Nearly half of the traffic wardens in a big London Borough left their jobs on hearing that immigration checks would be conducted the following day.
The wardens, aka ‘civil enforcement officers’ or ‘parking attendants’, had worked for APCOA until August when the lucrative parking enforcement contract in Lambeth was awarded to NCP Services Ltd. But 48 of the 100 enforcement officers either resigned or didn’t turn up for work after the new management announced it would be re-checking immigration papers of the 150 staff who transferred to the new contractor. “We do not know whether all of them did not have the right to work because they resigned of their own accord”, said the NCP manager for Lambeth, Tim Cowan. Go here for a BBC TV broadcast on the story.
In theory, UK government cares about this sort of thing – and employers should because they can be fined £10,000 for breaking laws on hiring people without valid visas or passports. But is this just an extraordinary isolated incident?
How come we have reached a stage in a ‘World City’ where half of the people dishing out fines to enforce a local authority’s parking regulations do not seem to be legally entitled to work at all? Does government at central and local level really care who is enforcing the limits of the parking restrictions they impose?
A Lambeth spokesman tells TC.com that “we absolutely support NCP Services in their efforts to ensure staff employed in Lambeth have the right to work in this country”. But, what is less clear is how the situation arose in the first place. Perhaps, in practice, the people who should care who is employed to impose Penalty Charge Notices (PCN) on behalf of UK local authorities don’t as much as they should, or they do care but have allowed the drive for profit to cloud their judgement…
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