By ROSS CLARK FOR THE DAILY MAIL
The economy is on its knees. Business and consumer confidence are at a dire new low. But one industry is making more money than ever: the business of fining motorists for the most inconsequential of traffic violations.
Whether it’s minor breaches of 20mph speed limits or confusion over the rules for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), drivers are being picked off like never before.
This is largely because councils outside London have been handed new powers to police a range of traffic offences, including such things as driving in bus lanes or taking banned turns.
Most of the penalty fines go straight into town hall coffers – and cash-strapped councils have jumped at the chance.
Here, then, are the costly new front lines in Britain’s never-ending war on the motorist.
Last November, retired photographer Mick Bradford, 77, had been shopping in Guildford, Surrey, when he turned on to a roundabout to join the A3. He was aware of the yellow box at the junction and knew he shouldn’t stop in it.
But a car cut across him and took up the one remaining space on the congested slip road on the other side of the roundabout, and he was briefly left with his bumper overhanging the yellow box. A £70 fine – reduced to £35 if paid within 14 days – arrived in the post.
‘A lot of people have told me they would have just paid up,’ says Bradford. ‘But I knew I had done nothing wrong.’
Retired Mick Bradford was fined £70 after getting stuck in a yellow box at a junction to join the A3
With the help of Sam Wright, a gamekeeper-turned-poacher who used to design yellow box junctions for Transport For London (TFL) and runs the website yellowboxes.co.uk – which helps drivers push back against unfair fines – Mr Bradford successfully challenged it. But he says the stressful episode ‘ruined Christmas’.
He is far from the only victim. A Freedom Of Information (FOI) request by the RAC revealed that the junction in question was among the most profitable yellow boxes anywhere outside London, with 4,250 motorists fined a total of £81,500 in 2024.
The greediest of all is Manchester City Council, which issued £447,000 worth of fines for just six box junctions in 2024. Medway in Kent was second, raising £145,000 from five box junctions, while Buckinghamshire, which issued £140,000 worth of fines, was third.
Even these figures pale in comparison with what’s going on in the capital, where box junction fines have been the bane of motorists for the past 20 years. One single junction, Bagley’s Lane in Hammersmith and Fulham, raised £12million in fines in its first six years of operation between 2010 and 2016.
Between 2022 and 2024 the number of Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) for ‘moving traffic offences’ – which include yellow boxes as well as other infringements – in London increased by 8.5 per cent to 3.45million or about one for every three residents.
Many councils insist that their policing of yellow boxes helps to ease congestion.
But Sam Wright disagrees. Nine out of ten yellow boxes are larger than they need be to ensure junctions remain clear, he says. Others are badly designed because motorists cannot see how big they are. Some are so worn that the lines aren’t visible to drivers.
‘After 20 years of policing yellow boxes in London, there is no evidence that it improves traffic flow,’ he says.
On the contrary, a simulation on his website shows what would happen if everyone strictly obeyed the rule of never entering a yellow box until the exit was clear: it would cause giant traffic jams.
Until he took a trip to Wales this year, retired salesman Martin Toms could boast of having driven for more than half a century without getting a speeding ticket.
Motorists are entitled to wonder whether some cameras have been deliberately installed to catch them out
But he was no match for the default 20mph speed limit imposed by the Welsh government. Mr Toms, 74, was fined for travelling at 31mph on the main A548 through the village of Greenfield, Flintshire, even though it lies just across the border from England where the default speed limit is 30mph.
No wonder then that Flintshire leads the way in fines for breaking the 20mph default limit introduced by the Welsh assembly in 2023.
The following year, 3,500 motorists were caught on the same section of the A548. On the A5104 in nearby Pontybodkin, 7,200 drivers were fined. Across Wales, 85,000 motorists fell foul of the new limit in its first full year of operation from September 2023. In Gwent, another county which adjoins England, the number of speeding offences almost doubled from 19,008 in 2022-23 to 35,112 in 2024-25.
Thanks in part to a petition which attracted 500,000 signatures – around a sixth of the Welsh population – some stretches of road have been put back to 30mph, including the A548 where Mr Toms was caught.
Enforcement of speeding fines has become more draconian across the whole of the UK in recent years.
Excluding London, police forces issued 2.32million speeding fines in 2023, up ten per cent on the previous year. In Hertfordshire, the number of fines rose by 64 per cent, from 49,800 to 81,600, between 2023-24 and 2024-25. In Cambridgeshire, fines were up 57 per cent to 56,900 over the same period. Preventing speeding is important, but motorists are entitled to wonder whether some cameras have been deliberately installed to catch them out.
It is hardly surprising that councils encourage visitors to take the bus. But the proliferation of bus lanes has itself led to swingeing fines for drivers.
Take the car park at Croydon’s Whitgift Centre. Its entrance lies in the middle of an almost continuous bus lane and anyone who wants to enter the car park has to take a sharp 90 degree turn across it.
Turn a fraction too early and mistakenly enter the bus lane, however, and there is a camera waiting to spring you with a £130 fine. In a five-year period between 2018 and 2023, 7,617 motorists were fined for doing so.
Croydon certainly needs cash. In 2020, it became the first council in London to declare bankruptcy – something which it has been forced to do again, twice – thanks to financial mismanagement which included investing £30million in a hotel it later sold at a £5million loss.
London boroughs together with TFL issued a total of 313,000 bus lane fines in 2023-24, the most enthusiastic being Lambeth, with 34,000 fines. Ealing and Barnet came second and third. By contrast, Kensington and Chelsea managed to get by without issuing a single bus lane fine.
Most of us will testify that LTN rules are not only strict but tricky to obey. Indeed the Metropolitan Police recently complained it had spent 12,000 man-hours challenging fines for infringements by its officers on duty.
Bollards in a street in Cowley near Oxford to create a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN)
LTNs are yet another bonanza for councils, of course.
Last year, Hammersmith And Fulham Council was revealed to have made £1.5million in fines from two LTNs alone – although it later had to refund motorists in 80 per cent of cases because they had been wrongly charged.
Some boroughs also rake in huge sums from motorists who make banned turns. In 2021, Newham Council earned £3.3million in fines on one street alone.
LTNs, together with speeding and parking fines, are among the reasons why PCNs in London rose from 7.6million in 2022-23 to 8.3 million in 2023-24. Since then, the tide has started to turn on LTNs, with the High Court ruling in May that one was imposed unlawfully on West Dulwich because Lambeth Council had failed properly to consult on the plans.
Tower Hamlets has scrapped three schemes, in spite of some residents taking it to court to block their removal.
The irony is that LTNs do not seem to be achieving their objective of cutting car use. A study by the University of Westminster found that while they had increased cycling, they had not decreased car use.
We only know about the study, commissioned by Sadiq Khan, because it was leaked. The Mayor’s office had refused to publish the report on the grounds that it contained no new insights.
As predicted, Khan’s expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) – which fines non-compliant cars £12.50 a day – has proved to be a huge cash cow. Or it would be if TFL was able to collect the fines.
In several cases, councils are raising more in penalty fines than from charges imposed under the low emission zones
An FOI request revealed that in the first seven months after the zone was expanded in September 2023, TFL had issued 1.35million fines for infringements.
Yet it had only collected £28.5million, while another £218million worth of fines remained unpaid. Six months later, the backlog had risen to £437million.
Low Emission Zones are proliferating across the country, as are the fines for breaking their rules.
In Birmingham, an FOI request revealed that the city council – which has also gone bankrupt in recent years – is issuing an average of 55,727 fines per month, bringing in £2.46million.
Bristol City Council is raising an average of £1.3million a month in fines, Sheffield £395,000, Bath £349,000 and Newcastle £239,000.
In each case, the council was raising more in penalty fines than from charges imposed under the scheme. In some cases, the only warning that motorists will receive is a small roadside sign telling them to ‘pay online’ – without mentioning the web address.
While councils have stepped up efforts to raise money from unsuspecting motorists, police across the country have been becoming evermore trigger happy when it comes to issuing fines to motorists for minor infringements.
A police system for collating data on PCNs outside London shows that forces issued 36,840 fines for use of mobile phones at the wheel in 2023, up 33 per cent from the year before.
They handed out 40,500 PCNs for careless driving (up 18 per cent), 14,200 for ‘obstruction, waiting and parking’ (up 23 per cent) and 42,273 for not wearing seat belts (up 4 per cent).