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UK ministers have been forced to make urgent changes to Rishi Sunak’s pitch to attract motorists’ votes after it vastly overstated the number of wrongly issued penalty tickets.
The Plan for Drivers, published on Tuesday and signed by transport secretary Mark Harper, set out to “restrain the most anti-driver traffic management measures” and “stop councils profiting from moving traffic enforcement”.
A section called, “Stopping Unfair Enforcement” cited the high proportion of penalty-charge notices (PCNs) that were overturned on appeal in London as an example of the injustice facing motorists.
“Issuing fines when the high number of successful appeals indicates that many are not justified reduces trust in the way we enforce our roads,” the Department for Transport document said.
It stated that 42.8 per cent of the more than 7mn PCNs issued in the year to March 2022 were successfully appealed against — implying there were about 3.2mn successful appeals against the 7.47mn notices.
However, statistics issued by London Councils, the grouping of London local authorities, show there were in fact 45,709 appeals against PCNs during the period, of which 18,130, or 0.24 per cent of all tickets issued, succeeded — a figure 176 times smaller than the government document claimed.
After the Financial Times pointed out the error, the transport department on Friday changed the document to make clear that 42.8 per cent of drivers who appealed were successful.
The transport department insisted its original point stood. “Our Plan for Drivers highlights that more than 40 per cent of London penalty-charge notice appeals are successful, which is why we are clamping down on overzealous enforcement and making fines fairer,” it said.
London Councils said before the changes were made that it was “aware of an error” and had raised it with the department.
The Office for Statistics Regulation, the UK’s watchdog on use of statistics, said it was “looking at” the concerns raised.
The mistake is the latest in a series that were spotted in government announcements this week. Plans for a “Network North” of transport improvements included a pledge to extend Manchester’s Metrolink tram network to the city’s airport — despite a tram link having been there since November 2014.
The government has since claimed that the pledge is to extend the line to a second terminal at the airport.
The Conservative party has focused attention on traffic enforcement in London since it unexpectedly won July’s by-election in the outer London constituency of Uxbridge.
Most observers attributed the victory to its candidate’s opposition to the expansion of the capital’s ultra-low emissions zone, where drivers must pay to use the most polluting cars.
