Member

It is perfectly reasonable to have the precedent of keeping fines. In the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where I had the privilege of being a councillor for a number of years, we kept the parking fines. In fact, I feel that my wife may have sustained the budgets of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for a number of years on account of her usage of yellow lines and blocked-off bays. The point is that it is perfectly reasonable to incentivise the councils using fines in order to do their job. I ask Minister to make clear in her remarks—or at least to give some guidance or element of the future expectation—that the principle around these processes is not to penalise legal retailers doing their job, trying to keep us safe and running their businesses properly, but rather to make sure that the focus is on cracking down on the illegal market. We should be very aware of that, which is why I support these amendments.