Parking fines rocket because of the centre's addiction to power
Conservatives like Eric Pickles espouse freedom for local councils, but they have done nothing to show they mean it
Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi
The Sunday queue at Lots Road car pound might be an upmarket soup kitchen. Yuppies and hedgies line up to retrieve the previous week's towed away Porsches and BMWs. Many victims are foreigners, relieved at their vehicles being not stolen but merely impounded, a relief that turns to rage when they find they must pay £400 (and steeply rising) to get their cars back.
The car pound is like a prison entrance, with grilles, jangling keys and warnings of dire penalties for assaulting staff. These are the badlands of south Chelsea, where traffic wardens, car thieves and basement bandits roam free. Here the banana republic of Kensington and Chelsea operates its notorious "five-day scam", the time period before basement builders can suspend residents bays and thus enable the local council to tow away cars left for even just a week.
Parking yielded £28m this year, a 30% rise on three years ago. All English councils were todayreported to have increased profits from parking to £635m. The City of Westminster garners more revenue from drivers – £42m – than it does from council tax payers. Perhaps unsurprisingly it recorded some 300 physical attacks on traffic wardens last year.
Parking fines have become a local super-tax. It is what the rich pay for property taxes being kept so low. Meters and fines are the last serious gusher of "uncapped" local revenue. While many councils put on bureaucratic fat under Labour – even "cut" council budgets are overall back only to the hardly ascetic era of 2008-09, according to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy – all are under financial stress. Car drivers are low-hanging fruit, ripe for picking.
All this has infuriated the local government secretary, Eric Pickles. He fumes: "It shows why we need to review and rein in unfair town hall parking rules. The law is clear that parking is not a tax or cash cow for town hall officers." Only last week, Barnet council was stopped by a judge from being able to divert parking revenue to more hard-pressed services. Parliament had stipulated such money should go only on helping traffic.
Pickles regularly inveighs against overzealous traffic wardens. In a gesture of crude populism, he recently suggested that people be allowed to park "for 15 minutes" on double-yellow lines, evoking instant opposition from the transport minister, Norman Baker. There can be no other country in the world where a double-yellow line is a matter not for mayors or councils but for feuding national ministers.
That a Treasury surplus, as from property or bank shares, should be considered a "good deal" for the taxpayer, but a local surplus should be a "cash cow for officers" indicates the present state of government priorities. Pickles has won plaudits from the Treasury for being a good cutter, albeit by slashing local grants and thus shifting the political pain on to local politicians. When councils have the impertinence to decide how to use their own money, he does not like it.
Bullying local government is a leitmotif of coalition politics. Pickles wants to cap every tax, decide every planning application, curb any innovation and squeeze every budget. No meadow is safe from his inspectors, no skyline from his towers. He has plenty of money to spend where he can get the credit. Two years ago £100m was found to reinstate weekly instead of fortnightly rubbish collection. There are millions available to bribe rural villages to accept 300-unit executive estates.
That the government should now seek to cap and further restrict what is a tiny source of local revenue is absurd. Even at half a billion, the profit is merely a 16th of what goes from councils to local transport. Rather than restricted, discretion should be widened. The relevant 1984 Traffic Act, supposedly hypothecating parking meters to road spending, should be suspended not enforced. Councils should fix their own parking policies and defend them to their electorates.
These days a car, van or truck is not a sign of wealth. It is the dominant mode of transport for working-class work and leisure. Britain now pours subsidy into relatively expensive trains (and wants to pour even more into plutocratic high-speed ones) while it has some of the most congested roads in Europe. According to the EU, it is third from bottom in road miles per million people. Parking charges are certainly extortionate and penalising town centre parking is another nail in the high street coffin. Fines have become a local norm, for littering, smoking, leafleting,seeking lost cats and using the wrong rubbish bag. But they are extortionate because ministers such as Pickles leave local treasurers no other discretion in raising and spending local resources.
Nothing is more cynical than politicians who preach localism in opposition and practise centralism in power. In opposition, the Tories lined up to pledge their new faith. David Cameron said councils should be set free, to "do literally whatever they like so long as it's legal". Philip Hammond wanted them to distribute social benefits. Francis Maude wanted to give them block grants to spend as they wished. Caroline Spelman promised to "revive democracy with the oxygen of localism".
Pickles himself swore an end to Labour's targets for local housing. Councils should breathe the clear air of Tory freedom. He now explains that what he meant was "muscular localism", the muscle being his own. The Tory party's fierce championing of "subsidiarity" for Westminster when under attack from Brussels has turned to a crude brutalism towards local democracy. Ever since Thatcher began rate-capping, local councils have been viewed as merely agents of central policy.
The parking farrago shows that these politicians did not mean a word of what they said. Even such devolutionary gestures as "city deals" and localised business rates have been curtailed or painfully delayed. Why do they not practise what they preach? The answer is as old as the hills. When politicians get power they merely want more.
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