City council netted over £428,000 in parking fines last year

In a survey of local authorities in the country by Peterborough-based comparison site, Compare The Market, the city council ranked 63 for most revenue collected in the last year.

The authority is said to have raked in £428,163 from 13,187 penalty charge notices.

The average fine issued in Peterborough was £32.47, compared to an average issued by councils across the UK of £37

And the average number of fines issued per day was 36, well below the countrywide average of 63, although that average rises to 307 fines per day for the top 20 local authorities issuing the most fines.

Drivers in London Borough of Haringey, Gosport Borough Council, and Durham County Council were issued with the highest fines costing them £72.04, £66.25, and £57.93 on average respectively.

The lengthy, and busy, stretch of Lincoln Road, in Millfield, was recorded as the location where the most fines were issued in the city.

Last autumn “high profile” police and council enforcement teams took to the streets checking for breaches of the Covid rules and to offer advice to residents after a spike in infections.

Police, parking wardens and council enforcement officers targeted the bus depot area of Lincoln Road in Millfield in October, where the density of poeple was highest.

Dan Hutson, head of motor insurance at comparethemarket.com said: “Parking fine revenues are a cash cow for many local authorities. Up and down the country drivers are regularly being caught out by tight parking restrictions.

“With the third lockdown now in place, we would encourage drivers to take extra care and attention when parking up their car to ensure they avoid a parking fine.”

The London Borough of Newham is the parking fine capital of the UK, issuing nearly a quarter of a million fines over the space of a year (239,000) and raking in more than £10 million in revenue, according to new research from comparethemarket.com.

The research shows that councils are charging more than £850,000 in parking fines a year on average, with some gathering more than 10 times that amount.

Nine of the 10 local authorities taking in the most cash from parking fines are in Greater London, with each council collecting more than £4 million in revenue in fines each year. Outside of London, the City of Glasgow and Birmingham City Council were the local authorities most likely to issue a ticket. Wellington Street in Glasgow and Alum Rock Road in Birmingham are the top parking fine hotspots in those cities.

In the last year local authorities, on average, issued nearly 23,000 parking fines - well above the figure issued by Peterborough – with the 20 authorities that issued the most fines handing out nearly 2.2 million fines between them.