a considerable investment of time and resource by the Parking department which would exceed the appropriate time limit.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a charge at £25 per hour.

Section 12 of the Act states that the Council is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

The appropriate limit is represented by the estimated cost of one person spending 2½ working days in determining whether the Council holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information requested. Consequently the Council is not obliged to respond to your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Therefore the information you have requester is exempt by virtue of Section 12 of the Act.

Due to the difficultly of obtaining the statistical data needed to answer each of your points, I have attempted to provide you with additional information which I hope will help to clarify each of your queries below. I would like to clarify at this stage that Hackney Parking Services policy for processing Penalty Charge Notices issued to Council hired or owned vehicles is consistent with that pertaining to private vehicles.  The Council employs an indiscriminative parking enforcement policy irrespective of who owns the vehicle.  This ensures that the public highway is appropriately managed through promoting road safety, the free flow of traffic and appropriately prioritising parking spaces for our residents, businesses and visitors. 

The Council ' s view is that vehicles owned by the Council should be subject to the same parking enforcement policy for private motorist in order to promote accountability among staff that drive Council owned vehicles. I can therefore confirm that there have been instances where Parking Services has issued Council vehicles with Penalty Charge Notices and will continue to do this on the basis of identify parking contraventions on street.  I would like to reassure you there is a statutory responsibility for the driver of the vehicle to pay for the Penalty Charge Notice or appeal and Council employees are made aware of the requirement to adhere to parking restrictions.  

Please note that this information is covered by copyright legislation. You are not authorised to re-use it for commercial or research purposes as defined by the Re-Use of Public Sector Regulations 2005. If you do wish to re-use this information please contact the Information Governance Team, 6-15 Florfield Road, Hackney London E8 1DT.

If you are dissatisfied with this response and wish to appeal, please write to the Information Governance Team, Appeals, 6-15 Florfield Road, Hackney London E8 1DT and your complaint will be dealt with through our Internal Review procedure.

If you are still not satisfied following the Internal Review, you have a right to appeal to the Information Commissioner. He can be contacted at:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF 
Telephone: 01625 545 700
www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

Yours sincerely

Fernando Filho

Parking Complaints Officer

Telephone: 020 8356 8279 - Fax: 020 8356 6901

[email address]

Parking Services, 2 Hillman Street, London E8 1FB

Steve Douglas

Corporate Director, Neighbourhoods and Regeneration