Council waives 9,000 parking fines

Leeds City Council yesterday confirmed that fines issued with a total of 9,228 parking tickets had been deemed “irrecoverable”.

The council said the owners of many of the vehicles given tickets had proved impossible to trace and continuing to chase them would not be a sensible use of taxpayers’ money.

No detail is available about how much all 9,228 waived fines would have brought in if they had been paid.

A council report does reveal, however, that the combined value of 984 of the written-off fines was £30,555.

The tickets consigned to the dustbin were issued between 2005 and the end of March this year.

A spokesman for the council said: “We do our very best to obtain all the money we should receive from parking tickets, and continue to try to obtain the money for a long period after the original ticket is issued.

“Unlike other debts, we do not have a name and address for parking tickets, just a vehicle registration, so if we can’t trace the owner then we cannot recover the money.”