COMMENT: Tow-away Labour is now the Tops

1.38.18pm BST (GMT +0100) Mon 17th Aug 2009

Local residents demanding a fairer parking regime have despaired at Labour Lambeth over their last three and a half years in office as they've broken all previous records for parking income, parking scams, clamps and for complaints. And now Lambeth has broken even this dodgy record tally and is now officially the Tow-away Capital in the Capital.

Lambeth's own highly-selective PR department tried to spin the story that ticket numbers had fallen in the borough - and so it has because tickets have fallen all over London - but what Labour's spin crucially tried to hide was that it had just taken the title for towing away the largest number of vehicles of any London Borough.

A massive 7,238 vehicles were towed away, according to official statistics, last year - which is higher even than Westminster City Council and Transport for London the body that operates the capital's Red Routes.

Labour's cabinet member for tow-aways said that only dangerously parked vehicles were ever towed away, but we've heard of numerous reports from residents who have said that their car was not even remotely dangerously parked. And there's a suspicion that you only have to be ticketed to risk being towed away to some hell-hole pound in East London.

In one recent high-profile case that hit the headlines residents in Palace Road on the Streatham and Norwood borders, who had already suffered a major burst water main that had flooded their homes and the noise and disruption of engineers blocking off the road to repair it found Council parking wardens descending like vultures to ticket and tow-away vehicles they claimed were parked dangerously in a road going nowhere.

Local Lib Dem councillors interceded quickly on residents' behalf and the police were called to see-off the wardens who were acting like a rabid pack of Hyenas.

Even Labour could not spin its way out of the awkward fact that while the number of tickets may have fallen overall, mysteriously, the income generated by their 'fairer' parking was the highest for five years, according to a recent story in the local press.