What’s the easiest fraud to get away with? Using somebody else’s disabled parking permit must rank pretty high.
 
The number of Blue Badges that enable disabled drivers to park where others cannot rises steadily every year – to 2.55 million by March 2010, according to statistics recently issued by the Department for Transport.
 
The benefits of the scheme to badge-holders are significant, especially in London, where it also provides exemption from the congestion charge. Badge-holders can park free at parking meters, in bays controlled by pay-and-display machines, and for three hours on single yellow lines, unless there are restrictions on loading and unloading. (In Scotland, you can stay parked on a yellow line with no time limit – for ever, if you like.) Nationally, the scheme is said to be worth £300 million a year to badge-holders.
 
For years, the scheme has been criticised as wide open to abuse, and in 2008 the Government launched a “crackdown”, the then Transport Minister Paul Clark promising to harry abusers and make the scheme work better. A total of £55 million was promised to improve enforcement. “Two thirds of councils tell us that abuse of the scheme is a major issue” he said, “and with forged or stolen badges being sold on the black market for up to £1,500 a time, it is time to get tough and stop Blue Badge abuse.”
 
So do the new statistics provide any evidence this is happening? Not really. The annual increase in badges issued has continued much as before, but statistics on badges withdrawn or handed in when no longer needed – because the driver has given up the car, died, or recovered his or her mobility – are singularly lacking.
 
With Blue Badges, they evidently count them all out, but very few local authorities seem to bother to count them all in again.
 
Of 150 local authorities listed, 113 either failed to record any returned badges, or recorded the number as zero. But others, such as Cambridgeshire and Gloucestershire, recorded more than 1,000 each “withdrawn because the holder ceased to be eligible”. Given that most holders are likely to be elderly, many must die or give up their cars every year, but either they are not turning their badges in, or when they do, few local authorities trouble to count them.
 
What about prosecutions for abuse? The commonest form of abuse, according to genuinely disabled people, is the use of the badge by able-bodied people who have acquired it from a relative or forged it.
 
In the year to March 31 2010, just 254 prosecutions are recorded as having targeted non-badge holders using another person’s badge. Only ten out of the 150 local authorities records any prosecutions at all, and almost half of total prosecutions (117) were taken by a single local authority in London, Camden. Fraudulent use of the badge can cost an offender a £1,000 fine, but the risks of detection seem small and the risks of prosecution – if the statistics are any guide – even smaller still.
 
Nor is there much evidence that the criteria for getting a Blue Badge have been tightened, as was urged by the charity for disabled drivers and passengers, Mobilise. In 2010, one in 3.9 of the retired population holds a Blue Badge, against one in 4.8 as recently as 2000. The retired population is rising, but the Blue Badge holders are rising faster. Almost 5 per cent of the entire population now holds the badge.
 
Are the criteria getting tougher? Very slowly, if at all. The acceptance rate for new applications was 84 per cent, down a shade from 2009, when it was 86 per cent. For renewals, the acceptance rate rose, from 90 to 93 per cent. Where medical assessments were carried out, 87 per cent of applications succeeded.
 
In July last year the DfT commissioned a review of the enforcement evidence base from consultants WSP (accessible here). It was published in March this year, and showed huge variations between authorities. Although traffic wardens (or civil enforcement officers, as they are now called) have the power to confiscate badges they find being misused, in only three of the 15 local authorities questioned by WSP did they actually do so. Similarly, only three said that they towed away vehicles found to be illegally parked with a fake or stolen badge.
 
False applications for badges were seldom detected, and the action taken when offences were detected varied hugely. Of the 15 authorities questioned, four said they took no action at all against drivers using forged badges, the badges of those who had died, or badges to which they were not entitled. The majority simply issued parking tickets, and only prosecuted those who didn’t pay; only five always took such offences to court.
 
The Select Committee on Transport reported in 2006 that the misuse of Blue Badges was widespread. It cited an operation in Liverpool in which the council and the police had recovered over a thousand misused badges in 14 months. Liverpool also determined, with the assistance of fraud experts from the National Audit Office, that the use of badges of those who had died was widespread.  
 
However, Liverpool’s enthusiasm for enforcement seems to have been short-lived. In the latest statistics, it records no withdrawn badges, no prosecutions, and only five stolen badges. If it is still trying to enforce the regulations, nobody is providing any evidence of it.
 
Judged by the latest figures, then, the last government’s promises to get to grips with abuse were hot air. Where did the £55 million go? In the WSP survey the 15 authorities were asked if abuse was increasing. More believed there were increases than decreases across the board, but the majority said it was about the same.
 
So much for the crackdown. Has anybody got tough? It doesn’t look like it.