Camden’s traffic wardens have now been on strike for over 50 days

• MORE than 100 of Camden’s on-street traffic wardens and CCTV operators have now been on strike for over 50 days. This is the fourth time workers on this outsourced contract have walked out in just over a decade.

Thanks to previous CNJ coverage, readers will know why these UNISON members have been prepared to fight chronically low pay and poor conditions, (Camden’s parking wardens step up strike action, August 11).

Their employer, NSL, initially offered a derisory 57 pence on the hourly rate of £12.70. After the strike NSL tabled an improved proposal, but this still amounts to a pay cut in real terms.

The time has surely come for Camden’s Labour-run council to stop washing its hands of responsibility for resolving this dispute and put meaningful pressure on NSL to address the workforce’s justified demands.

The council’s leadership and especially Bloomsbury ward councillor Adam Harrison, the cabinet member for a sustainable Camden and a politician with parliamentary ambitions, should be ensuring that NSL faces financial consequences for provoking the current strike.

Tight limits exist on how Camden can spend revenues from parking enforcement, but there’s little doubt that the council is losing tens of thousands a day in funds that should go to highway maintenance, Freedom Passes and the Taxicard scheme, alongside home-to-school transport.

NSL, meanwhile, is facing no penalty for failing to meet its target for hours of on-street enforcement, a key performance indicator on its contract. The current arrangements seem to treat industrial action as “an act of God”!

For whatever reason, Camden has so far refused to bring parking enforcement in-house, instead continuing to underwrite NSL’s profits.

In contrast Hackney Council, no bastion of “Corbynism,” brought traffic wardens into direct employment this spring, putting that borough’s civil enforcement officers on £15.68 an hour, with rights to decent occupational sick pay and membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme. So why won’t Camden do the same?

The traffic wardens’ battle continues in Sir Keir Starmer’s political “back yard”. Camden Council’s failure to act can only cast further doubt on the Labour leader’s own commitment to bolster workers’ rights and calls into question shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s pledge of “the biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation”.

Camden Trades Council urges residents to write to their ward councillors and to Cllr Harrison (adam.harrison@camden.gov.uk) calling on him to act now to resolve the current dispute and look at insourcing the NSL workforce at the earliest opportunity.

GEORGE BINETTE
Vice-Chair
& SARAH FRIDAY
Assistant Secretary
on behalf of Camden Trades Council