Control centre staff get to work on the charge's litmus test - sending out fines

At 7am today, a staff of more than 100 people in an anonymous London office will begin the task that will decide if congestion charging in London works: doling out the fines.

Capita staff working for Transport for London (TfL), which is administering the scheme, will start the day with a list of about 2,000 number plates captured by cameras and identified as belonging to people who did not pay the £5 charge before midnight yesterday, the first day.

They will also have the owners' details, sent from the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency (DVLA) in Swansea, generated from a larger list sent just after midnight, of number plates spotted in the zone with no payment record.

The DVLA will remove from that list any registered motorbikes, which are exempt from the charge. (Capita will have already weeded out those it knows have paid, as well as taxis, minicabs and other vehicles registered as exempt.)

The Capita workers will then check manually that the computer has correctly identified the number plate from black-and-white camera footage from the charging zone, cross checking it with the DVLA details and a colour picture of the whole car taken with the number plate. If they all match, the penalty notice will be sent out.

If there is a discrepancy – the computer read the number plate wrongly (Capita says it is more than 90 per cent accurate) or the car in the colour picture does not match the vehicle details – the notice will not be sent out and a query will be raised.

The fine will be sent to the owner listed on the DVLA details. Four debt-collection agencies have been hired to ensure people pay up – or to clamp and remove offending cars in London's 33 boroughs.

Those who pay are expected to provide a revenue of about £100m a year – an average of £2m or 80,000 vehicles daily – while fines are forecast to generate between £25m and £30m, about £500,000 in fines or about 10,000 fines a week, assuming most people pay the £40 fine within 14 days of the penalty charge notice being issued.

That implies that about 2,000 cars will be fined on an average day, although Capita said it was not working to forecasts or time limits. "We do not have any obligation on speed," a Capita spokesman said yesterday. "We will be measured against the quality of the notices. Our obligation is to manually check every notice before it is sent."

Last week, 45 people were mistakenly sent penalty notices before the scheme began, so TfL and Capita are being especially careful not to fine the wrong people.

Two glaring holes remain that would allow criminals to flout the system. By putting a fake copy of a number plate matching that of a motorcycle on a car, or by copying the number plate of a car known to have paid, some people may try to evade the charge – although they risk a £10,000 fine or two years' jail if they are caught.