Sunderland may have to repay £2m in parking penalties

Christopher Booker's Notebook
Sunday Telegraph
21st August 2005

Sunderland may have to repay £2m in parking penalties
Sunderland city council, running the largest city in the North-East, was deeply embarrasssed last week, having been forced to admit that it must pay back to motorists thousands of pounds which it had extracted from them in illegal parking fines. Furthermore, evidence given by the Department for Transport indicated that Sunderland's entire city centre parking regime, from which it has raised £2 million in penalties, may also be illegal.

This is the latest victory for Neil Herron, who was roused to become a tireless grass-roots campaigner when, in July 2000, Sunderland officials seized a set of non-metric scales from the market stall run by his friend Steve Thoburn. Following the appeal court's judgment in the "Metric Martyrs'' case, which ruled that "constitutional statutes" such as the European Communities Act and the Bill of Rights can only be overridden when Parliament explicitly votes to do so, Mr Herron's attention was drawn to the legality of automatic penalties, such as parking fines.

These seemed to contradict the Bill of Rights, which lays down that no one may be fined except by judgment of a court. Enquiring further, Mr Herron discovered that Sunderland had not obtained the necessary statutory order to set up its "decriminalised" Controlled Parking Zone. This suggested that the 61,000 fines imposed since 2003, totalling some £2 million, might also have been illegal.

The council insists that such an order was not necessary. But the Department for Transport has confirmed to the Newcastle Journal that it is. The council admits that it realised in November 2003 that 738 fines imposed for parking on the city's 14 taxi ranks were illegal, and has now promised to reimburse those fined up to that time, to the tune of £21,000. But Sunderland will only admit to having imposed a further 38 fines on taxi ranks since then (though other, unofficial sources maintain that the true figure is much higher).

Mr Herron says: "My enquiries suggest this is only the tip of an iceberg. If Sunderland has not complied with the proper procedures for setting up its decriminalised parking zone, it could theoretically have to hand back £2 million. And it seems that many other councils across the country have similarly failed to comply."

Earlier this month MPs on the Commons Transport Committee announced that they will be looking into the "legitimacy" of parking schemes this autumn.

A third of councils now operate decriminalised parking schemes, and the total sum raised from parking fines in 2004 was £1 billion. Mr Herron plans to give evidence to the committee, and suggests that anyone wanting to know more should contact him via metricmartyrs@btconnect.com. Sunderland council may be regretting that day, five years ago, when they seized Mr Thoburn's scales.