Highway robbery! How I proved that town hall traffic fines are nothing to do with bad driving - but just a grubby money making scam



Infuriating: Taking on traffic-enforcement powers is proving to be a very lucrative business for local councils

Around the part of South-West London where I work, the mere mention of the Bagley’s Lane box junction is enough to strike fear and anger into the heart of any motorist who knows it.

It lies on the New King’s Road, within a few minutes’ walk of Chelsea Football Club’s Stamford Bridge stadium, and on the pages of the A-Z looks like a relatively straight-forward T-junction. Approaching from the west, a motorist can either turn right or head straight on into Central London. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

So how come that last year almost 30,000 Penalty Charge Notices were issued to drivers trapped in the dreaded yellow box at Bagley’s Lane, raising almost £2 million in revenue (although aggrieved motorists would use the word ‘fines’) for the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham?

How come one of the bus companies that uses it daily once received seven Penalty Charge Notices in a single day, and their professionally trained bus drivers, emerging from the side turning, often have to wait 40 minutes before they stand any chance of being able to turn right into New King’s Road without receiving a fine?

The answer is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever stood and watched the thousands of cars, lorries and buses that struggle through this busy, road-rage-inducing junction every day. Like so many other similar junctions across the country, it is poorly designed and simply not fit for purpose.

With entry to the junction controlled by one set of traffic lights but exit limited by another situated just four car lengths away, any driver using it has to employ an almost unwinnable combination of anticipation and guesswork to avoid the £65 fine that is doubled if it isn’t paid within 14 days. And these days the council’s all-seeing CCTV cameras catch everyone who gets trapped.

If you don’t live or work in this part of London, you might think this story has little to do with you, but you’d be wrong.

Since the Traffic Management Act 2004 transferred many traffic enforcement powers from the police to local authorities, more and more councils have followed Hammersmith and Fulham’s energetic lead in getting in on the money-making act.

So far, 20 councils have taken on a range of traffic-enforcement powers but, with local-authority budgets under relentless pressure, that number is certain to grow.



In other words, what’s happening in Fulham now could be happening at a junction near you very soon. And it’s a very lucrative business for local councils.

The Bagley’s Lane junction, which two years ago trapped more than 40,000 drivers and raised a whopping £2.7 million in fines, is known locally as the ‘money box’, with the Conservative-controlled council laughing all the way to the bank.

As one CCTV supervisor in Hammersmith and Fulham put it in a congratulatory email sent to the council’s hard-working CCTV operators in 2011: ‘Another record month, guys, well done.’

The 'moneybox' on Bagley's Lane in Fulham raised almost £2million in 'revenue' - or fines - last year

It almost makes you long for the ‘good old days’, when being caught in a box junction might have been a criminal offence, carrying a fine and a three-point penalty, but only if you were spotted by a police officer and only then if the officer thought the offence was your fault.

But what’s taken its place is so wrong.

Councils aren’t empowered to raise money by catching out unwary motorists. What they are empowered to do is to improve traffic flow.

Yet in my part of London the council can produce absolutely no proof that these CCTV cameras and the thousands of fines that result are having any effect on traffic flow. In fact, anecdotally, I’d say it was quite the opposite.

As the money-grabbing reputation of junctions such as Bagley’s Lane grows, it is clear that drivers are now reluctant to enter the yellow box (hence the reduced number of fines last year) until an incontrovertibly clear exit lies ahead. The result is inevitable — a queue of angry, impatient, horn-honking motorists soon builds up behind.

Of course, councils will deny the frenzied issuing of penalty notices has anything to do with revenue-raising, but in Hammersmith and Fulham they’ve been royally found out.

A couple of years ago, I was issued with a penalty notice for being caught in a yellow box at Hammersmith Broadway, a complicated gyratory system off the A4, the main road from the West into London.



I appealed and, almost inevitably, was turned down. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up.

I’ve run a small publishing business in Fulham for 20 years, but in the past five years I’d noticed that something has changed. More and more of our customers or people who work for us were complaining of being given parking tickets and traffic fines.

The last straw was when an elderly architect parked outside our offices to unload a architectural model, brought it inside and, less than five minutes later, emerged just in time to see his car being carried away on a tow-truck.

And I know that all over the country shops and local businesses are complaining about the same things. Customers just daren’t park for even a few minutes for fear of getting a ticket, a fact that does tremendous damage to small businesses such as ours.

The only people making any money, it seems, are our local council’s traffic departments.

So when my appeal against my penalty notice was turned down, I used the Freedom of Information Act to find out what was really going on.

Even then the council wasn’t keen to tell me, releasing the bare minimum of the emails that I’d asked for. But I persisted, making another request and the council gave in (at least, partially) releasing 300 pages of emails concerning penalty charge notices and traffic management that they’d been strangely reluctant to reveal the first time.

As I revealed on BBC1’s Panorama last night, these included an email exchange that resulted in a fine for the car waiting outside the Fulham home of the council’s lady mayor being quashed. How very differently she seems to have been treated from the rest of us.

Time and again, the clear admission was that raising revenue was the main aim of these CCTV-enforced traffic notices. An email from the council’s head of parking complaining that a delay in installing a new CCTV review station would cause the council to suffer ‘the loss of the resultant revenue’ is typical.



One to avoid: This map shows the location of the junction in Fulham, west London

Then there was another email copied in to the borough’s director of finance where the aim of further investment in CCTV equipment is clearly stated as: ‘To increase parking revenue (target: additional £5 million)’.

It also transpired that while a CCTV monitoring centre to control burglary had been set up at a cost of £80,000 with just three staff, a similar monitoring centre for fine-generating traffic cameras cost £500,000 and had 16 staff.

But what will infuriate motorists — and confirm their worst fears — was the council’s admission that some officers in the parking services department had received bonuses related to the issue of Penalty Charge Notices.

And you can be quite sure that Hammersmith and Fulham won’t be the only place this is happening.

It’s taken two years of my life to prise these damning admissions from Hammersmith and Fulham, but it shouldn’t take another two years for both local and national politicians to realise that penalising motorists in this way is just wrong.

Driving a vehicle in our busy towns and cities is a complicated and stressful business. Local councils should be taking steps to make it safer and to allow traffic to flow as smoothly as it can, not fine motorists for every infraction of the Highway Code.