Just imagine travelling nearly 250 miles to come to Southall to visit your family, park your car in the resident area, pop inside to collect a parking voucher, come out immediately to place the voucher in your car, only to find that you have already got a penalty ticket.

This is exactly what happened to Mr Adalat Hussain who travelled all the way from Blackburn, Lancashire.

If you want to park anywhere near your desired place around Southall Broadway, you may end up going round and round for hours.

So people may park at the first available space, walk to your family/friends house, possibly at the other end of the street, fill in the parking voucher, return to your car. How long does that take?

The Ealing traffic wardens think that 3 minutes is more than enough, as they state on their penalty tickets:

“The Civil Enforcement Officer nnn observed the vehicle identified above from 16:08 to 16:11” and “believes a penalty charge is payable.”

In this particular incident, it took 2 minutes and 15 seconds to walk from the car to the house (which is not from one end of the street to the other), the same time back to the car.

Another 2 minutes is needed to enter the house and fill in the voucher with the correct details of day, date, month, year and time of arrival.

You need to double check the details, as getting any of it wrong will incur a penalty charge.

Other people may find that they need more than the 6.5 minutes, as calculated in this case, to place a resident voucher in their car.

The same incident happened to a neighbour, only a couple of weeks earlier, who were able to locate the offending traffic warden and get him to write a letter stating the facts brought to his attention.

Should you go to the warden and ask them to explain what the hell they are playing at or simply write in through the normal route? What if you can’t find the warden?

Not only is this another example of financially fleecing the residents/visitors but also causes a great deal of un-necessary stress and headaches to the tax payer.