To ask what disability a person could have

[Margomyhero]

to park outside the gym and run 30 minutes on the treadmill?

I am genuinely curious about this one.

I got out of my car and parked in a car park near the leisure centre. It's a LOT cheaper than the car park in the leisure centre grounds. As I locked up and headed towards the leisure centre I saw a young man park in the disabled space and get out and go the same way as me.

He went on the treadmill and ran for 30 minutes. I know that as I was doing the same.

So - before I judge him unfairly what disability which warrants a blue badge could this man have which would allow him to run for 30 minutes - after sprinting up the 2 flights of stairs to get there?

Was he a genuine recipient of disabled space parking or was he just avoiding paying the charge (which by the way is 5p for the first hour ).

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/31/able-bodied-motorists-getting-away-disabled-parking-fraud/amp/

The article is from 2016. It states ‘hundreds’ of badges are being misused without prosecution.

We already established that!

Oh, so that's what you took from it, rather than, say, the enormous number of councils who aren't prosecuting anyone at all?

There are hundreds of articles along a similar line. Several from Scotland where MSPs are pleading for tougher controls (although a great stat there is how many more disabled spaces there are in just 5 years).

There's another article where it's estimated that each BB costs about £5k a year on average; Chelsea & Kensington, where I lived for many years until recently, claims it's £11,500 a year there - so the amount of money that isn't collected via fraud is substantial. Those funds could be put to good use.

I don't get why you'd want to minimise the issue, I really don't!

Prosecution rate is 1,300. Let’s assume you can add a good few thousand, instead of hundreds as the article claims, to that number of non prosecution misuses. It’s still not ‘mass’ is it.

The point is there are still millions of disabled people who use their badges correctly, the majority!

The danger is you get lots of people, thinking badges are being misused due to not understanding the criteria or uses of a BB.

By all means report misuse, to make disabled people’s lives easier.However, be aware if you get it wrong, it’s having the opposite impact.

Fibromyalgia. Hearing or sight impaired. Missing limb

Shedmice; www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-43071932

So 2,900 badges stolen, probably being used daily.

On top of the forged badges (in Lambeth people talk about where to get one) and relative’s badges. Again, the chat you hear round here (S London ) people have no shame whatsoever “we were all right cos we just use Mum / Dad /Aunty’s B B”.

Of course there are hardly any prosecutions. Unless a parking attendant or council officials on a clampdown watch someone park, wait hours and watch them return, how can you ascertain that the badge holder wasn’t present?

Jealousy/ bitterness of easier parking? Nosiness? What is it exactly that makes non disabled people feel entitled to question why people have been provided with a bb?

Tammy we have already established that lost or stolen (possibly fake) BB’s are of little use to anyone. They cannot be used for congestion charge etc (other posters have given facts about this I have no knowledge of this) BB’s cannot be used for free parking, in a lot of places. Which is probably why the Government is in no rush to prosecute. Prosecution is focussed on genuine BB holders who let family and friends use it, because it costs the government money.

Lost, stolen, fake etc BB’s can only be used to park on a yellow line or a disabled bay etc.

About 50% of local authorities have started to prosecute genuine BB holders who let family use it (as money is involved, it won’t take the others long) The prosecution rate is 1,300.

For arguments sake, let’s assume the number of genuine BB holders letting family use it is closer to 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 how high would you like to go?

That still leaves approx 2.7 millions users who don’t. should we report and challenge, based on our perceptions of what a disability should look like, to try and prevent the minority of misusers being able to park on a yellow line?

I don't know why they are so obsessed.

Lots of people seem extremely interested in the misuse of BB’s, for the sake of the poor disabled people, obviously

Disabled people couldn’t possibly cope with a disabled bay being misused, they would much prefer to be questioned about their entitlement and uses of a BB relentless in an effort to prove them wrong!

@ RabbitFoodist "if very suspicious taking note of the car registration"

It's not going to help much on its own. It's the badge number you need really, the details 'hidden' in the number on the front of the badge have been discussed upthread.

Someone with a BB can be a passenger in anyone else's car and use the BB as it should be used. That someone could be a passenger in twenty different cars a week and no offence would be committed, so a car reg on its own isn't going to do much to prove misuse.

Before you report people for BB misuse, you need to know what the legitimate use of a BB entails, which is mostly referenced in this thread.

Falmer - I can only assume you haven't rtft.

The issue is nothing to do with why someone has been issued with a BB. It is everything to do with people who have NOT been issued with a BB using the badge/spaces.

Shed - maybe if you live in an area with lots of spaces for BB holders you can be more relaxed about fraud. Where I lived in Chelsea, there was one space on our street. Because it was Chelsea, everywhere else was rammed full on both sides of the road, so you couldn't even park for a couple of minutes, because you would be blocking the road.

I used to do a lot of work with a charity that supported local elderly and lonely people, and as part of that I'd host an afternoon tea party every couple of months. If the disabled spot on my street were full that day, the person driving the guests would have to park anywhere possible, and then bring in each individual one at a time. Most of them needed a wheelchair if they had to walk more than a few yards. It wasted a lot of the time that these people had at an event that meant a lot to them. And that was once every couple of months; if you needed to park there regularly, it would have been so much harder. If it's someone else in need, that's how parking works. If it's someone misusing a BB, to me that's an incredibly selfish issue.

The parking around there also raises a lot of money. People thinking they shouldn't have to pay because someone in the family has a BB means that money isn't collected and then isn't spent on the community.

Nobody is suggesting "questioning you about your entitlement". The posts by Bishop about what people have said to her are horrible. But you seem to think that reporting anyone, however suspicious they seem to be, is worse than doing nothing - even though that's the opposite of the advice from all the local authorities.

In our local authority, when they had a ‘sweep’ it was the able-bodied person using the badge who got prosecuted, not the absent owner of the badge.

But the distinction between on street and car park parking is interesting. Usually these threads are about people using disabled bays in car parks, not on-street. Yes, as a parent I got bloody frustrated that all the disabled bays in the park car park were used by the five a side football teams (they were next to the changing rooms) all playing fast and furious footie. And we could not park safely and get wheelchair out.

carryon OP's question was "before I judge him unfairly what disability which warrants a blue badge could this man have which would allow him to run for 30 minutes"

Once you cut through the patronising tone of the offended and the goady bullshit, this was a very educational thread.

Oh dear Margomyhero. I bet you regret asking now! 😁

Carryon that has not been my point at all! Any point I have made has been in reply to comments.

My points have been

1. Misuse is not ‘mass’ or an epidemic. It’s an extremely small minority.

1. If you know for a fact someone is misusing report them.

1. If you want to report someone, make sure you understand the criteria and uses of BB, if you don’t and accuse someone wrongly, you are making life harder, not easier for a disabled person.

1. Despite my points and many other points made by BB holders and carers of BB holders, most posters are not taking these on board.

“No one is suggesting questioning you about your entitlement” what do you think happens when someone is reported?

Tammy - there are two types of BB misuse.

1. Stolen, lost, fake, expired, deceased.

1. Misuse of genuine badges.

Both can be prosecuted. The first the able bodied person will be prosecuted. The second the badge owner will be prosecuted.

Interestingly, the approx 50% of Local Authorities who have prosecuted 1,300 have focused on the second group. 98%.

IME, by far the biggest problem when it comes to using disabled spaces is the cars using them, with no badge on display at all! I would prefer to see able bodied drivers misusing disabled spaces fined £1,000, more than anything else!

However, as for family members using a bb to avoid parking fees - imo, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the tax revenue lost by the very wealthy hiding money offshore, the black economy and legitimate loopholes in the law!

Auto immune disease? Like crohns?

Shedmice: the report in our local paper aid they had prosecuted the drivers for parking illegally / misusing the badge, and not the badge owner because they couldn’t know that the owner had given permission for the badge’s misuse.

The truth is that local authorities don’t have resources to check B.B. use, and while disabled people (according to this thread) are not troubled by it, and MN is more concerned with taking up spaces than protecting revenue, that doesn’t seem to be a big issue, really.

In the grand scheme of things, it is more important to not vote for a government that sweeps away the rights and benefits of people living with disability. Access To Work, PIP, all sorts of things causing misery and exclusion

What Checklist said.