Sunday 14 January 2024 – Overshooting on the Positivity Message

Perhaps they will offer to lift their knuckles off of the ground.  On Wednesday 24^th, I have a meeting with Marston to review their social value contributions on their parking enforcement contract.  Perhaps it is lazy stereotyping and prejudice to assume that their approach to delivering public services and dealing with our residents is unsophisticated and animalistic and their culture may bleed into their imagination and ability to deliver social value.

One reason I have to form this stereotype in my mind is that I have had encounters with bailiffs and privately contracted parking enforcement mercenaries, and I’m sure some readers will have a story to share of their encounters.  In one (and I have many more worse tales), one morning, just as I was on my way out to work, there was a knock at the door and, on opening it, there stood three men in a triangle in what I can only describe as trying to look menacing.  Flanked either side and slightly back from the smaller leader were two giant shaven gorillas both with their arms tightly crossed across their chests but who clearly hadn’t been trained to talk.  This task had fallen to the leader at the front who was wiry, had a shaven head and a large tattoo of a swallow on the side of his neck and jawline.  “Are you Andrew Paine?” he asked me as I opened the door and took in the startling tableau but not yet worked out what was going on.  “No”, I replied, “that was the previous owner”.

“Who are you, then?”, he then asked curtly.

What’s going on, I thought?  I was just going out the door and now these three bruisers are standing in my way clearly up to no good.  Is this a home invasion?  “Who are you?”, I asked back at him.

“We’re from the County Court to collect on unpaid council tax.”

Oh, okay, they’re bailiffs.  “No, he don’t live here no more, mate, and hasn’t for years.  I live here now.  You need to do your research better.”

“Can I see some ID?” he asked me.

No, bugger off, I thought.  He has no reason to disbelieve me and he’s just a private contractor, not the police, and he knows he has no right to demand I prove myself.  The onus is on him to find out where the debtor lives before just knocking on the door where the council tax was defaulted on many years before.  But to override citizens’ rights is why they use these threatening tactics and I don’t want them back here and I can end this right now by just showing him my drivers licence which is right here with me in my wallet so I do and he’s satisfied.  The bailiffs’ tactics are blunt, Neanderthal and have no basis in law, but they worked.  They never came back.     

Daytime telly consumer affairs programmes often feature such trauma and injustice. This all suggests that what council-commissioned and managed bailiffs get up to is underhand, intimidatory and illegal, but that is what bailiffs do and councils are one of their biggest customers.  A big part of what they do is drive flatbed lorries with a crane to remove parked cars blocking the public highway, entrances and resident’s driveways, and this can only be for the public good which is why councils procure them, and it can only be right that the inconsiderate driver pays a fine to pay for this service in the first place.  But I can’t help but think that putting oneself into proactive confrontation as a full-time job requires bailiffs to mentally remove themselves from the community and adopt a just-doing-my-job-guv approach to business.

So, how can social value, making contributions to the local community in addition to the service they are delivering, fit into such a mental approach?  Parking my prejudices for now, in preparation for the meeting, my first reference point is their bid with the social value proposal in it.

In their bid they have offered creating 17 jobs on the enforcement contract for local residents, including apprenticeships.  That’s a lot of new jobs on one contract, and dedicated to our residents.  Can you do an apprenticeship in lifting parked cars off the highway?  They have offered 58 weeks of work experience placements.  Would they be ride-a-longs?  Do the young people learn on their first day where the baseball bat is kept under the passenger seat?  540 hours of employment advice to unemployed residents is on the list.  Are they joking?  They have clear demarcation in their business model about which of their employees are allowed to talk so their own staff training is not that sophisticated.  They proposed to use electric vehicles on this contract.  Well they either have or they haven’t so they don’t need to talk to me about this.  And they have offered to do school careers talks.  Again, this may be based on my own personal encounters, but I wouldn’t let bailiffs anywhere near children anymore than I would bring a pack of XL bullies into a school except that, in their bid, they copied and pasted a picture to illustrate their philosophy to providing additional value to the community they serve:

Ahhhh: A picture provided by Marston in their contract proposal to demonstrate to council commissioning officers their attitude to delivering social value.

What is this?  The bailiffs that came to my door that day didn’t look like this.  They certainly didn’t smile or make eye contact.  Are these supposed to be bailiffs standing in a line in a park with their arms across each other's shoulders?  What are they supposed to be doing?  I’m pretty sure this is a stock photo but, if so, why this one?  What are they trying to say?  It feels to me that they have no idea what community spirit is and this picture just looked positive and otherwise they didn’t know what to put in the bid and, so, here it is along with a proposal to do school careers education sessions to say, hey kids, if you want to be a parking bailiff like us when you grow up, get your face and neck inked.

But this is probably unfair of me; lots of companies totally overshoot on the positivity of their products in the pictures in their ads and I don’t know what they’re trying to say either.

Life may be unbridled joy now but if that clock loses just one minute, we’ll kill each other!

Life’s been great since I got type 2 diabetes.  If I had known before how easy it was to manage, I would have been even lazier, never walked beyond my front drive like a schmuck and always have driven the 237 meters to Sainsbury’s Local and parked right outside the entrance in the disabled parking bay although I can do that without fear of parking bailiffs so my life is even better now.

I don’t know what the message is here.  Do they love getting buses?  This much?  Or do they love each other but were kept apart by the additional £1.75 bus fare despite both living in the same city within a one-hour bus journey of each other?

Can three people really have this much fun on a £2 Tesco voucher?  They’re not even in a Tesco!

I will have to wait for the meeting to see what Marston has contributed but, if nothing so far, if they ask me for my direction, my prejudices might keep my expectations low, but I will be asking them what they got up to in the park that day and, whatever it was, do that again for our residents.