Parking Partnership Award: London Borough of Waltham Forest, NSL and BBFi Public Sector Investigations

British Parking Awards 2021

For the past decade the London Borough of Waltham Forest has engaged the services of BBFi Public Sector Investigations through its outsourced services provider NSL. The objective of the partnership is eradicate the abuse of parking facilities provided for the use of disabled persons and motorists. To educate, through enforcement, drivers who think it is ok to misuse/abuse the Blue Badge scheme when not entitled to do so.

Anthony Hall, head of service at Waltham Forest, says: “The partnership is deeper than a standard outsourced services contract because this borough takes the issue of Blue Badge fraud very seriously and spends a great deal of time dealing with it although it is not something we have to do, we believe disabled drivers rights should be protected, and we work incredibly hard to do this.

“It is not a statutory service and from experience in the industry we know that not every borough views it the same, a lot of boroughs do not even do anything like this or to the extent that we do, and that makes this partnership personal. We believe that this is a moral thing to do. We do not approach Blue Badge misuse from the perspective of lost parking revenue, and the service costs the council much more than it recovers in fines and removal fees. Our approach and dedication to this public service differentiates us from other boroughs.”

Blue Badge fraud is estimated to cost £45m in lost revenue to local authorities, while the hidden costs of abuse is people with disabilities being disadvantaged. “We are much more concerned with the latter than the former,” says Hall. “For us this is something that needs attention because we want to protect the rights of disabled drivers, this comes way above income generation Waltham Forest has been proactively acting against Blue Badge fraud over the decade.

“Blue Badge fraud and abuse continues to be problematic in the borough and in order to combat this abuse, we have introduced a new enforcement method to increase and improve the scale of checks in August 2020. The new method allows our civil enforcement officers (CEOs) and team supervisors to check, via their mobile phones, the validity of a Blue Badge. Our officers on-street can now check on the validity of the Blue Badge via the online Blue Badge database, which they access by contacting our control centre. “

Depending on the information returned by the database, the CEO will be asked to issue a PCN and request for the vehicle to be removed. This will be treated as priority for the removal team, and the CEO remains at the location with the vehicle until the truck arrives. Should the driver return before the removal truck can remove the vehicle, the CEO will request the driver to hand over the badge for inspection. If the Blue Badge is handed to the CEO, he/she will return the disabled badge back to base and complete a witness statement. Which will be securely locked away until it is picked up by the Blue Badge fraud team.
BBFi then prepares the evidence pack and provides this to the Head of Service at LBWF who then decides what course of action to take in each individual case.

Available options and avenues

• Warning letter: Typically very minor infringements or where the circumstances indicate it was not done deliberately
• Prosecution: Most cases are prepared for prosecution
• No action: Typically this would be where the offender is very old and perhaps used the badge of a recently deceased husband or wife. It is not in the public interest to pursue such cases.