One in three fails to pay C-charge fines

More than 100,000 congestion charge dodgers have failed to pay their penalty fines, it can be revealed today.

Some 70,000 are still evading efforts to make them pay, while 35,000 have had the levy written off by Transport for London.

This means that almost one in three of the 350,000 motorists issued with penalty tickets - which now cost £100 - since the charge began in February 2003 have not paid up.

The figures come as it emerged that TfL stops pursuing dodgers if they have not been caught within two years.

As a result, it has written off almost 14,000 separate debts - worth in excess of £1.5 million - from the first two months of the zone's operation. Conservativeson the London Assembly, who obtained the figures in a written answer from Mayor Ken Livingstone, today said they were concerned that the enforcement system was not being applied fairly.

Tory congestion charge spokesman Angie Bray said: "These figures raise huge questions about the management of congestion charge fines. Why is it that 30 per cent of fines remain unpaid? This sends a message to people with penalties that one in three are getting away without paying."

The Mayor admitted TfL encountered severe problems with wrongly issued fines at the outset of the central London zone. But he said that the number of "representations" made to TfL by penalised motorists had fallen from 64 per cent to 16 per cent.

He said penalty tickets, which rose from £80 last July, were written off as bad debts two years after the offence and when the "full enforcement process" had been followed, including issuing a bailiff 's warrant.

He said: "During the last financial year a total of 13,777 debts were written off, which represents 11 per cent of all [tickets] issued in February and March 2003. This represented a total value of some £1,550,000."

Of these tickets, the majority - 69 per cent - were written off because the driver had moved away and a forwarding address could not be found.

One in four of the tickets were scrapped because no details could be found of the driver.

In the remaining six per cent of cases, the driver had insufficient possessions to cover the debt, had died or gone to prison, or the company responsible for the vehicle had gone into liquidation.

TfL's most recent figures show that 108,000 people a day pay the charge, which will rise from £5 to £8 on 4 July. But 6,600 fines are issued each day to drivers who fail to pay.

A TfL spokesman said the 71 per cent fines collection rate was far higher than London boroughs achieved with parking tickets.