Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what proportion of individual respondents to his consultation on local authority parking agreed with the Government's proposal to abolish the use of closed circuit television cameras for parking enforcement.

I refer the rt Hon Member to the Government's response to the consultation.

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/local-authority-parking

As my rt Hon Friend, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Eric Pickles) explained on 30 June 2014, Official Report, Column 593, we are banning the use of CCTV for parking enforcement, subject to a very small number of exceptions that emerged following that consultation.

Using CCTV to levy parking fines was a measure introduced by the last Labour Government, and it is clear that such powers have since been misused and abused by councils to raise money on an industrial scale.

A report in April by Big Brother Watch estimated that static CCTV and CCTV spy cars have raised £312 million in parking fines from 2008 to 2013 across 71 local authorities.

I would observe that the majority of local authorities are quite able to enforce parking rules without having to adopt such intrusive measures. Public confidence in CCTV is strengthened if it is used to catch criminals not make money.

The action of the Coalition Government to ban such CCTV cash cameras reflects our commitment to protect civil liberties, as well as our intention to end Labour's culture of unfair and aggressive parking enforcement which has inflicted real harm on local shops and high streets.