IT IS early in the morning. Bleary-eyed, you stumble out of bed and make the coffee. Clutching your cup, you go to the computer and log on to the e-mail service, only to find that you have lost your appeal against that parking fine. You are going to have to write a cheque for 拢60.
It may sound like science fiction, but this scenario may be closer than you think. The Parking Committee for London is the first tribunal to have the power to accept and issue legal documents electronically. The committee is a joint organisation set up by London鈥檚 borough councils to hear appeals on disputed parking fines. It is also the first body to store the evidence of parking offences electronically.
Nick Lester, the London parking director, says that although there are no short-term plans for the committee to send the results of appeals by e-mail, it has the legal power. 鈥淚t may happen,鈥� he says. Although it could be a while before drivers receive information about parking fines on their computers at home, all the evidence in appeals cases is already stored electronically.
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London鈥檚 boroughs took over responsibility for enforcing parking regulations from the police last year. Every year, London鈥檚 traffic wardens issue about 3.5 million tickets to errant motorists. Most of the motorists simply pay up, but about one in five complains to the borough about the ticket. In most cases, the borough scraps the ticket or the motorist admits the fault and pays the fine. However, with around 1 in 50 of the tickets issued, the dispute is unresolved and the motorist appeals.
The boroughs send all the motorists a standard appeal form and the drivers can also submit evidence. The boroughs send the committee their own files, which normally include a copy of the parking ticket and the relevant pages from the parking warden鈥檚 notebook.
The parking committee鈥檚 information technology contractor, Electronic Data Systems, a subsidiary of General Motors, scans in all the evidence as an image and stores the information in a database. All the adjudicator 鈥� the lawyer who judges the appeals 鈥� has to do is to call up the evidence on one of the network鈥檚 personal computers and make a decision. Lester says: 鈥淎s far as adjudication is concerned, it鈥檚 paperless. All the evidence is electronic.鈥�
He says that the great advantage of the electronic system is flexibility. About a third of appellants fail to turn up. But instead of hanging around, the lawyers can use the time to decide postal appeals. And on the odd occasion when drivers turn up at the wrong time, they can usually be slotted in easily. Lester says that this would be impossible with evidence on paper: finding it would be too time-consuming.
Even though the electronic system is proving efficient at collecting fines, it does have one advantage for the drivers who fall foul of London鈥檚 yellow lines. If your car is towed away in London, you can now phone a single central number and find out within half an hour which pound it has been taken to.
