Whether or not you are a Kemi Badenoch supporter, her comment that people get into more trouble for driving slightly above the limit in a 20mph zone than shoplifting will have resonated with millions. Because there is a war against motorists being waged out there – and it’s driving us to despair.
Wednesday 26th August was to be the happy day when we celebrated the 100th birthday of my Auntie Alice with a party at her care home. Alas, she never made it. I received a text from my cousin in early August to inform me that Alice had died, just three weeks before her centenary. So instead of it being the day of her birthday party, 26th August was actually the day of her funeral, at Mortlake Crematorium. If I go up to London (I live just outside Oxford), I normally travel by coach or train but as I was attending the funeral with my mother, who is 98 and too disabled to travel by public transport, I drove there.
The PCN – coming straight after attending a funeral – left me feeling extraordinarily depressed and demoralised
Hearing horror stories about how easy it was to get a fine in Sadiq Khan’s London I diligently did my homework the night before. I checked my car was fully ZEZ compliant. It was. I looked at the congestion charge zones. It appeared we would just avoid these by being on the edge of the charging areas. Yet, despite all this preparation, I still got clobbered. My ‘crime’? Well, when travelling along the Great Chertsey Rd on the way back home after the reception, my satnav instructed me to take a left turn, which I did. I did see some complicated signage as I drove past it, but it was too late to turn back.
Seven days later I received a nasty shock in the post, courtesy of Hounslow council. I had a £160 fine (reduced to £80 if I paid within 14 days) for ‘failing to comply with a prohibition on certain types of vehicle (motor vehicles)’. It transpired that the thoroughfare I had innocently driven along, Staveley Road, banned motor vehicles from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturdays. I had driven along it at 6.30pm on a Wednesday. Oh, forgive me for my sins!
I filed an appeal, stressing I had been at a funeral and was genuinely worried about my mother. It had been a long day for her, and she just wanted to get home to rest her tired legs. I made it clear I had never driven in that part of London ever before and that my satnav had directed me down that road. How was I expected to know that the road prohibited cars until 7 p.m.? The signage was too complex to take in when making a quick decision behind the wheel.
But my appeal was rejected. ‘I am satisfied that the PCN was correctly issued and that there is no reason for it to be cancelled’, the unsigned letter from the London Borough of Hounslow tersely declared. Kraftwerk couldn’t have been any more robotic.
So there we are. I wonder how many other unsuspecting motorists coming to London for family funerals have ended up having to pay £160 or £80 PCNs, simply for committing the heinous crime of driving down the wrong road, directed there by their satnavs or phones. With cameras everywhere, make one simple mistake and it’s reach for the cheque book time.
The PCN – coming straight after attending a funeral – left me feeling extraordinarily depressed and demoralised. I’ve gone through a bad time of late, my father died two years ago which has left me feeling very low, followed by other deaths of close relatives, but there seems to be little concern as to how these motoring fines – which nowadays are so easy to acquire – are affecting the nation’s mental health.
Put bluntly, every time you drive to a town or city you are not fully familiar with, you are at considerable risk of getting a PCN, costing you usually at least £80. I later learned of a married couple who got two tickets for driving in and out of the London street where their daughter lives when they came to visit her. Family values? Anti-car councils are doing their best to keep up apart.
How have we got to this? How have we accepted this new form of psychological torture? Like so much other dystopian stuff, it has all come in since the lockdowns. While we were ‘WFH’ observing the rules, councils were busy erecting new bewildering road signs restricting cars and installing cameras to try and catch us out. The people dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ say that the powers-that-be don’t want us driving anywhere, that they want us locked into our own ‘15-minute cities’. But that doesn’t seem to be such a crazy notion after all. There is definitely an undeclared war being waged on motorists and I’m afraid Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens are all very much in on it. If they don’t get you for driving down the ‘wrong’ road they’ll get you for going slightly above the 20mph limit – like Dr Gary Duffield, the poor doctor who amassed nine points on his licence, putting him on the brink of a total ban, all for driving in north London on four occasions at 22 to 25mph.
Of course, for the local authorities it’s a nice little earner. The area of west London where I drove is, I found out, a veritable minefield for motorists. According to the Telegraph, in just three years Hounslow Council issued 200,000 PCNs, worth up to £26 million, in a single low-traffic neighbourhood in Chiswick. Over Christmas apparently there was supposed to be an ‘amnesty’ on Staveley Road, and some others, but several motorists still received PCNs in error. What a happy New Year that must have been.
At the very least we ought to be having a proper national debate about what is happening. And politicians who have made it so stressful – and expensive – to be a motorist travelling to a different town or city need to be held fully accountable for what they have done, often with very little democratic mandate. I, for one have had enough of us being driven to despair.
