£44K PARKING TICKETS FOR JUST ONE DRIVER
Worst offenders owe fortune in fines
Just one vehicle got 282 tickets in Ealing, West London. None was paid so the local council is now owed £43,915.
The second-worst offender, according to a national study, was a driver in Westminster who had the same number of penalties but owes £27,360.
A VW driver owes Harrow council in North West London £31,007 for 187 unpaid tickets from last year.
And it’s not just London that has serial parking offenders who ignore tickets. A Vauxhall in Reading, Berks, racked up 177 and an Audi TT in Brighton amassed 147 fines, totalling £15,642.
In Southport, Merseyside, a luxury Mercedes C220 also got 147 tickets and owes £7,520 as none has been paid.
And in Devon, a Vauxhall Astra picked up 71 tickets in Torquay. They are unpaid so Torbay council wants £4,070.
Councils revealed the penalties, typically £80 or £130, under freedom of information laws. The fines are often cut by 50% if paid quickly.
Most of the unpaid tickets are by the worst offenders – often because the DVLA has no up-to-date records of a car’s registered keeper or the vehicle has a foreign number plate and finding the owner proves difficult.
Bailiffs instructed by councils to enforce the fines can sometimes clamp or confiscate a vehicle to claw the money back.
In other cases, illegal parkers pay all their tickets, giving the impression fines are an acceptable expense. A motorist in Kensington and Chelsea, West London, paid 123 fines, amounting to £16,850 and the 124th was cancelled. In Manchester a Range Rover driver paid off 172 parking tickets. David Renard, transport chief of the Local Government Association, said: “Councils use all the powers available to them to tackle the small number of people who flout these rules over a prolonged period of time and this is reflected in the size of fines.”