Edinburgh City Council writes off £3 million of parking fines

Edinburgh City Council writes off £3 million of parking fines

Car parking cheats and foreign tourists have escaped paying nearly £3 million in fines in the Capital after thousands of unpaid penalty tickets were written off. According to the Evening News, Edinburgh City Council has cancelled more than 35,000 fines since it took over responsibility for parking offences eight years ago.

A relatively small hard core of drivers are using a variety of tricks to dodge fines. The most common include not registering as the car owner, constantly changing their address and providing false details. Some tourists exacerbate the problem by simply ignoring fines when they return home.

The council has given up trying to find the fine dodgers, on the advice of sheriff officers, after it became more expensive to trace them than the £90 value of the fines. The extent of the problem was revealed by figures released to the Evening News under the Freedom of Information Act.

It comes after it emerged that 12 persistent fine dodgers owe the city council £66,000 for tickets they have simply ignored.

City writes off £3m of parking cheat fines (Evening News, 12 June 2006)