Parking Income Soars to £2 million Record High

2.17.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 7th Sep 2007

Parking fines have hit a new record under Labour

A London Borough which pledged to introduce fairer parking has just announced record income just shy of £2 million in a single month, according to an official report.

Labour-run Lambeth Council went to the polls in May 2006 pledging to introduce a fairer parking system for motorists - yet ever since it has piled on the agony and the tickets. While in June ( latest available figures ) it came close to hitting a massive £2 million in fine income in a single month.

Newspapers have been rife with Lambeth Parking horror stories about blood donor vans being ticketed outside the Town Hall, a cancer patient suffering cramp after treatment being ticketed, a breast-feeding mother being ticketed, motorists parked when police sealed off an area after a shooting in Brixton being ticketed, motorists being trapped in a yellow box by faulty traffic lights while being filmed by a spy car, and alleged doctored film evidence at a road narrowing in Norwood which has netted 63 tickets a day, six day's a week since February last.

Labour also used spin during the 2006 election to pretend they were scrapping targets for parking tickets yet all official reports show graphs measured against budgeted income.

Liberal Democrat Group Chair on Lambeth Council, Cllr Brian Palmer, said, "Motorists have been completely conned if they ever thought Lambeth Labour was going to play fair with them. A budgeted income is a target by any other name because performance is measured around that. As usual Labour is playing with words."

Cllr Palmer added, "If Labour was really being fair their income would actually be expected to fall. Instead it has gone up continually and is now markedly up on a year ago. At nearly £2 million in a single month there is now so much income pouring in that they'll have to recalibrate the graph soon just to make room for all their ill-gotten gains."

And it's not just income that's soaring. In June calls and complaints to the Council from angry motorists rocketed by 26% according to the same official statistics.