WHEN will our grasping councils finally work out that by penalising motorists they are shooting themselves in the foot?
This week, Labour-run Westminster Council in London has conducted yet another raid on motorists’ wallets by jacking up the cost of on-street parking permits.
The largest cars will now attract an annual charge of £321, while even electric cars — which so far have been granted free parking in order to encourage motorists to make the switch from petrol and diesel — will be charged between £40 and £80.
Pity those who took the bait and paid for an expensive electric car thinking they were doing the right thing.
The same thing is happening to them as happened to drivers of diesel cars 20 years ago.
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Diesels were encouraged on the grounds they emitted less carbon dioxide — only for the environmentalists to change their minds and decide that driving a diesel car is an antisocial act which should be discouraged through ever higher taxes.
Infested with cameras
What Westminster is doing fits a pattern across the country.
Councils, in desperate need to refill their coffers after poor cost control and, in some cases, lousy investments in commercial property, have picked on motorists as suitable victims.
Tax and charge them, they have calculated, and they can pass it off as an environmental measure.
Does anyone really believe that Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone is solely about cleaning London’s air?
As an independent study showed, it will have a minuscule effect on reducing emissions.
But you can bet the camera network, once established, will be used to extract ever-greater sums from motorists.
Khan has admitted he wants to use them to impose a £2 daily charge for driving in London, whatever vehicle you are in. It isn’t just parking or emissions charges.
Foolishly, the Government granted councils the power to fine motorists for minor infringements of traffic laws — and boy have they used it.
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Our towns and cities have become infested with cameras out to catch drivers who stray into a bus lane for a few yards or who hang about a moment too long in a box junction.
And don’t get me started on “bus gates” — which apparently means a short stretch of road which only buses can drive along even though, either side of the restriction, the road operates as normal.
We are just supposed to have an inbuilt knowledge of such concepts dreamed up by local council busybodies.
A lot of it is just sharp practice of a sort you might expect from cowboy parking firms, but not from elected local government officials.
In one outrageous example in Hammersmith, West London, a box junction has been placed a few yards from a set of traffic lights, making it impossible for motorists not to get caught if the lights change against them. It raised £3.2million in just three years.
When motorists started diving down side streets to avoid the junction, the council put cameras there too and fined people for driving in a “low traffic neighbourhood”.
The council said it regularly reviews box junctions, adding: “We use Penalty Charge Notices to help keep traffic in the borough moving. The vast majority of drivers are able to get through box junctions without breaking the rules.”
Then there is the switch towards on-street parking where the only way to pay is via an app on your mobile phone.
Bad luck if you don’t have a phone on you — or you have one which crashes. There is a price to pay for trying to milk motorists as cash cows.
A council which introduces new charges and fines might be whooping with delight as extra revenue rolls in during the first few months, but it won’t be so pleased a few years later when there is less income from business rates coming in because shops and restaurants are boarded up.
Drive motorists away from a town and you cut off its commercial lifeblood.
That is not to say that no one should ever have to pay for parking, and most motorists are quite happy to do so. But there is a point where it becomes pure greed.
It isn’t just the charges themselves but the way they are enforced. When the cowboy clampers were driven off the streets a decade ago we ended up with a system which is arguably even worse: Where the DVLA will disgracefully sell our home addresses to council and parking firms to pursue us for charges which weren’t even obvious when we parked.
Pure piracy
The surge in charges for residents’ parking permits has brought an unfairness which doesn’t seem to have dawned on town halls.
Like Ulez, they are a highly regressive tax which doesn’t affect people in wealthy neighbourhoods with off-street parking.
But they do affect a great number of motorists who live in ordinary streets of 19th century terraced housing.
Few people would argue that the Government and local councils have to raise money from the public to fund public services.
But it should always be done through taxes and other charges which are fair, proportionate and open.
What we have at the moment, on the other hand, is pure piracy.
Councils are dreaming up ways to squeeze money out of us in all manner of underhand ways while claiming to be keeping taxes low.
They might think they are being clever, but they are killing off our towns as desirable places to live, work and shop.
