The Government are right to want to regulate activities on private as well as public land. In one area of my constituency, there is a small unadopted road next to a shopping centre. Wheelclampers wait in a van and pounce as soon as a car comes round the corner and parks even temporarily with the driver still in it. That has happened time and again. My concern is that the Bill deals only with private wheelclampers, but I have written to Ministers on more than one occasion urging them to consider the possibility that the local authority could play a role in wheelclamping even on private land.
Local authorities undertake some wheelclamping, and they have a right to do that.
For example, my local authority employed a private wheelclamping firm to undertake wheelclamping on its behalf. However, the authority sacked the company because it misbehaved in the way that other wheelclampers misbehave. Thus even when a local authority was involved and employed a private sector organisation, the private organisation behaved badly and had to be dismissed. Local authorities are now considering other ways to overcome the problem. They and the police wish to wheelclamp in many cases, but the small amount of wheelclamping that would take place on local authority land would not be sufficient to make it financially viable for local authorities to set up a system involving a pound and a wheelclamping team.