Edinburgh council writes off £1.3m worth of parking fines
- Published
City of Edinburgh Council wrote off £1.3m-worth of parking fines
Edinburgh City Council has written off £1.3m of parking fines, after failing to collect more than 17,000 fixed penalty notices in the last 12 months.
The council also wrote off more than 3,200 fines accrued by motorists using bus lanes in the capital, worth £284,960.
The most common reasons for avoiding fines was due to the car being foreign.
In other cases the DVLA had no record of the vehicle or the owner was found to have no money or assets.
According to a report, due to be presented to councillors at a meeting of the finance committee on Thursday, more than 6,500 of the fines were also written off due to the owners having "gone away".
The report reads: "The council has sought to minimise the cost of write-offs by taking all appropriate action to recover what is due, with monies only being written off as a last resort after exhausting all other avenues."
Other debts written off
The council has also written off millions of pounds of debts owed for council tax, non-domestic rates and housing benefit overpayments.
In 2019/20, the council wrote off £1.87m of council tax debt, £3.17m of owed non-domestic rate payments, and £428,783 of housing benefit overpayments that the local authority was not able to recoup.
In total, the council has failed to collect £7.26m of the debt owed to it in 2019/20, however, this represents just 0.7% of the total collected payments in the same year, which totals £1.03bn.
The report continues: "This report details write-off debt values which should be viewed in the context of overall value of income collected and housing benefit paid out and the percentage of debt written off, at 0.70%, is low compared with the sums involved.
"Parking and traffic enforcement have a higher percentage of write offs than other streams.
"This is consistent with historical trends and reflects the nature of the debt type."
Reporting by local democracy reporter Joseph Anderson.