FROM what can be seen of them in their preliminary stages, motorists may fear that proposals to switch enforcement of parking regulations in Lancashire from the police-controlled traffic wardens to council-run services may amount to another drive on their pockets -- despite the gains that are also promised.

For, though, ostensibly, the move promises better enforcement of parking restrictions and so, in turn, less traffic congestion and the advantage of more police officers being freed to fight serious crime -- there is a danger that councils could turn it into yet another device to siphon cash from motorists who are already the most heavily taxed and legislated against in Europe.

That is because the switch would also direct the huge revenues from the £30-a-time fixed-penalty parking fines away from the Treasury into council coffers. And though local authorities would be required to spend this new income on traffic management, it could unleash anti-parking purges designed to rake in as much as possible so that the policing of the regulations becomes ever more extensive and so that the planners have ever more to spend.

One glance at the two-thirds increase in the number of parking tickets dished out in a year in Oxfordshire where enforcement was removed from traffic wardens and handed over to a private company by council chiefs gives an idea of what Lancashire motorists could be in for.

But if flouters of the parking regulations do beg punishment, it is also vital that councils contemplating this move realise that it should not simply be a revenue-driven change.

Above all, it should also alert them not only to their duty to curb indiscriminate parking and to keep the traffic flowing, but also to that of providing adequate parking facilities for increasingly harassed motorists -- particularly in regard to the health and protection of their town-centre economies.

If they are to be firm, they must also be fair.