Bedford Driving Lessons

Caroline Sheppard, chief adjudicator of the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, accused some local authorities of operating a “zero tolerance” approach to minor infringements. She suggested that motorists who are given parking tickets for petty breaches of the rules should be let off if they appeal against the penalties. Mrs Sheppard complained that motorists were being punished for such offences as leaving one wheel over the white line of a car park bay, or failing to display their pay-and-display ticket correctly. In such cases, drivers whose penalties were upheld on appeal to town halls have subsequently had them overturned by the tribunal. Last year the tribunal received more than 12,000 applications to overturn tickets. In more than 60 per cent of cases it ruled in favour of the motorist. The intervention by the chief adjudicator comes after The Sunday Telegraph’s Campaign for Fair Parking highlighted cases where councils have carried on issuing tickets in areas where they knew the signs were illegal. Mrs Sheppard accused councils of failing to exercise their discretion when penalties were challenged, and called for “an outbreak of common sense” over trivial cases. She urged motorists to appeal against penalties if they think they have been dealt with unfairly or illegally. She said: “Motorists must appeal if they have any doubts over penalty charges. People want to explain but we only see what comes before us, so let us look at it.” The chief adjudicator said she was concerned that too many councils were failing in their statutory duty to give proper consideration to representations made by motorists contesting penalties, or to evidence offered in mitigation. She said that motorists’ letters of explanation to town halls were often dismissed with a standard response letter of one or two lines – a practice which suggests that their arguments “had not been considered properly or fairly”. More