The Blue Badge

When I worked at the Bank, in the Paradise Circus building, we had a number of people who always seemed to get staff members parking round the back of the building, in parking spaces with meters.

They always seemed to have really expensive cars, and earned lots of money in their jobs in the bank, so I always figured they were paying, like everyone else, and they could afford the charges.
Then I realised they all had Blue Badges in their car, and they weren't paying a penny!

What bothered me, was that they weren't disabled, none of them, yet they all had the badge.

I asked one of them once, how they got hold of a Blue Badge, and they told me it belonged to their mother, and because it was registered to their car, they were allowed to use it, even though their mother wasn't with them at the time.

I was suspicious about this, but not knowing anything about the Blue Badge scheme, I left it.

Later I found out that some of them were using fraudulent badges. Admittedly I was pissed off with them getting away with this. I asked them how they got hold of one of these badges. They said they do cost quite a bit of money, but they can be got on the black market, if you knew the right people.

I never thought to dob them in. Maybe it just wasn't something I would do, even though it angered me that they were getting away with this injustice, whilst the rest of us had to fork out something like £10 a day to park in the City.

I was watching the BBC Midlands News recently, and they had a story running, about people in the City being caught out by using Blue Badges, when the person whom the badge was designated to, weren't actually in the car with the person who was using the badge at the time.

They have finally decided, no doubt after years of complaints, and fraudulent people being caught, that they're going to start ticketing cars, fining people, and towing cars away, of people who had the Badge showing in their car, but were not the person whom the badge belonged to. They check this, by calling the badge holder, to find out where they are, to establish that they are not in the vicinity of the car itself (ie they're at home, for instance, and the car is in the City). They can even imprison people who have stolen or duplicated badges as well.

I say ABOUT FUCKING TIME TOO!!! I cannot believe the number of people who used to get away with this where I used to work. I'd say a good dozen people I knew were doing it, and some of them were bloody Managers!

Of course in order to keep on top of this, they'll need to eventually employ more people, as it takes time to call the badge holders, etc. Whether they'll do this, is another matter!

I think this is long overdue, and I truly hope they finally put a stop to these people, not only taking advantage of their disabled relatives, but also conning money out of the Council, AND stopping actual disabled people from finding parking spaces near to where they need to go!

This has come as such good news to me, and i'm so happy about it. I don't have a Blue Badge, but I HATE injustice, and this injustice used to really piss me off, and still does, so it's about bloody time they sorted this out, and I hope this hurts those bastards I used to work with, and all those hundreds of people out there who do the same thing, because it's about time justice was served. People get away with too much in this day and age, and i'm glad this is at least one area that's being rectified. I only hope the inspectors will be able to cover not just Brum, but everywhere else in the UK as well!

If you wanna know more about this story, click HERE to go to the BBC News story.