Fri 4 Jan 2019 11.48 EST
Last modified on Fri 4 Jan 2019 11.50 EST
The high value of blue badges is inevitable as they are not marked with a car registration, for very good reasons (Blue badge thefts rise by 45% in England, 30 November). This issue came to my notice, via harassed constituents, when I was a councillor in Lambeth (sometimes memorialised in the Society section of this newspaper) over a decade ago. One constituent’s blue badge was being repeatedly stolen from her car overnight – hasslesome enough, but then there were also the parking tickets assiduously issued the next morning.
We came up with a ludicrously simple solution that I now offer to the nation: Lambeth issued (I wonder if it still does?) its own disabled badges, valid only in Lambeth but printed with the car’s registration. This meant that when used overnight or on a local trip, the badge was rendered valueless to a thief.
Not a universal solution, but I imagine it would, if nationally applied by each council, cut theft – and the subsequent fraud – in half. If not more.
Jonathan Myerson
London
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/04/one-way-of-reducing-theft-of-blue-badges
