Taranto Systems and the London Borough of Islington have been working tother since 2003 and have developed a parking partnership that delivers not only for Islington Council but also for the citizens of the borough. During this time, the partnership has developed beyond a conventional software contract into a genuine collaboration. Over the last two years, Taranto and Islington have focused on the productivity and efficiency benefits of AI, collaborating to develop new functionality and test prototype AI-enabled tools.
Serving over 215,000 residents, Islington is one of London’s largest and most complex parking operations. The parking team issues approximately 453,000 Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) a year and delivers one of the most sophisticated permit schemes in the country, with around 524 distinct permit price points and roughly 5,000 permit transactions a month. Despite having the lowest car ownership in London outside the City of London, Islington used Taranto Permits to raise almost £7.5 million in permit income over the last 12 months.
Islington uses the Taranto Parking Enforcement platform for PCN processing, permit management and moving traffic enforcement. The burden of parking enforcement in Islington has increased significantly over the past five years, with PCN issuance rising from around 300,000 a year to over 450,000. The permit team handles approximately 5,000 transactions a month, and because Islington’s permit scheme is emissions-based, with weight and battery factors for electric vehicles, the administration involved is complex. Moving traffic enforcement has added a further administrative overhead, because in London, PCNs cannot be served electronically and each one must be sent by post.
Despite this expansion of the workload, the parking team has kept pace with the growth, which the council attributes to platform improvements and collaborative working practices with Taranto.
"We work together on a lot of parking projects and have removed the boundaries to collaborative working."
A collaborative review of the debt collection process, including data cleansing, earlier-stage collection and resolving an issue with bailiff message uploads, has streamlined PCN progression from issue to resolution. As a result, Islington increased its debt recovery income from £1.1 million to just over £2.1 million in the last financial year. Parking revenue generated from using Taranto was over £28 million in the last 12 months.
Improvements to the Taranto permit system, including an updated web portal with responsive design and improved accessibility for mobile devices, delivered an additional £1 million in permit income over the same period. Permit income has grown by approximately £3 million over two years in total.
As well as the day-to-day management of parking enforcement, the partnership has evolved towards considering how artificial intelligence can improve productivity and efficiency in the parking back-office and also enhance the end-customer experience. Two projects illustrate this approach in practice.
Transfer of Liability, where PCN liability is moved from a leasing or hire company to the driver of the vehicle, has become increasingly time-consuming for Islington’s back-office. With around 30% of new vehicle registrations now purchased on finance or lease and over two million leased vehicles on UK roads, Islington’s volume of Transfer of Liability cases has grown substantially while staffing levels have remained static.
Working together, the teams identified that AI could transform the process. The resulting tool, Taranto ToL Assist, reads lease or hire agreements and driving licences submitted with a representation, extracts the relevant data points automatically, validates them against council policy, generates the correct decision letter and progresses the PCN within the Taranto enforcement system. Human oversight is retained throughout: The final decision on each case remains with the caseworker, but the tool removes the need to read through pages of documentation, re-key data or manually draft correspondence.
Based on operational testing so far, Craig Malpas estimates that the tool could reduce time spent on Transfer of Liability by up to 90% and increase officer throughput from approximately 6 cases an hour to between 20 and 30, freeing skilled caseworkers to focus on more complex work.
“We have a great working relationship and there are many more examples of collaboration over the last couple of years”
Islington has also been operationally testing Taranto’s AI-enabled Chatbot. Taranto shared a working prototype, with Islington providing structured operational feedback that has helped to shape the product.
The Chatbot sits on the self-service portal and is designed to give quick, accurate, tailored responses to PCN enquiries, helping motorists understand their options, answering questions intelligently, and reducing both unnecessary appeals and inbound call volumes to the contact centre.
The Taranto and Islington teams are already scoping the next generation of AI solutions. Over more than 20 years the partnership between Islington and Taranto has delivered tangible benefits to both parties: Operational productivity improvements and increased revenue for Islington, and real-world domain knowledge with a live operational testing ground for new product development for Taranto.
The partnership of Islington Council and Taranto Systems is looking forward to a successful collaboration on new projects in the future.
“We’re really happy with Taranto Chatbot. We tested it operationally and were very pleased with the results. I think it will be a really useful operational tool to provide users with quick, accurate, tailored information online, reducing call volumes and the number of PCN appeals.”