English councils made £756m PROFIT from parking fines last year

The amount of money councils made from parking tickets in England has reached a record high – netting them just over three quarters of a BILLION pounds, research has shown.

In 2015-16, England’s 353 local authorities made a combined ‘profit’ of £756m from parking tickets, both on and off-street – a 9% leap on the £693m made the previous year.

The figures, which come from the statutory annual returns councils make to the Department for Communities and Local Government, were calculated by taking income from parking charges and penalty notices then deducting the running costs.

The data, which was analysed for the RAC Foundation by transport consultant David Leibling, shows that while not all individual councils made a big profit on their parking activities, only 49 of them reported negative numbers.

The overall rise in profits is a combination of increasing income from parking tickets, which was up 4% on the previous year, and a drop in costs, which reduced by 2%.

According to the data, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest profits were seen in the capital, where the 33 London boroughs made £332m between them – 44% of the English total.

The biggest profits outside London were reported by Brighton & Hove (£20.1m) followed by Nottingham (£13.6m) and Milton Keynes (£10.8m), though the figure for Nottingham is significantly influenced by income of around £9m from the Workplace Parking Levy, now in its fourth year.

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Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said: “These numbers might seem eye-wateringly large, but in part they reflect the growing competition for space in many of our towns and cities.

“In 1995 there were only 21.4m cars on Britain’s roads, today there are 30.7m.”

He added: “Parking charges are one of the tools councils use to keep traffic moving whilst also allowing people reasonable and affordable access to high street shops and other facilities.

“The good news is that any profit generated by councils from on-street parking must by law be spent on transport-related activities, and as every motorist knows there’s no shortage of work that needs doing.”