Not sure if you’d caught up with the changes happening to issuing car parking tickets in the UK, which come into law from 31 March.
You may have heard that one of the changes is that the parking attendants no longer have to put the parking tickets on the windscreen of the car for it to become officially issued.
Well the upshot of this is, that the parking attendant doesn’t actually have to be at the location of the parking offence.
There’s been quite a lot of disquiet around the Island about … how shall we put it … the keenness of those issuing parking tickets at the moment and we’ve all seen how many newly-painted yellow lines have appeared.
There’s a lot of enthusiasm by the IW council on installing CCTV on the Island _despite_ the police reporting that Crime and Anti Social Behaviour was down now to a very low level.
When local town councils have said that they don’t want to pay for the CCTV in their town, the IW council have said that they will pay for it.
We’re told that CCTV is installed for the benefit of people, but could the issuing of parking tickets via CCTV could be behind the IW Council’s keenness on CCTV?
Westminster Council History
Out of interest, Westminster Council raised £38 million in parking fines 2006/7. Joe Duckworth’s last job (he’s currently Chief Exec of IW Council), was as deputy chief exec at Westminster, so he knows a thing or two about how much money can be raised from parking fines.
Another point of interest – Westminster already uses CCTV to issue parking tickets.
We’ve written to the County Hall press office to ask.
Would you find it acceptable to use CCTV like that? With a threat that CCTV could be used for issuing parking tickets, at some time in the future, would you still be in favour of CCTV?
