A senior Leeds councillor has spoken of his concerns over the number of untraceable vehicles that are parked illegally on Leeds' roads.
Horsforth Liberal Democrat Brian Cleasby says Leeds council is looking to write off almost £198,000 of unrecoverable parking fines because either the authority has been unable to gain payment or the owner of the vehicle cannot be traced.
Cleasby - who queried how many cars are on Leeds' streets illegally - is calling on the council to work more closely with the police and DVLA to clamp down on the number of unregistered cars, to keep the roads safe for motorists and pedestrians.
Cleasby said:
"I understand that the council is not able to collect all parking charge notices, however the write off of almost 10,000 seems a very high figure.
"I think we need to be made aware just how many of those are cars that are unregistered, uninsured or on the roads illegally.
"I'm calling on the council to work more closely with the police to ensure that only those entitled to do so are using our roads. If a car should not be on the road then it should be impounded and scrapped.
"We need to make sure people in the city can move about freely, safe in the knowledge that only those entitled to are using the highways."
A copy of the delegated decision notice authorising the write off of the penalty charge notices can be found here.
A spokeswoman for Leeds council said:
"We would like to reassure Councillor Cleasby that we do work very closely with the DVLA and the police to tackle the problem of illegal parking and we take robust action to clamp down on offenders.
"The £198,000 in uncollected fines that Cleasby refers to actually covers a three year period from 2004 to 2007 and overall is just 0.5% of the overall total of fines that the council collected in that period.
"The council took over powers for illegal parking from the police in 2005 but we continue to work closely with them and report parking problems where the council has no powers, such as stolen or abandoned cars.
"In Leeds we have over 30 parking wardens patrolling the city's car parks and streets making sure motorists are parking legally. We have also recently introduced a system where we clamp cars which are illegally parked and have a history of penalty charge notices and this has been very successful in tackling the problem."
The spokeswoman added that the £198,000 covers the period for uncollected fines from March 2004-March 2007, which the council's records show equates to around 2,000 penalty charge notices which have been uncollected.
She said that a proportion of the uncollected penalty charge notices relate to foreign vehicles which are harder to trace. Vehicles which are found to be untaxed or not registered are reported to the DVLA. Vehicles found to be abandoned, stolen or blocking an access route are reported to the police.
What do you think? Have your say in the comments section below.
