For once, local government is correct: nobody has a right to park in their drive

Telegraph

04-03-2025

It's rare to get a story out of local government where the council is unambiguously right about something; doubly so when that council is Labour; and triply so when it's suddenly enforcing a planning regulation. So it's important to call it when you see it: Lambeth Council is entirely right to crack down on unauthorised driveways.
Affected residents are, of course, furious. They say that the town hall is just using them as a cash cow; formal applications for a dropped curb cost £4,000 in Lambeth, and enforcement is apparently projected to net £1 million or more in fees.
Many Londoners, understandably angry about Sadiq Khan's various attempts to squeeze motorists, will reflexively put this in the same bracket. But they shouldn't, for three reasons.
First, it is not actually wrong for councils (and indeed, government) to ask people to pay for things.
Yes, Lambeth's official spiel about the move helping to 'support resilience to the climate emergency' is probably nonsense; the local Tories are almost certainly closer to the mark when they point out that 'the council currently needs to save over £69 million over the next four years'.
But… the council does need to make up that budget shortfall, or it goes bankrupt. And due to successive governments' efforts to keep huge areas of public spending – mental health, special educational needs, and social care – off the Treasury's books, local authorities are simply not in control of how most of their budgets are spent.
As a result, any savings are concentrated on the things a layperson probably thinks of as the council's job: fireworks displays, bin collections, and so on, most of which have already been cut to the bone. Therefore, the only other way to make up the numbers is to raise revenue. Would Streatham and Croydon North Conservatives prefer if Lambeth hiked council tax?
Second, people with 'unofficial' driveways are a legitimate target for such revenue-raising before official driveways represent a direct transfer of value from the public realm to private households, and that should be paid for in full. By this I don't simply mean the direct cost (to taxpayers) of physically installing a dropped kerb, but everything that comes with it.
For pedestrians, dropped kerbs mean an uneven pavement; perhaps not something you notice if you're young, healthy, and unburdened, but which can be a real pain to people with pushchairs, wheelchairs, or who are otherwise unsteady on their feet.
For motorists, the loss is even more direct. Because you can't block an official driveway, it's illegal to park in front of a dropped kerb. As a result, dropping a kerb converts a public on-street parking space, accessible to many, into a private space reserved for a particular property.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself. On-street parking is its own plague, and a combination of private drives and proper carpark provision would lead to nicer streets. But if you're going to annex part of the street to your house, you should pay for it.
Finally, the council has legitimate planning concerns. If a driveway isn't official, it isn't protected – and that means there's nothing preventing the council installing formal parking bays or other things on the street that would block vehicular access to a property altogether.
You can bet that if that happened, the outraged residents of Lewisham would be more outraged still. But why should they be entitled to the privileged use of public land, at the expense of 'parklets, cycle parking and seating' or whatever other more widely-useful things the council could install on it, without paying it – and by extension, taxpayers – for the privilege?