Reserved parking spaces

On a short residential street, I recently counted 25 disabled parking spaces marked outside houses. There could not have been much more than 200 houses in total on the street. The street is in an area where parking is in general a huge problem because of shoppers visiting the adjacent high street (and it’s a popular shopping area with people coming from all over England) and because in general the families living on this and similar streets are large, with often 2 or 3 cars per household.

You’ve probably guessed what I am trying to get at. If you extrapolate the 25 spaces to a national level that would mean well over 10% of the population has some form of mobility disability, which does not sound credible. People are, in other words, creatively using disability rules and regulations to get over parking problems. Often there is some form of legally defined disability in the household, but its mobility implications are exaggerated or made up. In some cases, I have seen households given disabled parking spaces even though there is no one in the household with a visible disability.

Being given a reserved parking space outside your house is a form of welfare, and like other elements of welfare it invites abuse. Cash benefits, for example, invite the vice of sloth, by making you think twice before accepting a job that would make you a mere £20 a week better off. They invite lies by making you under-declare income and savings or, the flipside of this, they discourage frugality lest any savings affect your benefit entitlements. So the right to a reserved parking space outside your house encourages people to exaggerate minor problems, or make them up altogether, and to redefine themselves or family members as disabled.