::nobreak::Alex Henney is an angry man. In the past two years he has been the victim of parking fines in Camden, north London, for offences he says “had nothing to do with parking management and everything to do with making money”.

On one occasion his car was towed away from a quiet side street three minutes after being ticketed, while another time he was fined £100 for not displaying an up-to-date residents’ permit, even though his permit had expired only two days before and the local authority had received the £90 payment for it to be renewed.

Now he’s fighting back using a legal weapon that has never been tested but has alarmed local authorities to the point where they are scurrying to seek legal advice.

According to the Human Rights Act a punishment must be proportionate to the offence and Henney argues this is not the case with towing charges of more than £150 in London. “My punishment has been excessive and unfair,” said Henney. “People will support sensible parking management but not the enforcement of trivial infractions, and traffic attendants who descend like vultures ticketing motorists who are no more than a minute or two late back to their car.”

Henney is taking his case to the Parking and Traffic Appeals Service, which adjudicates parking fines in the capital, and says if all else fails he plans to apply for a judicial review in what could become a test case for appeals against overzealous clamping and towing. Some legal experts say Henney, who has helped form the London Motorists Action Group to fight similar cases, stands a good chance of succeeding.

“There is no reason why the man in the street couldn’t use the Human Rights Act to appeal against a towing and if more people are aware of it I suspect more people would appeal,” said Toby Halliwell, a Bristol-based lawyer and former adjudicator for the National Parking Adjudication Service (NPAS).

Henney’s frustrations are echoed in towns and cities across Britain, where revenue from parking increased by 71% between 1997 and 2004. Eight million parking penalties were issued in England and Wales in 2004 — one for every three cars — and motorists are paying more than £1 billion per year in parking fines and charges.

Volunteers trying to save the stricken whale that strayed into the Thames last month were handed parking tickets amounting to £300, despite having vehicles marked “marine medic” or “marine ambulance”. In Bury, Greater Manchester last week a traffic warden slapped a ticket on a van and digger being used to resurface a street.

Laws passed in 1991 allowed local authorities to take control of parking enforcement from the police. London was the first to adopt the new system in 1993-94 followed by Winchester in 1996, and 174 local authorities (140 outside London) have now adopted the powers that allow them to keep some of the revenue from fines to invest in other local services.

Before 1994 a few traffic wardens employed by police pounded the streets from 9am to 5pm. Today’s traffic “attendants” are usually employed by private contractors who compete for lucrative local authority contracts and frequently set benchmarks (in reality, targets) for the number of penalty charges their staff should hand out per shift.

There are attendants on duty in many areas from early in the morning until well into the night and many are armed with clamps and a tow truck to remove cars that have overstayed their allotted time by only a few minutes. In Bristol a motorist recently had his car towed away after underpaying a parking fee on a meter by £1.50, the sort of tow-happy response that was last month criticised by NPAS, which considers appeals against fines outside London.

NPAS appears to support the principle behind Henney’s case. Caroline Sheppard, the chief adjudicator for England and Wales, wrote in a recent report to the Commons transport select committee: “The European convention on human rights places greater duty on councils to have regard to proportionality. It is for the council to prove that the removal (of a vehicle) is proportionate and necessary.”

In some areas the revolt against parking fines has gone further. A group of residents in the northeast is bringing into question the system of parking enforcement, demanding councils refund thousands of pounds in illegitimate

http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22750-2023496,00.html