RATS bikers protest group blockade Westminster City Hall with motorbikes ... while the EU Commission opens an investigation into pay-by-mobile phone M/C parking fees & fines scheme.

Earlier this morning a riders group who are new to me made something of an impact in downtown Victoria in the heart of the Westminster area of central London. The RATS (Riders Against Tory Stealth-taxes) managed to delay a meeting of the Partnership in Parking PIP consortium at Westminster City Hall by chaining a number of bikes together in protest. This lot are, incidentally, an entirely separate bunch from the No to Bike Parking Tax NTBPT group.

Anyway, I gather that these rascals are a splinter group of activist opponents to the controversial attempt by Westminster City Council to pioneer a new pay-by-mobile-phone parking fees and fines scheme – and to sell the system to any other local authority who wants to extract a few more quid from bikers if they can. And this may be a tempting prospect when you notice that the Westminster trial scheme has already extracted more than £2m from riders pockets More pics here

Later today, another demonstration is scheduled to take place but this one is organised by the official NTBPT group so it will be interesting to see what happens then. It will also be interesting to see whether the mainstream news media take the opportunity to report what is really happening these days on the streets of London or stick to their more conventionally oriented coverage of output from never ending streams of PR and well spun versions of what our governers would like us to get as 'news'.

But back to this morning's events, an eyewitness tells me that the police arrived on the scene and engaged in a highly professional investigation and amicable spot of negotiations. All of which resulted in a conclusion that no criminal activity or damage had occurred, a bunch of disaffected bikers had exercised their rights to take to the streets in protest, and the meeting then went ahead albeit two hours later than planned.

I also gather that meeting was rather uneventful, or as one member of the public gallery put it boring as f**k – until the end. Some council members of the London-wide consortium had no idea that opposition to bike parking charges was so vigorous and voiced major concerns about the very idea of charging riders of congestion busting motorcycles to park – let alone having their consortium take the lead on spreading it nationwide.

...Meanwhile, I learned late on Friday that the EU Commission will investigate whether regulations have been flouted or laws broken during the set-up phase of the bike parking tax scheme being pioneered in Westminster...

EU Commissioners have served notice on the UK government's representative in Brussels that they are opening a formal investigation into an official complaint that EU regulations were flouted in setting up the controversial bike parking fees scheme being trailed in Westminster. The complaints were lodged in 2008, and made regarding some of the behind-the-scene activities by the Partnership in Parking (PIP) consortium that was originally set up with tax payers money. It is alleged, by the complainant and opponents of the scheme, that the way that PIP went about setting up the pay-by-mobile-phone scheme involved several violations of EU law on procurement.

The case for investigation, No.SG-CDC-2008A-7695, was formally opened on 20th November and the UK government has eight weeks to reply to notification of the investigation.

The key allegations are that PIP coordinators set up the scheme in a way that could not only be rolled out throughout the UK by any authorities who wanted to introduce a new pay-by-mobile-phone bike parking charging and enforcement regime – but that PIP encouraged councils to deploy the new fees and fines system without a tender process by merely joining the PIP consortium.

The complainant cannot be named because it has asked the EU Commission to protect their identity during the course of the investigation. However, I have now seen a copy of the submission of complaints and can say that in my view it is very understandable why the Commission are taking the complaints sufficiently seriously to open a formal investigation...