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Garage regulation smacks of Big Brother
• CAMDEN Council have now been recruited by the Labour Party to collect information regarding vehicle taxes, by issuing a directive that to rent a garage a car owner needs to produce his or her insurance documents, tax disc and MoT certificate in order to comply with the new regulations.
Is this a further intrusion into a person’s private life by local and national government?
The official excuse is that Camden are correct in renting out a garage only for use of a car owner who parks his or her car in that garage and not for any other purpose – which is fine for those people who comply and have parked their cars in a Camden garage for many years without government interference.
However, once the legalities are established all sorts of problems arise.
For instance one woman who rented a garage for more than 30 years never used the garage except to store furniture but she was legally taxed, insured and produced an MoT in order to continue storing her furniture. Then she parked her car in the road outside her house.
Another case was that one garage was used for an engineering business, another for wine-making.
What about storage for criminal and drug activities?
Providing the villain has a current tax disc and insurance certificate for a legitimate getaway car…
Numerous garages were sub-let to people who did not live in London and on one occasion one was sub-let to a person living in the USA.
There are so many holes in this new Camden directive that whoever thought up the scheme never took into consideration the difficulties they can cause for legitimate garage storing space for a person’s car whether taxed or not.
Now any pensioner who takes his or her car off the road for, say, six months of the year in order to cut expenses and informs the DVLA (which is perfectly within the law, keeping the car garaged without paying tax or insurance, providing it is not used on the road) will be affected. Yet Camden are now operating outside the law and will refuse to allow any vehicle to be garaged without up-to-date documents so a recently bereaved pensioner, who wishes to avoid driving for the next six months, will have to scrap his or her vehicle in order to comply with the Camden Council Big Brother approach.
Is this discrimination against people on low salaries, pensioners and even students who may need to keep a car on the road for only six months of the year?
Arnold Bentley
Camden Town
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