Private fasteners certainly make doing courier work a bit more difficult, as you race against the clock to deliver a package, all the while praying that fasteners don’t see your white van parked in their private driveway or office block parking lot. . However, it has recently emerged that private wheel securing could be illegal and under UK law an infringement of our human rights.
According to the RAC, the seizure of cars by private companies could be a violation of the Human Rights Law of 1998. The car organization says that the fines charged by individuals are often exorbitant and unjustifiable. Tickets for parking on private land are also enforced without any legal process and this is something the RAC would like to see changed. The changes would certainly help people with courier jobs, as there’s nothing worse than coming back from a delivery to find a big yellow wheel clamp attached to your beloved van.
The move comes after the launch of a Daily Mail campaign to demand that the government tighten regulations on private wheel tying and ultimately make it illegal, as it is in Scotland. Once the newspaper featured the campaign, it was simply inundated with stories of unfair car blocking cases. A man in a courier job who found his van tied up after delivering some documents made headlines when he hit the clamp with a sledgehammer and broke it himself to avoid paying the exorbitant fine and another man found his car tied up after turning up in a private office block to pay his girlfriend’s wheel clamp fee. The price charged by individuals does not appear to be consistent in any way. While some people reported having to pay a £75.00 fine to release a car from an office block car park, another woman wrote in the newspaper describing how she had to pay a fee of £375.00.
So how exactly is it illegal to clamp the wheels? Chris Elliott, a lawyer for the RAC, argues that the concept of one citizen punishing another is foreign to English law and that the purpose of the restraint is simply to prevent a vehicle from being on private land without permission. Thus, Chris argues, restraint is perverse in that it perpetuates the damage done to the landlord which is ultimately a self-inflicted wound. The only tactic is to punish or deter, both of which have no basis in English law. This is because they are based on the notion that one person cannot punish another and that punishment is a power reserved solely for the State. There are other arguments from lawyers that the practice of subjection is also contradictory to protocol 1 of the Human Rights Law, which establishes that every person has the right to the peaceful enjoyment of their assets and should not be deprived of them, unless in accordance with English law.
The Home Office is in the midst of proposing a new licensing regime for private bras. However, with the arguments that the very action of depriving people of their vehicle is illegal, it seems unlikely that the changes will go ahead. With the RAC strongly defending the legal elements of tying, it seems very likely that the very act of private wheel tying will become illegal. And for us in courier jobs, it’s certainly a case of the sooner the better.