My daughter faces a £1k fine for parking on her own driveway after jobsworth council blocked dropped kerb
A DAD has claimed his daughter faces fines for parking on her own driveway after the council blocked a planned dropped kerb.
He claims local road bosses refused permission unfairly, leaving the homeowner fighting for overcrowded on-street bays.
John Church, from Lancing, West Sussex, has accused the county council of allowing other residents in similar circumstances a dropped kerb, but leaving his daughter out in the cold.
John told Sun Motors: “We applied to the planning department of Adur & Worthing Council for the dropped kerb.
“When I applied, I did say that there was a layby outside the house and they made no mention of it being a problem.
“They replied that planning permission wasn’t required…but we needed to get a licence from the Highways Agency.
“I paid £183 and filled the forms in.
“[Eventually] i had an email back from them saying that the application was being refused because there was a layby outside the house and the guidance specifically states you can’t have a dropped kerb because it will remove a parking space from the road.”
However, John claims that they only wanted the dropped kerb to ease the pressure on on-street parking.
He alleged that “everybody parks outside their house” and his daughter even parks in the bays within the layby when they aren’t already full up.
The driveway conversion is meant to allow them to park two cars directly outside the house rather than just one on the road.
John added: “A number of houses in the road have been granted dropped kerbs.
“So the argument that we are removing a parking space from the road doesn’t really apply because two of the neighbours just put dropped kerbs in.
“That removes a parking space as you can’t park across somebody’s drive.
“We will actually be creating a parking space rather than losing one.”
If they were to go ahead with building and driving the driveway, it would be rendered useless without the dropped kerb.
Indeed, driving over the pavement, even to get on to a driveway, is an offence and could see John’s daughter or any visitors fined £1,000.
Moreover, John accused the council of implementing a “double standard”.
He alleged that there are “numerous” dropped kerbs in laybys within West Sussex, which he highlighted to the council on appeal.
But they allegedly claimed that these were installed before the guidance came in and so are not relevant to the case, a point which John disputes.
The disgruntled dad has also slammed the decision for preventing the family from transitioning to electric vehicles, as is encouraged by the national Government.
He claimed that buying an EV wouldn’t be affordable unless they could take advantage of cheaper home charging, but that they won’t be able to do so unless they have a driveway to install the charger on.
As things stand, John is hoping to appeal his case to the Ombudsman and has had to delay the start of the £4,000 redevelopment to install the driveway outside his daughter’s house.
A West Sussex County Council spokesperson said: “When we consider an application for a dropped kerb we have to make the decision based on publicly-available criteria, which are mainly focused on highway safety and on-street parking capacity.
“Where these criteria cannot be met due to on-site constraints or conditions, the highways officer will decline the application.
“We have a statutory duty to make every reasonable/practical effort to keep the highway safe and strive to provide a fair balance between allowing vehicular access to private property and maintaining on-street spaces for people who are unable to park off-road.
“As is normal practice, the guidance used in assessing these applications has been reviewed and amended over the years.
“This has resulted in some dropped kerbs being present that now would not comply with the most recent guidance: where this is the case, these historic vehicle crossovers cannot be used as mitigation for new applications.”
Adur and Worthing Council has been contacted for comment.