15,000 parking tickets wrongly handed out in Birmingham; EXCLUSIVE.

Byline: BY BEN GOLDBY

BUNGLING traffic wardens wrongly dished out 15,000 parking tickets to Birmingham motorists last year.

The massive number of mistakes could have cost innocent drivers almost pounds 500,000 in fines if they had paid up.

Birmingham City Council raked in almost pounds 5 million in 2007 from the 163,457 Penalty Charge Notices issued by traffic wardens.

Yet figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show a staggering 15,364 were successfully appealed against.

The total number of tickets handed out by the wardens would have generated at least pounds 4.9 million for the council.

But that figure was cut by pounds 460,920 following the successful appeals.

Last night, a spokesman for the Association of British Drivers described the number of mistakenly issued notices as "outrageous".

Cancelled

"For a start this is a huge number of tickets for one city to be issuing," he said.

"The fact that they have only cancelled 10 per cent of penalty notices is probably because most people pay up thinking that they can't appeal.

"We would encourage everyone to appeal if there are any grounds at all.

This is almost an extra tax for the motorist, and we are already paying far too much tax.

"Obviously if people are causing a real obstruction, then they deserve to be given a fine. But it seems that far too many people are being needlessly ticketed which is a huge waste of everyone's time and money.

"The wardens are clearly giving out tickets willy nilly and looking to fill their quotas.

"This is yet another example of motorists being overcharged and councils looking to take as much cash as they can from ordinary drivers."

Unlucky motorists caught parking illegally can face fines of up to pounds 60, although they can pay pounds 30 if they cough up within 14 days.

A Birmingham City Council spokeswoman said that parking charges were only cancelled when drivers could provide a reasonable excuse.

Bizarrely, she claimed that the wrongly-issued tickets were not given out by mistake - despite many of them being waived due to machine failures, and human error by traffic wardens.

She said: "These cases relate to when the motorist has written in and explained their particular circumstances and we have exercised discretion to waive payment, it is not a case where the notice was incorrectly issued.

"Circumstances of each case are assessed and the reasons why payment is waived can include situations such as a valid ticket being produced, compassionate/medical reasons to support a case, loading and unloading where evidence is provided to support a delivery, stolen vehicles, season ticket/resident permit holder and a machine fault investigated and fault confirmed.

"We generally achieve around a 76 recovery on penalty notices when taking account of those cases where payment is waived for special circumstances. This is comparable to other local authorities."

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