Private Clampers - Week 1

I'm setting up a new company to monitor the wearing of jeans on Friday.

I accept that jeans on Friday is a perfectly reasonable wardrobe choice and one that you're fully entitled to make, but I'm afraid I'll have to immobilise your jeans and charge you between €80 and €120 unless your permit for wearing the jeans on Fridays is displayed prominently on your chest.

Ridiculous idea, isn’t it? It’s never going to work.

But somehow private clampers have kind of gotten away with the same thing.

I’ve fallen foul of private clampers twice in my life. The first time I was living in a house share in Rathmines. I parked across the road because the space I was entitled to park in was taken. I even left a little note explaining myself. Apcoa didn’t much like that though, and I think I had to give them €80 before they gave me back the use of my car.

The second time I was living in my current place in Swords, which is an apartment in a small complex with a shared private car park. On that occasion NCPS decided my parking permit wasn’t displayed quite as prominently as they would like, and owing to my extreme lack of money at the time (about two days before payday) my boyfriend had to hand over €120 before we even had breakfast.

Neither times had I the balls to cut the clamp off. Even though I’m a mostly upstanding citizen I still kind of wish that’s what I’d done.

I think I did appeal both times. I can only find the response to one though, in which the clamping company said they “sympathised” with my circumstances, but said they still weren’t going to grant my appeal and that they considered the matter closed.

I accept there’s a place for private parking regulations, but paying money to private clamping companies who don’t even have a clear legal basis, whose actions in the last instance we were funding via management fees and who don’t even have an independent regulator really grinds my gears. 

There’s currently a car rusting away to nothing in our car park. Naively I thought that’s what clampers would be clearing out instead of my bank account, but for some reason it seems not.

Clampers haven’t been allowed to clamp vehicles on private land in Scotland since 1992, and in England and Wales since late 2012. Back home the snappily-titled “General Scheme of the Regulation of Vehicle Immobilisation Bill 2013” was published by the Department of Transport last April, and there’s meant to be some move towards putting a few laws in place for private clampers - including putting the National Transport Authority in place as a regulator, capping release fees, giving private clampers a code of practice and giving clampees access to a proper appeals process - early this year.

Until then I’ll continue to wish a pox on all private clampers, and an unscratchable itch to accompany it.