Lynne's Parliament and Haringey diary

Part 2 today of the Congestion Charging scrutiny on the Mayor's extension and also the Assembly's review of the original Congestion Charge scheme.

I suppose the outstanding feature of the day was the inability of Transport for London, in the form of Michelle Dix and Malcolm Murray Clarke's, to convince us that all was well with Capita.

The Evening Standard had revealed a couple of days earlier that it had sent an undercover journalist into one of Capita's call centres. He had found a woeful tale of failure: complaints not logged as complaints unless the caller used the actual word 'complaint' - otherwise it was counted as an 'enquiry'; call centre stuff giving out wrong information was common; call centre staff hanging up when they didn't want to continue a call; call centre staff promising that someone would 'phone back when nobody virtually ever did, and so on.

When we put all of this to Transport for London, they simply continued to say that it was all being put right and that they were stepping up their monitoring. Oh please! I asked for a monthly report to my committee to keep an eye out on this.