Street wardens employed through local councils are allegedly being instructed to identify vulnerable people and pressure them into paying £175 penalties for minor offences such as flicking away a cigarette butt, an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has found.
Training reportedly includes guidance on racial profiling, while officers are also said to be encouraged to wait outside hospitals, where patients hurrying to appointments can become easy targets.
An undercover reporter who was offered a role in Bristol with 3GS, one of the UK’s largest private council enforcement firms, was told he would be expected to issue at least five fines during each shift or face the possibility of losing the job.
Local authorities bring in environmental enforcement contractors to issue Fixed Penalty Notices, or FPNs, for a range of offences, including graffiti, fly-tipping, illegal parking, incorrectly presented bins and failing to clean up after dogs.
However, the overwhelming majority of these fines — around 95 per cent — are reportedly issued for discarded cigarette ends. The penalties usually stand at £175, reduced to £100 if paid within ten days, and have led critics to dub the wardens “the cigarette police”.
The investigation also claims to have found:
Grandmother Diane Goodfield, 74, and her husband Robert, who has dementia, were approached outside Bristol Eye Hospital. A single mother, pictured left in a pink top and shorts, was also being fined while her son was undergoing surgery
Diane was taking her husband into the hospital when she was ‘pounced on’ by the enforcement officer
A lone mother was stopped from comforting her son after surgery due to being fined
The revelations come amid growing anger over aggressive enforcement tactics after two private wardens working for Harrow Council were filmed threatening to assault a man who had intervened in a dispute with a teenage girl.
One told him: ‘When I’m not in uniform, I’m gonna knock you the f*** out and rip your teeth out.’
Bristol City Council, now run by the Greens, has contracted 3GS to carry out its Clean Streets Enforcement Campaign since 2019, when it dropped Kingdom – the firm at the centre of the Harrow controversy.
3GS, which describes itself as an ‘ethical enforcement’ company, has always denied paying staff commission, insisting it acts with ‘social responsibility’ and reinvests its profits into education.
But our reporter found that FPNs generate profit for the firm and that staff are promised a £10 bonus for every fine beyond a daily target.
A senior manager told The MoS that the ‘business model is sustainable by us issuing the fixed penalties and generating revenue… so we need to be proactive when we are out and about.
‘We encourage people to issue as many FPNs as possible and obviously there’s opportunities to progress within the company, opportunities to increase your earnings’.
Councils are not charged for 3GS’s services. Instead, the firm keeps the bulk of the revenue from fines, handing councils a cut of about 25 per cent. Around 500 FPNs are issued every month in Bristol alone.
One man was made to pay £175, despite picking up his cigarette and throwing it in the bin immediately
Workers are told to cover up their company badge with a camera recorder so the public are unaware they are working for a private firm and not exclusively for the council
Jagjeet has worked at 3GS for eight years and was described by a senior company manager as a ‘cracking team leader’
Diane usually carries a pocket ashtray and said she felt she was being ‘picked on’ because she was an ‘easy target’
The scale of the fines issued became clear when our reporter took part in a trial shift with 3GS and shadowed a ‘team leader’, Jagjeet, who has issued about 30,000 FPNs since 2018.
During the trial shift, 3GS officers targeted vulnerable members of the public outside Bristol Eye Hospital. Jagjeet described it as a ‘good spot’ to fine people, as patients were often rushing to appointments.
Jagjeet issued his first fine within minutes when 74-year-old grandmother Diane Goodfield – who was rushing to an appointment with her dementia-stricken husband, Richard – made the mistake of dropping a cigarette butt.
‘The council can prosecute you but we’re not looking to do that,’ Jagjeet told them. ‘I’ll need to verify your details – can I just get you to come over to the side?’
Goodfield replied: ‘I’m just taking him to the hospital – can you get me on the way out?’ But Jagjeet pressed on, asking for her ID and address.
She later told this newspaper: ‘I threw my cigarette down because there were already 150 to 200 on the floor.
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‘If it’s such a problem, why don’t they put an ashtray outside? There was a man next to me in his thirties who did the same as me. But they didn’t go after him. I’m an easy target. I felt picked on because of my age. This is just a money-making racket.’
Goodfield, a mother of two, is waiting for the fine to arrive at her home on the outskirts of Bristol, where she cares for Richard, a retired engineer.
Moments later, officers approached a lone mother who dropped a cigarette end as she rushed to be with her son who was coming out of surgery.
She offered to pay the £175 fine on the spot but was held up for eight minutes when the contractors said they could not verify her address.
‘My son is literally in hospital, so I’ve got to go in,’ she said. ‘I did apologise and said I’m happy to pick it up. My son is literally about to come out of surgery.
‘There are more criminal acts in the world than me throwing a cigarette. Can I not just pay a penalty now? I’m so stressed without this. I really have got to go.’
An officer replied: ‘The two addresses you provided are incorrect – we need your details. You need to be honest.’
The mother said: ‘This is a joke. I don’t have anything because my son is literally in surgery. I’m happy to pay you right now.’
Afterwards, Jagjeet – described by a 3GS boss as a ‘cracking team leader’ – said: ‘This hospital can be a good spot now and again. People are often in a rush to try to get to their appointment.’
He added: ‘Anything over five FPNs, they usually give us an extra £10 per ticket. So, if you’re someone that’s constantly performing, getting seven or eight fines a day, it will work out quite nicely for you. You can probably end up getting an extra £200 to £500 or £600 a month.’
Last month, the Daily Mail investigated the industry after enforcement officers Umar Siddiq (left) and Joseph Fernandes were sacked after they were filmed threatening and abusing a man on Northolt Road, South Harrow
A 3GS business manager said: ‘[Jagjeet] runs a good team, looks after them – and I look after him’.
During the trial shift, the reporter was advised to pretend to call the police and threaten people with arrest if they refused to hand over their details.
‘Sometimes if someone walks off, I put pressure on them,’ Jagjeet said. ‘I’ll spend five minutes following them. So, if they start walking, I’ll say if you don’t cooperate you are committing a further offence. I’ll say, “Can I get a police officer over here? We’ve got someone here who won’t cooperate… when the police arrive, you’re going to be prosecuted for up to £2,500. You have an opportunity now where if you want to pay you can do it now”.’
Asked whether officers actually do call the police, he admitted: ‘No. We did have a constable but recently I’ve not had much luck getting in contact.
‘Now we just say, “Can I get the police?”, but we’re not going to call them. Just from mentioning it, people are shaken.’
Shortly afterwards, a 3GS contractor was filmed pretending to call the police as he followed a couple accused of dropping a cigarette.
Jagjeet also described telling people they would be unable to board public transport unless they cooperated and said he had threatened taxi drivers by telling them they would be reported to the licensing authority if they drove off with a passenger who had failed to give their details.
‘If anyone gets in any car or taxi, I say to the taxi driver that unfortunately he’s committed an offence and if you drive off, you’ll be reported to the taxi licensing authority,’ he said. ‘And if someone drives off, we can tell them we’ll do a DVLA check and they’ll get a fine in the post.’
Asked whether people can actually be prosecuted for walking away, he admitted: ‘Nah, not really. There’s nothing in place for us to prosecute or anything like that.’
The 3GS officers, who wear uniforms bearing 3GS and council badges, are told to place a camera holder over the contractor’s logo so the public believe they are dealing exclusively with the council.
‘We don’t tell people we are a third party,’ Jagjeet said. ‘Under here it says 3GS. So we have magnets covering it and just show the council logo. People [would] think just because it’s a private party, they don’t have to cooperate.
‘With a tourist, we don’t verify addresses. We see a passport… and explain that they have to pay before they leave the country because if you leave and don’t deal with it, you will get stopped.’
Siddiq was filmed turning off his body-worn camera while his colleague told the man to come across the road so he could ‘rip his teeth out’
The reporter was also told officers use racial profiling to select their targets.
‘Students from abroad – Indian, Pakistani students – are good as gold,’ continued Jagjeet. ‘You get a lot of black people – they don’t cooperate a lot. You get Arab people – they have no respect for nothing.
‘Chinese students used to be really good but now they are hit and miss because they’ve seen stuff about us on social media.’
Six people were handed FPNs during our shadow shift including two outside Bristol coach station – among them a man in his seventies attending a hospital appointment for detached retinas.
One man in a park picked up his cigarette he had dropped and disposed of it in a bin immediately, but was fined regardless.
It turns out that the council itself is prone to exaggeration, stating on its website that, if a suspect refuses to give their details, officers ‘will be able to use the information they’ve recorded on their body cameras’. This is ‘often enough to identify someone’.
But Jagjeet admitted this was untrue, and that the claim is used to pressure people into cooperating.
‘There’s nothing in place to be able to identify people,’ he said. ‘What I say to people is that you will be identified from the footage. We use that as a way to get them.’
The council’s website also states that 3GS ‘will use any extra funds from FPNs for education and promotional purposes’.
This is despite the fact that the firm puts much of the revenue in its own coffers. The firm pulled out of a previous contract in Bradford in 2019, claiming it was ‘not profitable enough’.
A spokesman for Bristol City Council said: ‘The matters raised by this investigation have been shared with our contractor.
‘Council officers are making enquiries to identify any issues that are inconsistent with the contract we hold with the contractor, and should any claims be proven further action will be taken.’
3GS did not respond to requests for comment.
