Resident parking: milking cash cows or lawful charging? Nicholas Dobson reports
On 22 July Barnet Council was caught with its parking permits down. For it was then that Mrs Justice Lang in the Administrative Court ruled as unlawful the Authority’s decision substantially to increase charges for residents’ parking permits and visitor vouchers in the Borough’s Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ) ( R (Attfield) v London Borough of Barnet [2013] EWHC 2089 (Admin)).
The case was brought by a resident; solicitor David Attfield (the claimant). The claim followed the council’s decision on 14 February 2011 to increase the cost of a resident’s permit for a first car from £40 to £100 and for visitor vouchers from £1 to £4. Following the judgment, The Times reported Attfield remarking that “Barnet Council has been caught picking the pockets of CPZ residents”. For “despite making up less than 10% of the borough, [CPZ residents] were being made to contribute disproportionately to a range of services such as road repairs and the provision of bus passes across the borough”.
The claimant’s key contention was that the particular charge increase was unlawful
