Errr, my labrador has a limp?
Reports today suggest the Department for Transport will tighten the eligibility criteria and to make it harder to forge blue badges.
Local authorities estimate that up to half of blue badges are being used fraudulently, with the most common cases involving a driver illegally using a badge owned by a relative.
This is hard to detect because an authority must prove that the driver was not picking up or dropping off the relative.
But yesterday, Wandsworth council in South London successfully prosecuted a solicitor after using a video surveillance team to monitor his movements.
Mohammed Lodhi, who was a partner at A to Z Law Services in Balham High Road, was given a three-month suspended jail sentence, fined £1,000, told to pay £1,989 in costs and ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid community service.
He had pleaded guilty to seven offences relating to blue badge abuse after being caught using his disabled wife’s badge to park free of charge in designated disabled parking bays while working at his firm’s offices.
He was covertly filmed on six separate days using the badge. At no time was he accompanied by his wife.
When interviewed on tape, he denied any misuse of the badge and claimed that he only used it when travelling with his wife. He elected to have the fraud offences heard at the Crown Court but, when he appeared, pleaded guilty to all charges.
Wandsworth’s investigators found that two thirds of blue badge misuse was by friends or relatives of the badge holder. Many of the remaining incidents involved stolen badges, which sell on the black market for up to £500.
The investigators uncovered a number of drivers using computer-scanned copies of genuine badges and others who had altered the expiry date or were using badges belonging to people who had died.
Last year, the DfT announced that it was redesigning the badge and adding a hologram to make it harder to forge.
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