Fines and fees cost drivers £340m

Drivers are having to pay councils £200million a year - just to park their cars in London.

An Evening Standard investigation today reveals how local authorities are earning millions of pounds in extra revenue by exploiting drivers.

Blighted by traffic calming, bus lanes and traffic-light rephasing, and with the Mayor's £5-a-day congestion charge due next February, motorists are being hit in the pocket on an unprecedented scale.

The £200million raised from parking meters, council car parks and residents' parking permits is the equivalent of every car owner in London paying £85 a year. On top of this, motorists pay about £ 140million a year in parking fines - the equivalent of £58 each.

The latest "stealth charges" on drivers emerged just days after the Standard revealed that parking tickets in the capital are due to rise by up to 50 per cent, which could lead to fines as high as £120.

Commenting on the latest findings, Jonathan Simpson, spokesman for the RAC Foundation, said: "The level of charges is absolutely astronomical. Local people and transport users in London don't seem to see any of that money coming back into improved services. It's disappearing into a black hole which doesn't seem to go on transport improvements."

Some of the money goes on building much-hated road humps or other " trafficimprovement schemes", but the Standard has learned that councils routinely use "creative accounting" to reinvest the cash raised from parking charges in other services of no benefit to road users.

Some of the more bizarre include:

? £500,000 spent by Westminster on trees and hanging baskets;

? Six new community safety wardens in Hammersmith and Fulham;

? Improved council internet site in Tower Hamlets.

Most boroughs also fund free bus passes for the elderly, repairs to roads and new pavements and street lighting.

Evening Standard can also reveal how the charges keep creeping upwards. Westminster has increased the cost of its residents' parking permits from £88 to £90, while Camden added an extra £4 to charge £86.

Westminster emerges from the study as the biggest parking service in Europe and one of the biggest in the world. It expects its profit - or "surplus" - from meters alone to rise from £44.4 million to £49 million in the next three years.

The council, which has 38,000 on-street parking spaces and 20 car parks, last year issued motorists with 858,000 parking tickets, clamped 24,207 cars and removed almost 18,000 vehicles to a car pound. It issued 500,000 more parking tickets than any other UK borough. Drivers are charged up to 20p for three minutes, equivalent to £4 an hour, to park at some meters in Westminster and Camden.

Pat Mason, Labour environment spokesman in Kensington and Chelsea, insisted all councils used their parking surplus "for the public good". He said: "We would not be able to fund these things if we didn't have the parking money. We wouldn't get it from central government, or the GLA, or from the council tax."