THE air that we breathe and the sunshine that we enjoy comes to us free of charge. Unfortunately, nothing that is made by man comes to us free of charge. It costs money to build a car park, and it is perfectly reasonable to make charges for parking.

What I do resent, however, is the method by which we are charged and the high-handed methods by which local authorities administer parking. There must be a better way and I would like to propose one.

When I am about to leave my drive to enter the highway, I do not have to suffer the irritation of having to get out of my car and walk 50 or more yards to buy a ticket from a machine to enable me to do so. I have already paid to use the road from having paid Vehicle Excise Duty (VED). Similarly, why can't we have a national scheme for parking so that parking becomes free at the point of supply?

The cost of parking could be paid for by means of a supplement to VED which could enable a vehicle user to park free of any further charge in any local authority area. Such a scheme could be regulated by disk parking, and I suggest that it could provide parking free of any further charge for up to three hours. Consideration would have to be given to longer term parking and it could well be that charges would have to be made for motorists wishing to park for long periods of time.

The advantages of such a scheme would be many. Drivers would not have to find coinage to feed into the ticket machines and, furthermore, people would not suffer the stress that comes from the anxiety of not knowing whether they can get back to their vehicles before the expiry time of their ticket because of delays caused by unexpectedly long queues in shops and banks and delayed appointments, for example.

Local authorities would not lose out from this kind of scheme. The DVLA will have the names and addresses of all registered vehicle keepers, and they could disburse the money that they would receive from the parking premium to the local authorities in which the registered vehicle keepers reside.

An additional advantage of this kind of scheme would be a reduction in the cost of administration –there would not be a need for so many ticket machines and fewer people would be needed to print the tickets, empty the machines and count the money before banking it!

David Hill, Northallerton