Clamping in Dublin worth €35m to winning bidder

DUBLIN CITY’S clampers will be paid more than €35 million for the next seven years in a deal on which Dublin City Council will lose about half a million each year.

Dublin Street Parking Services (DSPS) has been the city’s parking enforcer since late 2004 when it took over from Control Plus, which won the council’s first clamping contract in 1998.

The council put the contract out to tender again this year and received bids from four companies including Nationwide Controlled Parking Systems which provides parking enforcement for Iarnród Éireann, third-level institutions and private companies; APCOA Parking Ireland, which works for a number of local authorities; and UK-based clampers NSL.

The winning bid came from the incumbent, DSPS, which will provide clamping, towing and vehicle impound services to the council at a rate of €5 million a year excluding VAT, for a period of five years with an option to extend the contract for a further two years.

At current clamp release fee rates the council will lose about half a million each year of the contract.

While the clamping company is paid a set fee every month by the council, the local authority is reliant on the charges paid by the public to have the clamp removed from their car. At the current release charge of €80, which has not been increased since clamping was introduced in the city in 1998, the council takes in about €4.5 million a year.

In his annual report for 2010, published earlier this year, the council’s independent parking appeals officer, Liam Keilthy, said a release fee of €150 would be needed for the service to break even.

Although the council will continue to lose money on the service each year if the release fee remains at current rates, the new contract represents a reduced cost to the council on its previous deal with DSPS which saw it pay the company €6.79 million a year, or about €8 million including VAT, to run the service.

DSPS had in 2004 tendered a “less economically advantageous” price for the contract than Control Plus, the council admitted, but it said the company proposed additional benefits in staff training and retraining, as well as extra staff and new vehicles.

While the contract was agreed in 2004, at the height of the economic boom, it was also a seven-year deal, which locked the council into a set fee that could not be reduced.

It is not known if DSPS entered the lowest bid this time, but the council said the length of the contract reflects the “huge capital investment” required by the firm in terms of vans, equipment and staffing.