Whether it intends to ensure that fines raised from parking offences committed within each local authority area are retained by that local …

Under existing arrangements, parking infringements are criminal offences and the income generated from parking fines accrues to the Exchequer.However, the Road Traffic Act 1991 introduced provisions enabling the decriminalisation of most non-endorsable on-street parking offences in London and permitted similar arrangements to be introduced elsewhere. The relevant provisions of the 1991 Act were commenced for Scotland in June 1997.The purpose of decriminalising parking offences is to enable a local authority to administer its own parking penalty schemes and to retain the penalties collected to finance their parking enforcement procedures. In areas where parking offences are decriminalised, any surplus income must first be used to improve off-street parking and secondly, for general traffic management purposes within the area of the authority.Decriminalised parking enforcement was first introduced in Scotland in the City of Edinburgh on 5 October 1998. Glasgow City Council introduced a similar scheme on 4 October 1999.It is for other local authorities, as they see fit, to make application to Scottish Ministers for a designation order to introduce a similar decriminalised parking regime.