British Parking Awards: Parking Partnership finalists

Parking Partnership of the Year

Havant Borough Council and East Hampshire District Council: The way forward
Havant Borough Council and East Hampshire District Council are pioneering new ways of working together by operating a single Joint Management Team.

Michelle Green, parking and traffic management team leader: Havant Borough Council (HBC) and East Hampshire District Council (EHDC) are pioneering new ways of working together by operating a single Joint Management Team.?This follows the appointment of a new joint chief executive, Sandy Hopkins, in October in 2009. This was the first appointment of its kind in Hampshire.

HBC took on civil parking enforcement (CPE) powers in 2005, enabling the council to enforce its off-street car parks and also many non-moving traffic offences previously undertaken by the police. This gave HBC a wealth of experience in both the enforcement and back office processes. HBC also had a notice processing system that could be adapted to add other debt types.

In contrast, EHDC previously managed its off-street car parks with the police retaining responsibility for enforcing on-street parking. In 2009 the last traffic warden left and the police decided not to replace her. This lack of enforcement resulted in regular breaches of parking restrictions as motorists realised that no action was likely to be undertaken if they parked illegally.

An exercise was undertaken to see what options were available to EDHC and how they could operate a decriminalised system as agents for Hampshire County Council. A report recommended that the most savings could be made by operating a shared service and that HBC could lead the project to implement CPE also. This was agreed at a joint meeting of both councils’ cabinets in September 201 and a project team was out together consisting of staff from HBC, EHDC and HCC.

In?March 2012 EHDC and HBC relocated the processing team of the Shared Parking Service along with a number of other council and voluntary organisation services into the new Public Service Plaza building in Havant. We thus became the first shared front-line service across the two councils.

One of the key benefits are the financial savings achieved by operating the Shared Parking Service. The overall savings fro  using a shared service to implement CPE is £75,000. The ongoing financial savings amount to £90,000. Meanwhile, a reduction in the number of vehicles required has both reduced costs and emissions produced by the service.

LOCOG Transport: Parking partnership on an Olympic scale
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG)  worked in partnership with 23 parking enforcement authorities across the country to develop a temporary parking solution around 18 London 2012 venues.

Gary Smith, LOCOG parking integration manager: The Olympic Games are the biggest sporting event in the World and the Paralympic Games are the second biggest. A key objective of the London 2012 bid was to make the Games the first public transport Games.

In order to achieve this objective the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) worked in partnership with 23 parking enforcement Authorities across the country to develop a temporary parking solution around 18 London 2012 venues.

This solution was developed in order to manage traffic and parking for the convenience and safety of the local communities during the Games and included the introduction of a temporary resident and business parking protection area in the vicinity of each venue.

The parking control was established by amending the existing controls and introducing further temporary controls, these parking controls required innovation. No parking enforcement solution had been introduced in such a small time period and on such a large scale. An innovative parking enforcement solution was introduced and over 2 million permits were delivered.

The three key components of technology employed were: an interactive voice recognition (IVR) call centre and virtual permits.

To manage traffic and parking for the benefit of the local communities during the Games, a temporary resident and business parking protection area was introduced in the vicinity of each venue. This area included both existing controlled parking zones and streets where there was no current parking controls, the existing controls had to be amended and new controls introduced. The aim was to protect the residents and businesses from spectator parking near the venues.

These areas included a mixture of streets with no parking controls and existing controlled parking zones which needed to be reviewed and the days and times of operation amended. The aim was to protect the residents and businesses from spectator parking near the venues. This protection was achieved by three key activities:

• Travel demand management and communication
• Travelcard provision for ticketed spectators
• Parking control with parking enforcement

If every competition venue adopted the traditional method of parking enforcement combined with paper parking permits a budget in excess of £18m would have been required, together with a workforce of at least 600 qualified enforcement officers.

An innovative ‘virtual parking permit’ scheme was introduced for the London boroughs (with the exception of Greenwich who required their own paper based system).

The original concept was developed by the LOCOG Traffic Management & Parking Team, managed by Mark Bland, and developed by the LOCOG parking integration manager Gary Smith. Late procurement of the contractors and late delivery of all the integration arrangements made this a challenge – but ultimately all was delivered.

Nottinghamshire County Council Central Processing Unit: Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire-Lincolnshire parking enforcement partnership
Since 2008 21 local authorities have joined together in the East Midlands to benefit from an enforcement partnership that seeks to deliver consistent and cost-effective enforcement across this predominantly rural area.

Gareth Johnson, CPU & enforcement manager, Nottingham County Council: Since 2008 21 local authorities have joined together in the East Midlands to benefit from an enforcement partnership that seeks to deliver consistent and cost-effective enforcement across this predominantly rural area.

This partnership now boasts one of the largest multi-authority back offices in the country following a recent expansion to work with the councils in Lincolnshire who started civil enforcement in December 2012.

The partnership is growing and evolving constantly. In 2008, Nottinghamshire County Council set-up a single back office (the Central Processing Unit, or CPU) as a single external enforcement contract and four bailiff contracts to provide the framework for eight local authorities in partnership to deliver civil parking enforcement.

In 2009, the nine local authorities in Derbyshire agreed to use the same back office and bailiff contracts, although they tendered separately for an enforcement contractor.

In 2012, Lincolnshire County Council and three of the Lincolnshire district councils also joined with the single back office and bailiff contracts.

It is the CPU that binds the overall partnership. The back office initially established by Nottinghamshire County Council has grown from eight staff handling 50,000 PCNs in Nottinghamshire to 25 staff split into three teams and handling over 140,000 penalty charges notices (PCNs) across the three counties as well as over 20,000 permits. The unit leads on procurement and currently manages the Nottingham enforcement contract (NSL), the four bailiff contracts (Equita, Marstons, Bristow and Sutor and Jacobs), the software contract (Chipside), as well as other smaller contracts to support the back office.

The unit costs per PCN are falling each year as economies of scale are realised and it now offers a very competitive processing rate to all the partner authorities. Derbyshire County Council and Lincolnshire County Council manage their respective enforcement contracts with APCOA Parking.

Parking enforcement in the rural East Midlands is very different to its urban counterpart. Town centre parking is often relatively inexpensive, towns are not usually covered in restrictions and the distances between them lead to significant staff travel time and costs. However, the problems they experience can be as relatively significant as those experienced in a major urban centre. The private vehicle is often the only realistic mode of transport in a rural area and market towns need efficient parking control in order to allow them to function and survive in difficult economic circumstances.

This enforcement can be difficult to deliver, primarily because of the distances involved. The three counties, in total, cover more than 4,500 square miles and there are significant distances between the urban centres. The public, though, should not bear the extra costs of enforcement and consequently it is imperative that rural authorities work together to reduce the costs of enforcement as much as possible.

In Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and now Lincolnshire this is being achieved through one single back office that delivers to 21 local authorities working with two enforcement contractors and four bailiff companies.

Pluss Future Clean: Future Clean
Future Clean, an employment development project for people with disabilities, uses an eco-friendly commercial mobile car wash system that is industry accredited.

Rod Burnett, development manager of Pluss: Launched in 2010 in Plymouth, Future Clean now operates from 10 town and city centre car parks, with 18 more locations in the pipeline.

Future Clean was developed by Pluss, the UK’s largest social firm and a social enterprise supporting thousands of disabled people into employment each year.

Future Clean is a project where a most unlikely but highly effective five-way collaboration between Pluss (a social enterprise delivering training and employment contracts for Job-Centre Plus and Social Services), ESF, private and local authority run city centre car parks, local authorities and the British Parking Association (BPA).

The association and its private sector members are now robust supporters of Future Clean. Exeter Guildhall’s Car Park, for example, now has 10 designated parking bays in what is the city’s`s most popular car park, enabling people parking there to have their car washed while they shop.

The BPA love Future Clean’s uncomplicated system (that can easily be carried with one hand) and its commercial competitiveness, but they also like the social investment perspective. They feel that Future Clean’s training and job creation for people who are considered furthest from the labour market, and its use of a pioneering car-cleaning process, are ways they can visibly put something back into a local community.

Future Clean is already doing this in 10 city centre and other locations. Over the next year this could rise above 20 as cities from Glasgow to London line up to secure a Future Clean service.

As a project Future Clean has now caught the interest of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). On Friday 2 November hosted a visit to its Exeter site from Mary Helson who is responsible for Disability Strategy for the DWP.

For Pluss, our mission is simple: inspiring people with disabilities to find work and build a career. Pluss knows that less than 7% of people with a learning disability and only 3.4% of people who have experienced severe and enduring mental ill-health are in paid work, and that we need to find imaginative solutions in delivering our Job-Centre Plus employability contracts and our supported employment services delivered for local authority Social Services departments. Developing sustainable micro-enterprises like Future Clean is one way of doing this.