Overzealous policing by councils of motorists is unwelcome - David Behrens

The latest example is in Leeds, a city whose transport infrastructure is possibly the worst in Europe, yet whose officials are seeking permission to plant spy cameras at roundabouts in order to fine motorists who sit in the yellow box junctions they have arbitrarily painted there.

Their request has been made possible by new rules that allow the Department for Transport – the people who brought you HS2 and other celebrated models of efficiency – to bestow on councils powers of enforcement that have previously been the purview of trained police officers.

Thus, Town Hall bureaucrats will be able to fine anyone judged to have performed an illegal U-turn, ignored a priority sign or encroached on a cycle lane as they attempt to navigate the dog’s breakfast of a traffic network laid out before them. Each infringement costs up to £70, which makes this a valuable new revenue stream.

In Leeds, the traffic engineers – and who’d have thought there were any? – have counted hundreds of drivers ignoring No Left Turn signs and waiting in box junctions, and calculated that it would be easier to prosecute them for working their way around the system than to invest in making it fit for purpose.

On that basis they are proposing cameras that can read your number plate and send threatening letters to your front door when you eventually get there after spending half your day stuck in traffic. Never mind the Chinese spy cameras that are supposed to be monitoring us; it’s the Leeds Council ones you’ll have to worry about.

But it’s not the only authority seeking to play judge and jury with its ratepayers. Sheffield Council should have learned from the scandal of its roadside tree felling programme that residents won’t tolerate Town Hall tinpots with ideas above their station – yet this month has seen the emergence of another group outraged at the city’s despotic approach to policy making.

The tree issue, you will recall, saw the council not just prosecute but actively persecute those who literally stood in the way of contractors with financial incentives to cut down healthy trees. When the game was up, the authority did everything it could to subvert the inquiry into its conduct. So it’s understandable that there is little trust or goodwill surrounding its latest wheeze, which is to levy charges on vehicles that enter a self-imposed “clean air zone” around the city centre.

Like so much else in local politics, it’s not the principle that is in dispute; it’s the inflexibility with which government policy is interpreted and implemented that people don’t like. The people in question – nearly 6,000 ratepayers at the last count – have formed a protest group to oppose the clean air charges because they fear the extra costs will drive them out of business and turn the city centre into a ghost town. It’s a policy that is damaging both socially and economically; the only body that stands to gain financially is the council itself.

Leeds has a clean air zone, too, with drivers of certain vehicles charged for entering its confines even if they don’t park on a box junction. It prompted one councillor to complain that the city was at risk of becoming “anti-car”. At risk? It’s been the most vehicle unfriendly place in Britain since the 1970s, when the first one-way system was knocked up, apparently by a five-year-old with an Etch-a-Sketch.

As the Lib Dem councillor Conrad Hart-Brooke put it, motorists need carrots before sticks. And he’s right – councils are there to serve the public, not vice versa, and people shouldn’t have to live in fear of being victimised for infringements made necessary by the inadequacy of the services they’re paying for.

Perhaps they’ve got the right idea down the road in Bradford, where there’s also a clean air zone – this week we learned that someone had swiped four of the cameras that are supposed to be monitoring it. There’s no word yet on whether the culprits had stopped on a box junction when they did it.