Although council once pushed to “terminate” it, scheme letting clampers knock off early if they met quotas remained

Dublin Street Parking Services, the company the council pays to fine, clamp and tow illegally parked cars in the city, has been operating an incentive programme that the council’s former CEO told DSPS to end.

Under the scheme, if crews clamp or tow a certain number of vehicles, they get to knock off early.

After two whistleblowers came forward, then Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan on 28 September 2017 drafted a memo proposing changes to the operation and oversight DSPS’s contract.

In the memo, Keegan concluded that there were problems with quality control, and some evidence that DSPS staff were finishing work early.

“We need assurances that DSPS will continue deploy staff and resources in line with the contracted hours (as amended from time to time by agreement),” Keegan wrote.

“And that no DSPS staff members will be engaged on any type of ‘task and finish’ basis whereby they can finish early subject to achieving a particular number of clamps,” he wrote.

Then, in bold, and underlined, Keegan wrote that “Any incentive scheme based on achieving an actual number of clamps de-clamps which is targeted at individual operative are to be terminated.”

Yet documents show the Early Finish Scheme has continued, at least until September 2023.

Under the scheme, for example, van crews who work 10-hour shifts and clamp 21 cars can finish 90 minutes early, while HGV crews who work 10 hour shifts and tow 12 vehicles can finish 90 minutes early too.

In September, the council refused a request under the Freedom of Information Act for correspondence from the past three years about the scheme. Neither DSPS nor Dublin City Council have responded to queries sent Thursday about whether the scheme is still operating today.

When Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose asked whether the scheme is still in effect, the council’s head of traffic, Brendan O’Brien earlier this month didn’t give him a direct answer.

“Any incentive Scheme that DSPS have with their employees would be a private arrangement which DCC is not party to,” O’Brien wrote.

However, a September 2023 email by a DSPS manager about the Early Finish Scheme says its terms had been approved by Dublin City Council.

Flocking to easy pickings?

DSPS’s contract with Dublin City Council is winding down, and council managers are preparing to put out a new tender for parking enforcement services.

Some councillors have said they’d like parking enforcement done differently under the next contract.

Among their complaints was that there’s too much clamping in the city centre, and not enough parking enforcement in areas further out.

An early-leave incentive scheme would give crews an incentive to head to places where they think they can find easy pickings to get their clamps in fast.

Most of the top 10 streets for vehicle clamping in 2023 were in one part of the city: Ranelagh, Clarendon Street, Mespil Road, Merrion Square, Merrion Square West, Waterloo Road, Chelmsford Road. As they had been in 2022.

“Outside the city centre, there’s a sense of lawlessness when it comes to parking,” Social Democrats Councilor Catherine Stocker said at a March meeting about parking enforcement in the city.

By the same token, driving out to far-flung spots to follow up on complaints from residents of illegally parked cars isn’t the most efficient way to rack up numbers fast, either.

And data on parking enforcement between July 2021 and the end of 2023, shows that if you report a car parked illegally in the city, it’s unlikely to result in any enforcement action, records show.

The most likely result is that DSPS would never have responded to the report – or only responded after the cars left, the data show.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the document detailing the terms of the Early Finish Scheme says that “The primary goal of the service is to deliver the SLA [service level agreement] quality and quantity and not to address requests which do not lead to enforcements.”

Neither DSPS nor DCC responded to queries about whether the Early Finish Scheme could incentivise crews to head to places where they can clamp a lot of vehicles fast, and neglect outlying areas – and complaints from the public.

They also did not respond to a query about whether it’s fair for the council to be paying DSPS to have staff patrolling the streets who have already left and gone home.

Although the council has refused to release the contract it has with DSPS, the tender it issued in August 2018 that led to the contract detailed the hours the service should operate.

“The Contractor shall provide a clamping and removal service Monday to Friday from 0700 hours to 2400 hours, Saturday 0800 hours to 2400 hours and a reduced Sunday service, minimum one quarter of the normal service, from 1000 hours to 2400 hours,” it says.

Data on the times that cars were clamped and towed last year, released by Dublin City Council, suggests that a lot more happens during some parts of these service periods, than others.

There’s a big spike in the morning as crews come on shift, and then a decline. Then there’s another spike peaking between 4pm and 5pm. There’s little or no clamping or towing between 7pm and midnight.

What about quality?

Two whistleblowers went to the council about DSPS in 2017, and three more in 2019, concerned about the quality of the work the company was doing, records show.

After it got the 2017 protected disclosures from the whistleblowers, outlining their concerns and allegations, the council appointed Michael J. McCarthy, a former assistant Garda commissioner, to investigate, former council chief Owen Keegan told Sinn Féin Councillor Anthony Connaghan in a 2021 letter.

McCarthy produced a report, and submitted it to DSPS and the council in June 2017. However, “Following representations from DSPS, the Council agreed to withdraw Mr McCarthy’s report and to terminate his investigation,” Keegan wrote.

“This was done in light of legal advice received that the investigations on which Mr McCarthy’s report was based, breached the principles of natural justice. The Council also agreed to expunge the report from Dublin City Council’s records,” he wrote.

So, instead, Keegan “decided to complete the investigation into the 2017 protected disclosure allegations”, he wrote to Connaghan.

He concluded that “there was a valid basis for the various concerns that had been raised”, but “in general the parking enforcement service operated to a reasonable standard”, and that “primary responsibility for problems with the parking enforcement service should be attributed to the City Council’s inadequate monitoring of the parking enforcement contract”.

Keegan’s 28 September 2017 response to these protected disclosures gave his conclusions on a series of allegations. “There is irrefutable evidence of inadequate quality control procedures by DSPS,” he wrote, with the result that a number of vehicles were clamped where there was no or inadequate signage/road markings.

In the letter, Keegan called for some changes, including the end to early-leave incentive scheme, and a change to the role of DSPS supervisors, away from operational duties and to a focus on supervising DSPS operations – including quality control.

When three whistleblowers went to the council in 2019, DSPS “raised concerns that many of the issues were historic and had been dealt with as part of the investigation into the 2017 disclosures”, Keegan wrote to Connaghan in 2021.

The council appointed Miriam Maher, an external investigator with Resolve Ireland, to investigate the allegations the whistleblowers raised in their 2019 protected disclosures. She submitted this 35-page report in September 2020, Keegan wrote.

Dublin City Council has refused a request under the Freedom of Information Act for Maher’s report, and for any correspondence about it, and about the early-leave incentive scheme.

The Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act 2022 exempts records created in relation to reports made under protected disclosure legislation from FOI, a council administrative officer in the chief executive’s office wrote in September.

When Jose, the Green Party councillor, asked for the Maher report, council chief executive Richard Shakespeare earlier this month declined to release it to him.

“The report was prepared on a strictly private and confidential basis. It was only shared with the individual staff members who made the disclosures and with relevant staff in both DSPS and the City Council,” Shakespeare wrote.

However, Keegan’s 2021 letter to Connaghan, the Sinn Féin councillor, gives what he says was Maher’s “summary conclusion”:

“Notwithstanding the discloser’s reasonable beliefs, based on the extent of the information available to them, I do not consider that the issues raised by them in respect of practices in place since 2018 represent wrongdoings on the part of either DSPS in the delivering of the parking enforcement contract or DCC in their management oversight of the contract.”

Keegan goes on to tell Connaghan that, “The City Council accepts that there have been instances where the quality control process put in place by DSPS has failed. This is viewed very seriously by the City Council.”

Neither DSPS nor DCC responded to a query sent Thursday asking whether the Early Finish Scheme could lead to sloppy work by crews trying to clamp fast to hit their numbers so they could knock off early.

UPDATE: This article was updated at 9.58am on 18 November 2024 to add a bar chart showing pattern of clamping by DSPS by hour of the day in 2023, and then to update an existing chart in the article showing the pattern of towing so that it has the same maximum value on the vertical access as the clamping one.