London traffic wardens are competing to win a Corsa – by writing the most parking fines, but a South African official has said he would not support a similar scheme. What do you think of this idea?
London traffic wardens are competing to win a Corsa – by writing the most parking fines, but a South African official has said he would not support a similar scheme.
reported that National Car Parks (NCP) body introduced the Parking Attendant of the Year award for traffic wardens in the Westminister area of London. The attendants compete against each other for the prize of the Vauxhall Corsa.
NCP’s Ian Kavanagh said it was not an attempt to catch more people with parking fines. “This new scheme is to be an acknowledgement and recognition of the wardens’ work. The parking attendants will be closely monitored and awards given out to those who fulfil a list of criteria, including appearance, attendance, customer service, disciplinary record as well as actual performance.
“This is a carefully controlled scheme to encourage our staff to do a very good job,” he said.
Kavanagh said each ticket had to be valid to count towards the competition. “It is therefore in no-one’s interest to issue invalid tickets, and a parking attendant with a high number of challenged tickets will stand no chance of doing well under this incentive scheme.
“It’s not about encouraging people to give out millions of tickets. It’s about giving out good tickets. One of the reasons we changed contractors is to stop the number of complaints we’re getting.”
Kavanagh said factors that also counted were attendance records and the number of tickets challenged. He said only wardens with clean disciplinary records were eligible.
Johannesburg Metro Police spokesman Wayne Minnaar told CARtoday.com he disagreed with this kind of motive. “That is not the objective of a law enforcement officer. It could end up becoming victimisation. There are some cases where they have to use their discretion, for example in borderline cases where the person is on the way to feed the parking meter. In that case you can give them the benefit of the doubt, but if the official is trying to win a prize he or she would not. So I would not support a similar scheme,” Minnaar said.
What do you think?