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Telegraph

It's time meddling councils were put in their place

The days when a law-abiding Englishman could go through his life barely interacting with the state beyond the policeman and the postman are long gone. Even so, it is dispiriting to see the eagerness with which minor government apparatchiks seize every opportunity to infringe on personal freedoms and impose inconveniences on the population. Labour-controlled Hammersmith and Fulham Council's decision to fine a resident £1,000 for putting out his bins a few hours early before travelling away from home is a perfect example of the type of small-minded bureaucracy that permeates life in modern Britain. It fits all too neatly into a schema containing the proliferation of anti-driver Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and 20mph zones imposed against the wishes of residents, the excessive taxation of those who dare to own a second home, and the impression that local officials are all too willing to interfere and meddle in the daily lives of their residents with little sense of self-restraint. Hammersmith and Fulham has taken this logic further than most, with uniformed enforcement teams patrolling the borough and issuing fines 'day and night, seven days a week', without providing the safety and security of police officers. But establishing a specialist unit of jobsworths is merely a logical continuation of a broader trend across the country as a whole. A stranger arriving in Britain for the first time could be forgiven for believing that the primary role of local government is to restrict choice and wage war on convenience. It is hard to otherwise explain the sheer extent to which councils delight in imposing their whims on residents, and the sheer number of rules weighing down daily interactions with the public sector. Rather than viewing their role as providing services to the taxpayers who fund them, however, it seems to be that councils see their job as ensuring adherence to the most rigid interpretation of the rules possible, enforcing ideological conformity with ambitions such as net zero or biodiversity improvement, and – potentially – levying fines to help balance the books. The result is an unending war on convenience, and ever greater state intrusions into daily life that should rapidly be reined in.