NO-HEADLINE

Cowboy wheelclampers will be regulated by a Labour Government, Labour's home affairs spokesman, Jack Straw, said last night. Since publishing a consultation paper in 1993, the Government has taken no action on the clampers, who are able to hold motorists to ransom if they park on private land.

However, Mr Straw said Labour would introduce statutory regulation as part of plans to curb the private security industry. He said it was intolerable that clampers had threatened to hold a woman's three-year-old daughter as surety while she collected a pounds 60 penalty from a bank and that a hearse should be clamped outside a church, with the corpse still in the back. "Everybody, apart from the cowboys and the Tory party, wants these rogue clampers regulated," he said.