Council ‘targeting’ school-run parents with £26m in LTN fines

A COUNCIL has been accused of targeting school-run parents after it issued motorists with fines worth up to £26 million from just three CCTV cameras.

A total of 204,873 penalty charge notices (PCN) were handed out over a three-year period from 2021 in two streets of a low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) in Chiswick, West London.

If all of those fines were paid in full at £130, it would have generated over £26 million for Hounslow Council.

Campaigners opposed to the borough’s LTNs said the data suggest CCTV controllers choose the most “lucrative” times to target drivers.

This includes parents dropping off and picking up children at a school near Staveley Road and Hartington Road, which are both closed to through traffic as part of the “South Chiswick Liveable Neighbourhood”. The statistics show the date and exact time each fine was issued, using software that identifies when a non-resident motorist has entered a road closed to them through CCTV. Council employees then review the image and if they believe a contravention has occurred, issue a fine.

The vast majority of fines were from between 7.45am to 10am and then 3.30pm to 6pm, coinciding with school-run and rush hour times. It also reveals fines peak during the months March to June, with more than 10,000 or 15,000 fines issued each month on each street. The numbers then drop dramatically to only a few thousand in August during the summer holidays.

In a handful of cases, fines were even issued minutes after the restrictions came to an end at 7pm. However, the dossier also discloses that bailiffs were called to over 6,000 of those cases until early 2022, before suddenly ceasing. A Hounslow Council spokesperson said the local authority “paused” send- ing bailiffs to non-payment cases between February and November 2022 because of “a lack of resources”, adding it has since used bailiffs in a further 7,556 cases. The file also shows nearly 40 per cent of motorists who appealed their PCNs were successful.

The council spokesperson added that receipts from paid fines on the two roads came to a total of £12,174,762 between 2021 and 2023. A total of 18 contracted staff are responsible for monitoring the CCTV systems.

A spokesman for campaign group OneChiswick said it was “disgusting” that millions of pounds had been made, often with the use of bailiffs to “intimidate people going about their day to day lives”. He said: “Hounslow Council has been incredibly vexatious and their own data shows that in the main the council appear to have been initially targeting the morning and afternoon school run.”