Comment

DESPITE issuing more than 500 parking tickets since November, Stroud District Council claims it does not know how much money it has taken off motorists.

The authority took over responsibility for enforcing car parking from the police four months ago.

However, Paul Helbrow, council community safety manager, said they were unable to work out how much had been paid in fines since then.

He said: "We haven't got an actual figure because some people haven't paid, some have paid but then some would have paid within the 14 days and only paid £30, while others would have left it longer and faced the charge of £60."

The new car parking enforcement (CPE) meant any motorist caught parking on a double-yellow line, in a disabled bay or residential parking space would face a fixed penalty notice of up to £60.

Since November the district council's team of four traffic wardens have issued 511 parking tickets in the entire Stroud district, including 124 in the Berkeley, Cam, Dursley and Wotton-under-Edge area.

Mr Helbrow said even though the council was unsure of the exact monetary figures, the traffic enforcement in the district was going well.

He said: "We have a duty to visit all the traffic regulation orders in the district within six months.

"What we try to do is not visit all of them every week because people might think there is a pattern to our visits, so we try to vary it. We are working on a varied rota basis.

"We do have hot spot areas in the district though that we target. But it is not about gaining revenue and only going where we know we will catch people out, it is about having an impact on the parking and traffic flow issues in the district and keeping everything moving."

From April 1, the district's parking attendants will become known as civil enforcement officers under the new Traffic Management Act which will come into force.

8:30am Tuesday 25th March 2008

Print

Email this

Comment

Add your comment

Name:
Email: *
Location:
**
	e.g. 123-123
Comment: Please note: All HTML tags will be ignored. Format Text:
By posting a comment, I confirm that I have read and agree to the terms of use. Comments are not moderated but we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention and we may delete inappropriate postings. Please treat other people with respect. You must not post anything that is abusive, indecent, unlawful or defamatory. Remember, you are personally liable for what you post on this site. If you wish to complain about a comment, contact us here.
* Your email address will not be displayed ** To avoid register now or login