Expansion of School Streets could lead to greater driver fines

LEASING brokers that offer fleet management services are being warned to watch out for the potential uptick in driver fines.

It follows the Government’s recent guidance on launching more ‘School Streets’ schemes where vehicles are banned from certain roads at the times of the day children are going to and from school. Penalty Charge Notices are issued if they enter unwittingly at prohibited times.

The new Government guidance is intended to help create more of these schemes in England, with the Department of Transport saying: “Millions more school runs across the country can now be transformed to be healthier, safer, greener and more active.”

The Department for Transport claims that School Streets can hugely reduce pollution: its Hackney example cites that vehicle tailpipe emissions have reduced by 74% as a result. But it does raise the prospect of increased driver fines for entering School Streets.

“Businesses operating in cities such as London have had to plan to avoid entering School Streets at certain times of day, or risk £130 fines each time for doing so.”

Ben Bax, Client Services Director, Lightfoot Tweet

Bax added: “There are around 700 School Streets in London and a further 200 in the rest of the UK. So the potential scale of the issue as this expands across the country, with more than 300 separate councils able to implement these schemes, is quite clear.”

Hackney Borough Council is one of the Department for Transport’s case studies on how to implement a successful School Streets scheme. Over 40 roads in the borough are off-limits in the morning and afternoon as children travel to and from school, but in 2024 so far, according to its live PCN database, nearly 12,000 fines have been issued to non-eligible vehicles entering these streets.

“Clearly, drivers are still entering School Streets then, and if you are a delivery driver going to a drop-off, or an engineer needing to get to a location, it can be difficult to do your job without falling foul of these permissions – not least because the ability to drive on certain streets can change during the day,” added Bax.

“As a business, how do you plan for this, especially as these schemes grow across villages, towns and cities, and are not centrally controlled in one place? Each scheme is run locally, and so the rules, administration, eligibility, enforcement criteria and even the operation times can be different.

“In the first place, how do you know where these streets are? There is a useful website from campaign group School Streets Initiative which tries to keep a list, but there is no official central resource. The administration challenge is to ensure drivers don’t enter the streets in the first place, and then to manage fines if they do. It could be vast.”