28/11/2011 Inside Out London

Hello, you are watching Inside Out Hello, you are watching Inside Out

London. He was what is coming up on tonight's show. Making a mint from

parking - we investigate how councils are raking it in by hiking

up parking charges. Parking is becoming the new poll tax. We have

seen in lots of borrowers the charges going up 100%, 150%.

row to recovery - how these victims of torture are using the land to

heal. They have been betrayed by a human

beings so they need to find something that will never betray

them. And, caught in a crowd, we test out the latest technology for

catching criminals. The camera is scanning every face in the crowd.

It I am on our database, in one second it makes the connection and

As many of us will know, parking a car in London can be an infuriating

experience. Around here, Westminster Council's controversial

plan to introduce night time and weekend charges is just the latest

thorn in motorists' sides. To stop things becoming a chaotic free for

all, many parts of the capital introduced controlled parking zones.

In fact, more than 100 such zones have been created in the past five

years. But, with the prices of permits soaring, more and more

residents feel they're being taken for a very expensive ride by their

local council, so we sent Joanna Good to investigate.

High insurance tariffs, the congestion charge, parking fees...

Being a motorist in London is incredibly expensive. And for some

Londoners, owning a car has just become even more costly! Over the

last year, London car owners have seen the price of their parking

permits rise well above the rate of inflation. In some cases, the cost

has more than doubled! It appears there is no free parking left and

drivers are just being taken for a ride. The driving public are cash

cows and the councils will go out of their way to cream as much as

they can off the motorist. parking zone initially was �20 a

year, they've gone 500% or 1000%. Today Janis is hosting a tea party

for her friends and their children. But she has had to fork out for far

more than the cost of the biscuits. The visitors' permits have gone up

from �1 per voucher to �4 per voucher which is just outrageous. I

didn't feel able to ask each visitor for �4 so I end up paying.

The change in price for visitors' permits has left Janice with a

massive annual bill. I use 200 cards every year so that means...

It used to be �200 for the whole year and now that's �800. That's a

staggering 300% increase! On top of this Janice has also been hit with

a price hike on her annual resident's permit. For our own car

we used to pay �40 for the year for a resident's permit and now that's

gone up to �100. I think the price hike is absurd! The residents of

Barnet are not the only ones facing eye-watering increases. We sent a

Freedom of Information request to every borough in the capital. On

average, resident parking permits across London's boroughs have gone

up by 26% in the last three years and the cost of daily visitor

permits by a whopping 42%. Parking is becoming the new poll tax. We've

seen in lots of boroughs, the charges going up 20%, 100% 150%. It

appears to be now more about money and not about parking. Six years

ago, residents in Stroud Green put up a fight when the council tried

to enforce a Car Parking Zone. carried out an extensive campaign

and in most of the roads, Haringey did not introduce a CPZ. But that

of course is when our problems started. The problem is that Stroud

Green has become a mecca for motorists trying to avoid car

parking zones elsewhere. It's called the domino effect. When it

comes to parking there is a domino effect. You get one area close to a

tube station or railway station that needs residential parking.

That scheme is put in and then the commuters actually move further out

and they go to the next street, the next area. What we've now got is a

CPZ just a hundred or so yards away from where we area at the moment

and what that's done is to make parking in our roads absolute hell.

Five years ago, the streets around Paul's house looked like this.

Today they've become a massive car park! They are literally squashed

in like sardines. Jane Forster lives locally and says finding a

space to park is a daily nightmare. I may be driving you around for

hours because we are not going to get out until I manage to park

somewhere. Well let's just go back into your road and see if we can

find somewhere. But we're not going anywhere fast. There's a road block,

caused by nose to tail parked cars. This is what we're having all the

time, and we do have a bus that comes up the road as well. There is

nowhere to pass and nowhere to park because we've got cars both sides.

The community in Stroud Green is so fed up with situations like this

that they've made something of a U- turn. What do you think is the

answer to this horrendous situation? We will have to become

part of the CPZ. I can't see any other solution to it. Are you

worried about the cost and the fact it may go up substantially each

year? I'd rather pay to be able to park than to have the situation

we've got out here now. inclination is to still to say I

don't want a CPZ but there is frankly no alternative. Haringey

said last year said we're increasing our parking charges but

we're simply taking them up to the London average. Of course the

average constantly rises. It does appear in London that car owners

are being attacked from all sides whether they're residents, whether

they're visitors, whether they're shoppers, whether they're theatre

goers. As space in London becomes increasingly tight, it's not just

resident's permits that are soaring. Some local authorities are raking

in the cash simply by extending parking time restrictions. It's

very difficult actually getting into London and transporting my

instrument around. At the moment we are quite lucky because as a

musician I can normally get on to a metered bay from 6.30 onwards and

there is no charge. Vicky Tilson has been performing for years. But

her career in the West End may sadly be coming to an end.

Westminster council are looking to make parking paid up until midnight

daily. On average if I do a gig in central London I might get �50 for

it. If I'm paying �4.80 an hour to park that's over half my gig fee

just gone. It's not just performers who will be affected by the change.

Cleaners, waiters, even those working in the emergency services

will also be hit by the new fees. Of course there will be an impact

but ultimately what we've tried to do is limit the changes that we are

making to a specific time of the day in a small area of Westminster

and if people want to park elsewhere they'll still be able to

park elsewhere for free within a couple for minutes of Oxford Street.

Car Parking Zones are clearly lucrative for local authorities.

Our Freedom of Information request revealed that councils are earning

millions from charging residents to simply park outside their own front

doors! More than �186 million has been raised from parking permits in

London over the past three years. The borough that earned the most,

Wandsworth at �25 million. So what are our councils spending all that

money on? The money that we get as income from parking permits and so

on, we are legally obliged to use it first of all to cover the cost

of a parking scheme and then we are allowed to spend it on other

transport things. We are not allowed to take it and spend it on

social workers or other bits of the council. Many boroughs are using

parking charges for other means. It's not just to administer the

parking scheme. Campaigners in Barnet believe that's exactly what

their local authority is doing. These residents are angry thst

Barnet council has imposed almost a three-fold increase on their

parking permits. Up to �40 a week. We can't do that. They claim the

local authority are using the extra money to unlawfully fund other

services. They've taken their case to the high court. We are asking

the court to consider whether the charges are lawful. What we do not

accept is that they can charge money for parking and increase the

parking charges in order to make up shortfalls in other budgets

elsewhere. Their initial request for a judicial review at the high

court has been rejected. The judge ruled there is no evidence that

Barnet council has acted outside the letter or the spirit of

statutory provisions. The next legal option for the residents is

to make their case at an oral hearing. The Barnet residents'

legal fight is a crucial landmark for all London drivers. If they win,

then maybe more communities will unite and make a stand against

high-parking fees. It you have got a parking story to

share with us, either as a motorist or a resident, get in touch.

Still to come: the regime arrested his father, his mother, his wife,

his four year-old child, and the baby he had never seen. They were

all killed. It was Saddam Hussein. It might sound like something out

of an episode of Spooks, but new technology that recognises the

faces of criminals is now being used to help solve crime in the

capital. Used in the aftermath of the London riots, and with plans to

use it during the 2012 Olympics, this new face print looks set to

become an important tool for police. Wendy Hurrell has been finding out

CCTV has been instrumental in catching the rioters. With 40,000

hours' worth of footage captured on camera, searching through it is a

tedious task. This is some CCTV footage quite high quality it's of

a casino in the Queensway area of Westminster. Code-named Operation

Withern, DCI Mick Neville is using CCTV to identify those involved in

the riots. These offenders not only caused damage to this Casino they

also broke the doorman's arm. officers here have seized the CCTV

and they've spent a long time viewing that and capturing the best

images of the offenders. Then we create a journal called caught on

camera and that's circulated to all our officers and we show it to

criminals who give information. images are also matched to a

central database of known criminals. Identifying a suspect takes time

and manpower. But what if a machine could do the job for you in

seconds? Face Alert is a facial recognition system basically it's a

piece of computer software that matches faces against images on a

database. Tim Noest is the man behind it. Lets not discount CCTV,

particularly with the riots and what's been going on recently, it's

been very very important. What this system does is take it to the next

level. Everyone has a unique face, ultimately what facial recognition

is doing is using a face print a bit like a fingerprint. So how does

it actually work? Let's take my face for example. The computer

software picks out specific facial points such as my eyes, nose and

mouth. It measures between them calculating a unique print of my

face that it can use to identify me The Face Alert camera has been set

up at Charing Cross station. I've been entered onto a watch list as a

suspect. Now let's see what happens when I arrive. The camera is

scanning every face in the crowd and at the same time it's searching

for a match on the database. If I'm on that database, within one second

it will make a connection and trigger an alarm. You can have, say,

10 protesters on the watch list and it can be looking for those people

and it can alert within a second or so. It also gives notes of how to

respond i.e. Whether it's a protestor or a shoplifter or

potentially a suspect. Across the road at Gordon's, the oldest wine

bar in London, this very system is being used to catch bagsnatchers.

Show me these cameras then. Yes, the camera is up there. What

they'll do is pick your face up as you walk in here and when you go

down the stairs. Known criminals are flagged up on a portable screen

when they enter the bar. Every time someone comes in, the system will

look and take a picture of their face, store it in the system and if

a crime is being committed we go back and say if that person comes

in again we'd like to be told. don't want to have any heavies here

or doormen or anything like that. I just wanted to have something that

if someone did come back who had committed a crime before that we

could stop that crime from happening. I'm a great believer in

deterrents rather than actually letting something happen and

sending them off to prison. The Met does use facial recognition and the

Commissioner is keen to embrace the new technology. But there are

limits to using it. It depends on the quality of images in any

situation, be it the riots or any type of crime. If the images are

that high quality, then it can be put through a system and like all

facial recognition systems it compares against a database but

never forget that people are good at identifying other people.

Idris's job is to spot criminals he's one of the Met's best officers

when it comes to identification. Is there something that actually a

human eye picks up on more than what a computer can? The style of

walk, the mannerisms and sometimes there's even a look in the eyes.

Are they expecting something as you are identifying them? It goes both

ways. So let's put Face Alert to the test. Can a computer really

beat the trained human eye when it comes to face recognition? Battling

it out for the human eye is Supreme Spotter Idris versus Tim and his

face recognition machine. Earlier today we enrolled 30 people on the

Face Alert database. Six of them will appear in the station over the

next half hour and we're going to see just how many the computer

picks up. How confident are you? Quietly confident, man versus

machine and today machine should prevail. Idris has been given just

five minutes to memorise the same 30 images. But who's more

effective? So that's time up, they are all in the computer of your

mind now. Hopefully. Well we'll put it to the test. I'm confident. Nine

minutes in, here comes our first suspect. One all at the moment. You

got one. One more to the machine. A girl there. This lady here. So, at

the end of that experiment, six people have come through the

computer successfully matched four of them. Idris here successfully

matched two of them so it shows that there are limitations on both

sides still impressive though. Were you impressed with the machine?

Yeah, to pick out in that sort of crowd it would be good in football

grounds or in the future. It will be a good tool. So, Tim, four out

of six for the computer how do you feel about that? Well we got 400%

match, the other two we didn't see come into the camera view so that

was disappointing. The key problem seemed to be this line of sight

thing, it has to be caught on the camera for you to make that match.

Of course if you were to properly seal this off then you would need

more cameras to cover the areas and we were restricted due to the

access around here of where we can film and where we can't. So there

are limitations but as our experiment shows a system that

scans 25,000 faces every second has enormous potential. I've no doubts

as time progresses it will get better and better. We only have to

look at the mobile phones we used in the 1980s and what we've got now.

As far as facial recognition improving, the more images we can

feed into that as the standard of facial recognition gets better. If

it can deal with lower quality images then that's even better, but

I think we've got to make sure the public are assured that we are

using it to target criminals. plans to use this type of system

more and more at major events like the Olympics, criminals beware -

Fascinating stuff, though nipping out for a sneaky pint one never be

the same again. Who knows who could be watching? Allotments in London

are scarcer than gold dust, but for those lucky enough to have one,

they are at great weight of that being fit and active, with a great

way of growing food. But there is one allotment in Barnard that

offers something unique and incredibly valuable for people who

work the land, a way for them to escape the horrors of this past as

victims of torture. Some viewers may find the accounts in this film

disturbing. This ramshackle place is full of tranquillity and beauty,

but there are gardeners here getting a lot more out of this soil

than just the flowers and vegetables they grow. I come here

because of the conflict between the Tutsi and the food to in my country,

Burundi. I am growing some potatoes, carrots. I am from Sierra Leone. We

are growing lettuce, tomatoes and we grow spring onions and all sorts

of vegetables. I was a carpenter and teacher in Cameroon. When I see

maize growing like this I feel like it just reminds me of my country.

His allotment is a council owned site and the charity Freedom From

Torture rents six plots here. They are used to aid the well-being of

people from all over the world and their stories are hardly does of

typical gardeners. I leave the Ivory Coast because the war started

and because I was in a political movement. All my family was killed

and I saved my life to come here. After killing my father, a gang of

boys and soldiers kept coming to our house, beating us, as my

husband was burnt alive in the presence of my children, my mum and

myself. I had to run to the bullish for safety. Those people came, they

started raping me, beating me. They left me half dead. I met a man, he

told me he is going to free me from the country. I am taking you to my

friends in this country. There were four men, they would force me to

have sex, they would rape me. They locked me in the house for three

and-a-half years. One of the commanders of the Revolutionary

United Front was threatening to wipe my entire family and he

demonstrated that by burning my dad's house by killing members of

my family whilst I was there. When he came there he arrived at the

house... When he came back at the house... Sorry about that... He

stripped everyone naked and asked everyone to come out and raped all

the women including my grandmother. I arrived in the UK in 2007.

received a message of the remaining members of my family have been

killed, my dad and my little sister. Two psychotherapists and a

horticulturalist work with these gardeners using nature to lift them

from the depths of their despair. bring them into the allotments

straight away. That calms of their mind, calms of their whole being. I

cannot calm them down by what I say, it is also what they do, and what

the land does, through working on the land. The biggest problem is

they are so involved in their emotions. They are full of fear and

anxieties and terror and it overwhelms them. There is nothing

left of them, just that intense emotion. They come and suddenly

they care about plants, about watering, about something else.

approach is to do anything that the client wants to try. You can grow

grapes, you can grow potatoes, and there is a reliability in the

natural world. Because they have been betrayed by human beings they

need to find something which does not betray them and will never

betray them. The victims of torture are referred to the charity by

doctors and lawyers and are often so traumatised that sending them

straight on to the allotment would be too much for them, so their

first received therapy in a specially designed garden in

Finsbury Park. Mary Raphaely works with the most vulnerable. There is

one plant that stands right out. The young man who planted it came

from a Middle Eastern country where he was imprisoned and very badly

tortured. What the regime did was they arrested his brother, his

mother, his wife, his four-year-old child and the baby he had never

seen and they were all killed. It was Saddam Hussein. The first day

he came we planted three plants in a pot and I said, who a day? He

told me the names of his wife and two children. We needed to plant a

shrub that would last, because those were just plans that would

last the season. He said it must be evergreen and have tiny flowers

because his little face was so small. Torture destroys, fractures

and fragments and so what people have to do is gather themselves

together again and that is a lot of what we are doing here. I have been

attending some psychotherapy assassins and finally I started

developing my confidence defaults. Before I could not talk the way I

am talking. When you force yourself to engage yourself doing something

continuously you are concentrating on one particular thing. For

example if you are doing weeding, you make sure you concentrate on

putting the weeding downwards and you do not just pick the leaves.

Your mind is connected with what you are doing. It has given me life.

I was with a woman who was so severely tortured she hadn't spoken

for three years. She was sitting and watering the plants, no

movement, no feeling, and I encouraged her to splash my feet a

little. I looked at her and I have never seen it so vividly. Suddenly

it was as if somebody turned on a dull light switch in her eyes. She

took the hose and soaked me from head to toe and screamed, laughed,

and she could not stop herself. We were all stunned and we were all

crying and laughing because it was as if something just broke through.

I compare a plant growing with my growing, human growing, human being

growing, so it is very, very wonderful. Most of the time when

I'm in my room I'd get nightmares. I feel traumatised, I feel lonely.

But when I am with people in my community, I feel cheerful. You

know when you have lost all your family and you do not have a family

in the world, you get friends and such people all care, you feel

really you are back with your family. Now these are my family.

That is nearly all for it this evening, but before we go, here is

a quick taste of next week's show. Cosmetic procedures gone bad. We

expose the dangers world of cut- price treatments. My chest was

covered in red burn marks. You know when you plant and animal?

reveal the shocking amounts of rubbish they are dumping in the

Thames. You are seeing less than two week's rubbish just by Big Ben.

We reckon in a typical year that could be 1000 cubic metres.

will this new mountain bike circuit be rough and tough enough for the

Olympic Games? It is tough, fun and fast and it will be a great show