Parking wardens on ticket frenzy

Portsmouth and Southsea
A parking ticket is handed out every 12 minutes in Portsmouth.

A 50-strong army of wardens patrolling the city streets dished out 43,500 fines to motorists last year. But 3,500 – eight per cent – of them were wrongly ticketed, having their £30 fines overturned on appeal.
City chiefs defended the figures, claiming it was necessary to make roads safer and free up congested residential streets.
But critics today accused the city council of simply 'picking' on motorists.
Tory opposition leader Steve Wemyss said: 'In the end you will just drive people away.'I don't believe that all 43,500 tickets are cars causing serious problems.'
The city council took over street parking enforcement from the police in 1999. Since then, the number of fines have increased, fuelling claims that the council has become too keen to fine the motorist.
The city hands out roughly four times as many tickets as in Fareham and Gosport where the police still control on-street ticketing and councils deal with its car parks. And compared with Portsmouth's 50 parking attendants, there are just 18 in Fareham and Gosport.
Although Portsmouth City Council pulled in £1.5m from the fines, it actually made a loss of £50,000 because of staff and bureaucracy costs.
However, Lib Dem transport boss Cllr Alex Bentley said the fact the council made a loss proved fines were not being used as a stealth tax.
And he said Portsmouth had more traffic than Fareham and Gosport, so inevitably there were more tickets handed out.
'There are people who get angry about tickets but many more who think we should hand out more of them.'
david.maddox@ thenews.co.uk