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| C E O basis | blue badge.doc | DECRIMINALISATION |
| CEO handbook | DISPENSATIONS | Pedestrian crossing enforcement |
Starting from Monday 31 March, under the Traffic Management Act 2004, parking attendants will be re-named 'civil enforcement officers'. From this date the Council will be able to mail out parking penalty notices to motorists who physically prevent parking attendants from attaching them to their vehicles.
Under the Traffic Management Act 2004, there will also be two levels of penalty charge notice for parking violations. Under the two-tier penalty system, £70 tickets will be issued for contraventions such as parking on yellow lines, loading bays, resident and disabled parking areas, taxi ranks, bus stops, cycle routes and in prohibited areas outside schools.
Lower level £50 penalties will apply to contraventions such as exceeding the time limit in an on-street parking bay, parking without a pay-and-display ticket, 'meter feeding', misusing an invalid parking ticket and re-parking in an area without complying with a designated time interval.
Those who receive a charge notice will still have a 50 per cent discount on penalties if payment is made within 14 days. The discount concession will last for 21 days for people who receive a penalty notice through the post.
If the full penalty is not paid after 56 days a charge certificate increases the full amount by 50 per cent and failure to pay after another 14 days will result in the matter being referred to the Traffic Enforcement Centre in Northampton for recovery enforcement incurring an additional £5 registration fee. Motorists who wish to contest a penalty charge notice will still be able to appeal to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal (currently known as the National Parking Adjudication Service).
The city council's website will soon provide motorists with full details of Peterborough's traffic regulations orders through an online mapping system that will show all the city's streets with the parking restrictions in force in those areas.
The new Traffic Management Act also gives local authority parking attendants the power to check Blue Badges issued to drivers with disabilities and to enforce a range of traffic violations through the use of CCTV cameras. However, Peterborough City Council has no plans to introduce the CCTV powers initially.
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Arrests can be made by people other than the police but should be approached with caution as legally it is a tricky area and potentially dangerous. The police do not actively encourage people to make citizen's arrests and the circumstances of the arrest can be examined in detail if the case goes to court. There is more legal information concerning citizen's arrests on a website called K-Zone set up by a final-year law student.
The right to make a citizen's arrest comes under section 3(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967 which says:
"A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large."
The crime must be an 'indictable offence', i.e. a serious offence which could be tried in a crown court. Another way to think of indictable offences is as crimes that can result in long prison sentences.
Examples of indictable offences are theft, burglary and criminal damage. So, drink-driving would not qualify as it is an offence which would be tried in a magistrates court and only result in a maximum sentence of six months.
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PARKING attendants have come under fire for snooping and taking too much interest in the contents of people's cars.
A St Albans motorist, who does not wish to be named, lodged a complaint with NCP which runs the council's parking services, after watching a parking attendant (PA) showing an excessive interest in the contents of parked cars.
The response from the attendant was that he was checking for explosives and NCP said he was only doing his job which now involved reporting any suspicious activity to the police under the new Partnership Plus scheme involving the council, NCP and Herts Police.
In his response, James Gurney, NCP's operations support manager, cited an example of an attendant spotting what appeared to be a handgun left on the seat of a vehicle in one of the district's car parks. It turned out to be a child's toy but, according to Mr Gurney, the police, "thanked us for our assistance as it could have turned in to a serious incident".
Partnership Plus enables police to patrol with PAs to protect them if they are at risk and PAs being trained to report street crime.
NCP Services communications manager James Pritchard said that their PAs were encouraged to be on the look-out for minor crimes rather than just parking infringements.
The complainant said he found it frightening that the police seemed to be handing over part of their duties to PAs and felt that anti-terrorist work was probably best left to the police.
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