The TaxPayers' Alliance - Campaign

Daylight robbery

Can anyone tell me why this is anything other than a crime?

Some councils have earned hundreds of thousands of pounds by enforcing unlawful traffic and parking restrictions, the BBC has learned.

Fines are said to have been levied despite incorrect road markings and on parking bays which are too small.

Councils have been levying charges and fines that are simply not legal - and it looks as though the amount could run into the millions. Haringey, Sheffield and Camden alone have unlawfully taken at least £715,000.

You want to know the worst part? London Councils don't even seem to think there's anything wrong with that.

Nick Lester from London Councils, which represents authorities in the capital, argued that handing the cash back was not necessarily in the public interest.

He said: "Where there's only a technical error, a small issue, where no-one was genuinely misled, the council can take the view, is it really a good use of public money to repay the penalty?

"Is that really what they should be doing?"

Mr Lester* should take a swift lesson in the law. It's not "public money" being used to repay people, it's a question of giving back the money councils wrongly extorted from them. The distinction about it supposedly being "only a technical error" is also false; the law, especially when it comes to levying fines and road regulations, has to be specific and it has to be followed properly or else it means nothing. Something is either a crime or it's not - if it's not a crime then you can't fine them. Fining the innocent isn't a technical error, it's a total injustice.

If it's true that some councils continued charging fines even after they discovered they had no legal right, heads should roll and criminal investigations should follow.

The article is also very revealing about the flaws in the National Parking Adjudication Service (NPAS). Instead of insisting councils go back through their records to repay every fine they illegally charged, they recommend motorists to appeal their fine if they think it was unjust. It's amazing that even the Chief Parking Adjudicator recognises that the system is weighted to deter people from appealing:

she said that many motorists would not want to take the risk of taking their case to tribunal because it would mean losing their 50% discount - and that the onus was on local authorities to put things right.

This has lifted the lid on a serious problem. Councils can't be allowed just to decide what should be a crime and what shouldn't, and they must not be allowed to just flout the law like this. It's completely wrong that there is a penalty for appealing, too - especially considering that 60% of appeals succeed, which suggests that wrongly levied fines are endemic.

*You can contact Nick Lester here to put him right, should you wish: nick.lester@londoncouncils.gov.uk

The people speak - but who's going to listen?

Last night's Newsnight debate in Crewe ahead of the by-election produced a wonderful image that embodied the gulf between politicians and the public on motoring taxes. After a heated debate on fuel duty in which all of the main parties steered clear of promising a cut in the taxes on drivers, Jeremy Paxman asked the audience to raise their hands in a straw poll:

How many people think that the rate of duty on fuel should be cut?

The answer was stark:

As Paxman put it, that is "almost everyone" except, notably, for those two ladies in the front row - who are the Lib Dem and Labour candidates (it should be noted in the interests of balance that the Conservative candidate was for some reason absent, so we can't be sure how he would have voted - in the debate, Michael Gove criticised the cost of motoring but stopped short of promising a tax cut).

There is a severe divide between the views of ordinary people around the country on this issue, i.e. that taxes on motoring are exploitatively and unsustainably high, and those of the main political parties in the Westminster bubble - who are broadly signed up to a strategy of taxing motoring until the pips squeak. As Paxman demonstrated in the debate, even when the Conservatives are talking tough about the burden of fuel duty they have yet to acknowledge the need for a tax cut.

It cannot be healthy for the views of representatives to be so divorced from the views of the people. This is not simply timidity on behalf of the political class, it is in many cases a severe separation and fundamental disagreement over the issue. Punishing drivers with heavy taxation has become gospel in Westminster, whilst the idea of tax cuts on fuel is for far too many MPs a taboo. It is a symptom of the continuing failure of the political parties to connect with the experiences of ordinary taxpayers, and the tendency of some to turn a blind eye to things that challenge their belief in ever higher green taxation.

As our research on green taxes has shown, drivers already pay far more in tax than is necessary to offset even the worst-case estimates of their carbon emissions. There is no sound argument for pushing that cost up further. Electorally, we have also shown that fuel duty hits floating voters in marginal constituencies hardest, so there would be a real benefit to any Party that signed up to reducing fuel duty. You only need to look at the media and public reaction to Darling's unfair and ineffective - in environmental terms - Budget tax hike on Vehicle Excise Duty to see that this an area where votes can be won.