Bradford Council has written off a total of £50,000 in uncollected parking fines in one year. It says that so far, no one has been able to trace the drivers of these vehicles who were mostly issued penalty notices at £35 a piece.
The penalties stem from March 2009 to April 2010. Back in March of 2009, the local Council took over the job of penalizing parking offenders from the police. The Council says that the loss is extremely dispiriting, but that they can only take steps on information provided to them by the DVLA and that information has not led to finding these drivers.
For its part, the DVLA says that more than 97 per cent of vehicle owners can be found using DVLA records.
They say that they have systems in place to aid local authorities, like the Bradford Council, to track down and penalize the offending motorists. They say all of the information they have is provided when a charge extends beyond the 28-day pay period.
Yet, no one can seem to explain why the Bradford Council is having such trouble tracking down its violators. With all of this help offered by the DVLA and the statistics they are claiming on registered drivers, these people should be getting found.
If this is a failure of the Bradford Council because they haven’t quite learned the job they inherited from the police or a failure of the DVLA, no one seems to want to say.
The DVLA says the drivers shall be caught up with.
