The Local Government Association is comprised of lying arseholes, then. These uncollected fines do not “cost” anything. Nothing has been taken away and no legitimate contract broken. There is no cost, merely less money stolen by the state. This is not a cost, it is a reduction in the rate of theft. The less the state gets, the less it has to piss up the wall. So, on balance, this is a good thing, not a bad one.
Nope.
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Having been in the business may I offer that because of processing and administrative staff costs, these ‘fines’ actually fall as a cost not a revenue raiser. Councils, at least in my experience, do not actually make much money off parking tickets. On and off street parking revenues are where the real money comes from.
For every two on street enforcement officers (Who need to be paid, equipped, employers NI etc) there is an administrative clerk sitting behind a desk all day (Who needs to be paid blah-blah-blah)
Here’s the skinny; the longer a Fixed Penalty Notice remains unpaid, or better still, the more it is contested, the more expensive it is. If you want to cut council revenue from FPN’s, follow this method; To qualify for the ‘discounted rate’ simply contest the initial issue before the initial two weeks ‘grace period’ is up. The issuing authority must then give you another two weeks to pay up at the ‘discounted rate’ after you receive a rejection of appeal notice. Escalate to the parking ombudsman (PATAS http://www.patas.gov.uk/), that will give you another two weeks, which will reduce the tickets proportional revenue to the issuing authority. Then, and only then should you cough up at the ‘discounted rate’ if none of your appeals have been accepted. Do this, and because of processing costs it actually cost the issuer money. Cunning, what?
If you don’t reply to the parking ticket issue, issuers don’t have to go through the expensive and time consuming appeals process and end up block dumping tickets (FPN’s) onto debt collection agencies after the issued ticket has been rubber stamped via Northampton. So councils do actually lose money. Most of the costs are purely administrative caused by ticket issue.
Hope this helps.
Jax hits the nail on the head below. Sure, the department is a cost. Not receiving fines isn’t. If no one ever parks illegally, that wouldn’t be a cost. That said, I’m all for making it difficult for the buggers, so thanks for the advice… š
If you lived in my town then you’d be crying out for motorists to get nicked for parking. It’s an absolute bloody nightmare made worse by wardens who only do the council bits and ignore yellow line infringements and PCSO’s who do the opposite. Bring back traffic wardens who nick ’em all!
I live and work in Bristol. I can’t say it is a huge problem and certainly don’t see swathes of foreign registered vehicles parked illegally – so this is a non-problem. Shroud waving by the usual suspects.
I used to live in Easton, in the 80’s, in a house condemned by Shelter. Twas a shit hole then. (house and the borough). I suspect it hasn’t improved. š
Itās Newspeak, isnāt it? The word ācostā these days is used in any situation where the proper terminology should actually be āmissing out on.ā Which, as you point out, LR, isnāt the same thing at all. I regularly āmiss out onā a lottery win, but that doesnāt mean that Iām several million pounds poorer because of it ā Iām just not several million pounds richer. Moreās the pity ā¦
Indeed.
On a slightly different tack. I live in New Zealand. And certainly the imposition of speeding fines is aggressively policed. They say it’s all about safety, but in reality it’s about revenue. The NZ police have bugger or else to do. In the first 6 months of living here we racked up 3 speeding fines which cost us $400- Ouch. Now we are wiser and very careful how we drive. If you drive 4km over the 100km limiit, you get pinged.
How accurate are speedometers required to be in New Zealand? In the UK, the leeway is so high, your car might be telling you it’s doing 70 mph., while actually doing less than 60. The UK only requires that speedometers never show a speed *lower* than the actual speed of the vehicle. Aside from that, the accuracy can be all over the place.
(Incidentally, this explains why you often see people trundling along some way below the speed limit: the car’s speedo might well be giving a very inaccurate reading.)
Worse still is the UK’s annual vehicle roadworthiness test (known as the “MOT”) has no requirement at all for checking the accuracy of the speedometer. On an older vehicle it might have drifted way off, showing 70 mph, when actually doing 75 or more. You’d never know until you got whacked by a speeding fine.
Revenue from speeding fines is likely to be put under threat from the driverless cars that were referred to in the previous post. Authorities in various places are worried that computer controlled cars will completely refrain from breaking the rules of the road, be it box junctions, bus lanes, speed limits or parking restrictions.
If that’s all they think driverless vehicles* will affect, they’ve got a really, really big shock coming. Forget low-emission and zero-emission electric vehicles: it’s the self-driving part that’ll radically change how we look at transport. It’ll be the most disruptive technology since the coming of the railways.
(* The technology isn’t limited to cars; it can easily be applied to almost any road-going vehicle, including buses, vans and trucks.)