Congestion charging: firms blame each other for chaos

Three days before the Congestion Charge starts Transport for London (TfL) and the contractor running the scheme have begun blaming each other for what they are sure will be a disastrous launch.

TfL has hired an extra call centre in Glasgow with 300 staff to double the number of people available to handle the flood of calls expected on Monday. It's believed that thousands of Londoners have not received their Fast Track cards, which enable easier payment, despite giving details to Capita, the operators, up to two months ago.

TfL's decision to use another centre was made after Capita's base in Coventry was unable to handle applications coming by post, telephone and over the web, with fewer than half of those of expected now registered.

Almost half of the applications have come by post – but there is now no time for those to be processed before the Congestion Charge is introduced. The website at cclondon.com has crashed repeatedly in the past week and was yesterday criticised by experts as "near impossible" to use.

But sources within Capita suggested that the real blame lay with TfL's £12.7m publicity campaign about the charge, which they said had been insufficient to prompt people into registering.

"The public information campaign hasn't achieved the goals we would have liked," said one insider. "TfL will tell people that it has been a successful campaign, but what they're doing suggests otherwise. The only thing that shifts the levels of registrations we see is how many ads are running."

TfL said the call centre in Glasgow will supplement the Coventry centre. Both will be run by Capita. "It was a provision that we had made, an overcompensation as a contingency in case we were inundated," said a TfL spokeswoman.

TfL also insisted that its advertising campaign, which started in October, has been "very successful", citing surveys showing 97 per cent awareness among Londoners and that 80 per cent of residents could name some way of paying the charge.

Although people can still register to pay the charge over the web and by phone, TfL has found that fewer than half of the applications so far have come by that route, with 20 per cent coming by phone, and 25 per cent over the Web. In all, just 12,861 people have pre-paid for the charge.

The looming fiasco on Monday – which London's Mayor Ken Livingstone said would be a "bloody day" – will be another in a long line for Capita, which has contracts with the Home Office, Department for Education and Employment, the TV Licence Office, and local authorities. The company itself estimates that in some or other it touches the lives of 33 million Britons.

But it has been repeatedly criticised for its project management on cases such as the Criminal Records Bureau, a £400m project to let employers make background checks on prospective staff. Last summer the CRB ground to a halt when it was told to make background checks on all administrative staff at schools. It turned out that a computer system was months behind schedule.

Capita said it was the fault of applicants who had not filled in their forms correctly.

The same claim was made yesterday by sources at the company about problems with registrations for the Congestion Charge. "Some of the forms are unreadable, really unreadable," said one insider

With the website gridlocked, the phone line was backed up for miles

Fed up with www.cclondon.com crashing, I rang the 24-hour helpline number to register for the 90 per cent discount available to residents of central London. I phoned after 6pm hoping to get straight through, but twice had to listen to a recorded message giving me "congestion charge facts" that I already knew.

The third time I was put in a queue. After five minutes' wait, I was connected to an operator who promptly put me on hold, saying she was "in training". When she returned, she said I could not claim my discount in time for the introduction of the fee on 17 February.

She then passed me to her team leader, who said I would have to pay the full £5-a-day charge until my application was processed. While this was supposed to take about 10 days, the backlog of 30,000 forms meant it might take a lot longer – and I might not be entitled to a back-dated refund for this time because I had "left it till the last minute", he said. With the discount I would only be paying 50p a day, he added – though this adds up to £2.50 a week, even if I only use the car once. He said that was because the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, had wanted to make the charge "best value" for Transport for London.

So, after all of that, I was still at least 10 days away from receiving my discount.

Arifa Akbar