Council set targets over clamping

The borough said its wardens only catch 10% of parking offenders

Wardens in one west London borough will have to reach annual minimum targets on clamping and parking fines.

Kensington & Chelsea confirmed that it has set an annual minimum of 306,000 parking tickets and 15,000 clampings.

The targets are contained in a contract between the borough and National Car Parks, the council revealed.

Motoring bodies said the move would lead to over-zealous ticketing, but the council said only 10% of parking offenders were being caught by wardens.

The British Parking Association - which represents around 600 organisations in the parking and traffic management industry - said it was not surprised to hear of the council's plans.

Fair minded

A BPA spokesman said: "We have previously received some concerns about the contract introduced by The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for parking enforcement and are currently undertaking an investigation."

But the council hit back, saying it had a wealth of data revealing how many parking offences a parking attendant is likely to encounter in any street in the borough.

Councillor Nicholas Paget Brown said: "We therefore also know the overall number of penalties that a fair-minded, competent parking contractor should be issuing each year."

He added: "Whilst there are figures for the overall numbers of tickets in our contract, these do not translate into targets for individual wardens as some streets clearly pose many more problems than others."