The ever delightful Eric Pickles is reported on the BBC yesterday as decreeing that Councils should not be allowed to use technology such as cameras to enforce against parking offences. I often think that being a civil servant for Eric Pickles must be an utterly soul destroying job.
Presumably the policy will be challenged. First off, why should evidence gathered by a camera be less valuable than evidence from another method like a traffic warden's eye witness report? Secondly, Parliament has decreed these are offences; if Pickles and co. disagreed with that judgement did they vote against it? Most of these offences come from the Road Traffic Act of 1984, enacted under a Tory government. Thirdly, what evidence does he have around the effect on road safety and traffic congestion, which is the statutory basis of many of the offences.
Of course, although the income from penalties has to be spent on road traffic purposes, which seems reasonable to me, so the effect of doing away with the enforcement structure would be to dramatically cut the repair of roads and pavements. As a councillor, I tend to get the opposite demand.
Pickles' headlining chasing is fed by authorities such as Barnet that seem to have used traffic fines simply as revenue raising rather than with any coherent transport policy. Naturally, people resent that approach. However, Pickles himself is driving it by the most savage cuts to local government funding in living memory, combined with ongoing assaults on any ability of Councils to raise revenue.
It is all a long way from Eric Pickles' rhetoric on localism.
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