Reading council has refunded drivers a total of £68,000 for wrongfully issuing driving fines.
The council has been in the process of refunding people for parking penalty charge notice (PCN) fines that were found to have been issued in error.
It has been revealed that £68,000 has been paid to drivers nearly a year after the blunder came to light.
The error was discovered by a Reading Borough Council staff member along the East Reading red route, who found that traffic regulation orders (TROs), the legal instruments controlling the road network, had been made incorrectly.
This led to a wider investigation, with the council’s chief executive, Jackie Yates, issuing an official apology for the blunder in October last year, with councillors approving a refund scheme.
Council staff want to close the repayment scheme in the coming weeks.
A report by Michael Graham, the council’s monitoring officer, states that the team were focusing on directly contacting people who had been referred to enforcement agent debt collectors (formerly known as bailiffs).
A total of 147 cases had been referred to enforcement agents, and each innocent individual or business that was fined was written to in October last year.
Of those, 63 responded and have been fully refunded.
Council staff then put in place arrangements to attempt to trace the remaining individuals through credit reference agencies, such as Experian.
The enforcement agents have successfully located 69 of the 147 and made restitution.
The remaining individuals have either not responded or cannot be traced; therefore, those investigations have closed.
An update on the repayment process was provided at a meeting of the council’s audit and governance committee on Thursday, September 25.
Mr Graham said: “Most of the action plan which we set out in October last year has now been delivered.
“Now is the time to say that the scheme is pretty much done.”
He also expressed surprise that the refund scheme is not proving as costly as predicted.
The council set aside £360,000 from its reserves to pay people back. Of that, £68,000 has been paid out, with future repayments unlikely to escalate much higher than that.
Cllr Clarence Mitchell (Conservative, Emmer Green) asked whether the council would issue a public statement on the closure of the repayment scheme.
Louise Duffield, the council’s executive director of resources, said: “We’ll actively review how this meeting is covered, and then if it’s not covered in the way we want to make sure do what we want them to do, then we’ll do a press release, but if it’s well covered, we’ll leave it be.”
Cllr Mitchell said: “It’s just for completeness really, we started the process publicly, we should close it publicly.”
No release is visible on the council’s website, and the webpage ‘apply for a parking fine refund’, which drivers can use to make a claim, remains live.
Councillors agreed to end monitoring of the repayment scheme at the meeting.
