Britain's ailing councils are fleecing drivers

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16-05-2025

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On our street the sight of the postman is greeted with jubilation, such is the irregularity of his visits.
But in our house the postie's arrival induces panic: has my wife received another penalty charge notice from the council? There goes another £35, or £70 if we forget to pay within a fortnight.
More pain comes every April when the cost of our parking permit rises – it now costs a shade under £200 a year for the privilege of leaving our humble Honda Jazz on our potholed road. If anyone comes to visit, it costs £4.15 a day for them to park, too. And spare a thought for my colleague in London who has to pay £46 a day for a builder to park outside her house.
Teetering on the edge of financial ruin, councils across Britain are now dangerously reliant on milking the dwindling number of us who dare to own a car.
To be clear, I'm not a petrol head who hates public transport and cycling; quite the contrary.
But for many people a car remains a necessity: my immediate neighbours include a disabled lady who walks with the aid of crutches, an electrician who must have a van for work and a teacher who needs to drive to a village school – or spend double the time walking and waiting for unreliable rural buses.
New data from Cinch, an online car retailer, has found councils across the country collected £360m from residential parking permits over the past five years (the number would be higher but some authorities did not reply to the Freedom of Information request).
My council, Brighton and Hove, came third in the list of local authorities ranked by revenue, raking in £28m from permits between 2020 and 2024. The others on the list were all London boroughs (see full table, below).
But it's not only a London problem: Windsor and Maidenhead and Hampshire County Council have both more than tripled how much revenue they receive from permits in recent years.
On top of permits for our own cars and our guests, we find ourselves paying ever-rising fines for often very minor infringements. A couple of years ago my council opened a new 'bus gate' and it caught out 38,500 drivers in one year alone. That one street generated £1.5m in fines.
Is a £35 or £70 fine really appropriate for mistakenly going down a road that is perhaps 200m long? Of course not. The imposed 'low traffic neighbourhoods' – with their £130 fines, reduced to £65 if paid within 14 days – is yet another way drivers are being scalped.
What happens to all this money?
The 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act makes clear that 'profit' from parking income must be spent on related costs, such as maintaining on and off-street parking. In Brighton, the council says any surplus generated by permits is 'spent on improving our local transport system for all'.
But many suspect local authorities use the money taken from drivers on other projects. In 2013 the London Borough of Barnet lost a high court battle over its proposal to raise the cost of parking permits from £40 to £100 and visitors' permits from £1 to £4. At the time, Mrs Justice Land said the 1984 Act, which Barnet used to increase the charges, did 'not authorise the authority to use its powers to charge local residents for parking in order to raise surplus revenue for other transport purposes'.
The next target is likely to be electric car owners, previously regarded as saints. Earlier this year, Dover District Council raised electric car parking permits by 162pc, from £40 to £105, in line with other types of vehicles.
In Brighton permits are still £50 cheaper a year for electric cars. As more people ditch internal combustion engines, councils will either have to give up hundreds of thousands of pounds … or charge Teslas the same as a diesel van from the 1980s. No prizes for guessing what they'll choose.
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