CAPITA, the company that runs London’s congestion charging, is in talks with Edinburgh City Council over the introduction of a similar scheme.

Paul Pindar, chief executive of Capita, said there was a long way to go before the Scottish capital adopted congestion charging but he was hopeful that Capita was well placed to win the contract.

Capita’s congestion charge contract with Transport for London is worth about £230 million. The value of the contract was recently renegotiated and could be worth £31 million more to Capita, after the success of the system led to a higher volume of calls to Capita’s call centre in Coventry.

In October Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, revealed that he came close to terminating Capita’s contract because of customer service failures. But termination would have cost TfL £81 million.

If Edinburgh takes up the scheme, TfL will not see any benefit as it has signed away intellectual property rights for the congestion charge.

TfL agreed to a non-exclusive licence for Capita’s software and the outsourcing group has promoted the system to other interested cities in the UK and overseas.

In yesterday’s trading statement, the company said that it was on target to meet analysts’ expectations of pre-tax profit of £121 million on turnover of £1.07 billion.

Shares in the company slipped 2½p to 248½p, as analysts remarked on the absence of new contracts.

Capita also revealed that it was in talks with the Home Office to renegotiate its £400 million contract with the Criminal Records Bureau.

The negotiations are likely to see the contract swell in value for Capita, as it has been swamped by paper-based applications after setting up a system that was supposed to be largely online. Discussions are expected to be concluded this month.

Capita first encountered difficulties with the Criminal Records Bureau contract in August 2002, when Estelle Morris, the then Secretary of State for Education, said that all new teachers and teaching assistants had to be vetted by the new bureau before the start of the academic year. This move followed the deaths of the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham.