Park life Practise what you preach Kelvin Reynolds seeks guidance from other sectors on penalty charge costs and the governments message ractise what you preach is a retort to someone who is being hypocritical, telling people how they should behave while not behaving in a similar manner themselves. Last month,I spoke about the hypocrisy of media commentators and others when they deride our campaigns for realistic deterrents in parking contraventions,1 and have been continuing to look at recent and not so recent government announcements. On 21 June this year, the government said, in a Home Office circular:2 182. Last year the Home Office carried out a consultation as part of a review of the level of the statutory fees that the police can charge for vehicle recovery. The fees have not been increased since 2008 and we are aware of concerns that they are no longer sufficient to cover costs of vehicle recovery operations. We will publish the response to the consultation shortly. On 28 July 2022, in its statement on railway penalty fare value reform,3 and following a public consultation on train penalty fares that have remained at 2008 levels, the government announced: The DfT [Department for Transport] will update the Railways (Penalty Fares) Regulations 2018 to replace the current methodology for calculating the value of the penalty fare. We will introduce a surcharge on top of the price of the applicable single fare of 100, which will be reduced to 50 if paid within 21 days. In the introduction, it states: Fare evasion costs train operators, rail passengers and taxpayers, who ultimately subsidise the journeys of those who deliberately travel without paying the correct fare. P Consumer Price Index [CPI] as a benchmark.) Using an online CPI calculator, I uprated a 60 parking penalty charge from 2001 to 2022 98.09! How close is that to 100! So in 2001, the last time it was properly reviewed, a statutory penalty charge was the equivalent of 100 today. The AOS Code recommended maximum today is... 100!5 In June 2020, Defra issued a statement in response to commentary on the state of the nation: The government is clear on littering... it blights our communities, spoils our countryside, harms our wildlife and wastes taxpayers money to clean it up. This was under the headline Lockdown litter louts liable to 150 fines. The default fixed penalty for littering from a vehicle outside London is 100, increasing by 100 if unpaid within 28 days.6 Now, Im no preacher, but I am a practitioner, and all the preachers Ive heard leave me to draw my own conclusions. Many of you are also parking practitioners, in the public and the private sectors, so I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about politics and parking tickets. bit.ly/PNSept22PKB 2 Circular 005/2022: bit.ly/PNSept22PL1 3 Penalty fare consultation outcome, bit.ly/PNSept22PL2 4 bit.ly/PNSept22PL3 5 See bit.ly/PNSept22AOS 6 bit.ly/PNSept22PL4 Looking at the evidence In the 2017 consultation on littering fines,4 it was said that the levels for fixed penalties under section 88 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 have not changed since 2006, but adjusting for inflation since that time means that a maximum penalty of 80 in 2006 would now be 100. (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [Defra] used the Kelvin Reynolds Director of corporate and public affairs kelvin.r@britishparking.co.uk 44 PN Sept 2022 pp44 Kelvin.indd 44 22/08/2022 14:00