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.

Private Clampers - Week 1

The premise of 'Thing a Week' is that we each contribute a piece of writing each week on a given theme. This week, the brief is simple. Three to five hundred words on Private Clampers. 


Three nights ago, I found a clamp. The clamp was lying both in and on top of a small hedge. The chain, designed to fasten a steel yellow triangle to the front wheel of an illegally parked car, had been cut through with an angle grinder. This now dangled stylishly from the hedge onto the kerb.

I live in an apartment complex in West Dublin. There are no gates, and our residents committee became worried that people were abandoning cars in our car parking spaces. This is largely because people were abandoning cars in our car parking spaces.

Over four months, I watched a Suzuki Alto rot into the tarmac outside my window, and wondered about the ratio of flat cracked tyres and rusting bonnets to property prices. A man downstairs from me ran a motor maintenance business in the car park, stripping down Celicas and Mondeos, leaving them on axle stands for days at a time. As a member of the apartment complex residents association, I tacitly contribute to pay for a private company to enforce parking regulations in the complex.

So, really, you'd think I'd root for the clampers. That clamping an illegally parked car, and fining the owner is a restoration of order. If I'm clamped,  I must pay the fine. Otherwise I can't drive my car.

If I use an angle grinder to free my car, I've escalated this, and I have committed criminal damage, destroying state property. If I do this, the system that I pay so much tax to maintain will swing into action - I'll surely be arrested, go to court, lose, go to jail, and ruin my life. So as a civilized man, I have no choice but to pay the fine to release my car.

But this clamp lying in the hedge doesn't belong to the state - it's a private company. A set of private individuals who have immobilized a car on private land. They have decided to use their belonging to immobilise your belonging. The only real consequence they can offer is the escalation to criminal damage, at which point they can make a complaint to the genuine authorities.

And this is why I don't root for the clampers. This is is why I find myself trying in small, passive-agressive ways trying to thwart them. I drive too slowly when I'm in front of their van, and drive spookily close behind them when they are ahead.

Nothing pushes me as close to questioning the trade-offs we make for civilisation as the thought that one individual, with no more authority than smugly threatening prosecution for criminal damage, can enforce their will on another. This is the behaviour of a child in primary school, screaming insults at another, until the provoked child hits them - at which point the provoked child is hauled into the headmasters office.

This is why I would choose to watch cars rot in my car park, why I'd be happy to see people run garages out of the apartment complex. I don't ever, ever want to endorse this petty, smug, primary school mentality of private clampers.



PS - 

I wrote this piece, and lay awake before publishing it. It was a feverish, poor night's sleep, due in part to an early flight the next morning. One thought kept me awake: What if you didn't damage the clamp? What if you could release your car by freeing the lock?

At one point, as part of a security seminar, I attended a lock picking workshop, and the combination of fine mechanical work and an almost orgasmic release as the lock clicked free stuck with me.

I spent that sleepless night picturing, in vivid detail, picking the lock on a clamp, then calling the clamping company, outraged that they had left a an undamaged clamp on the ground beside my car. Then, in my mind, I reported them for littering.

I have ordered a set of lockpicks.