Medway Council needs to be tougher on “selfish” parents who park near schools, elected members have said.

A number of regeneration, culture and environment scrutiny committee members complained on August, 15 about those who leave their cars on yellow zig-zags as they drop-off and pick-up their children.

Cllr Alex Paterson (Lab) suggested a rota shared with him shows the authority’s CCTV enforcement vehicles only visit each school in the Towns “more than once, if that”.

He added: “Just by the resources we have, we can only visit one school in the morning and two in the afternoon.

“Fair play to the officers who carry out the work – I’ve seen the abuse even police officers have to take when they intervene – but if we leave it to the teachers we are putting them in a difficult position.

"Put simply, that level of enforcement is not good enough to fundamentally change the behaviours of people who –through their own selfishness – are putting children in danger.”

The Rochester West representative claimed “an element of active discouragement” was needed, but did not put forward any suggestions of how this could be implemented or financed.

Members suggested children “needing to battling cars” was stopping parents from allowing their children to walk to and from school, exacerbating existing air quality issues in the Towns.

Creating wider exclusion zones for vehicles and publicising air pollution figures were ideas put forward by Cllr Simon Curry (Con), who added: “A bit more of a heavy-handed approach is needed to prevent the problem.”

Cllr Gary Etheridge (Con) says he was told to “fudging mind your own business, I’m picking up my daughter from school” when confronting a mum parked illegally earlier this week.

Portfolio holder for frontline services, Cllr Phil Filmer (Con) responded: “We haven’t got any army of people in that department, but they work very hard.

“We do a lot of initiatives with schools, but the amount of times we visit with the CCTV car isn’t as much as I would like.

“There are quite a few selfish parents who really could quite easily walk to school and they go to drive there.

"It is a problem, but we try to do what we can.”

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