DESPITE new parking restrictions in Abbots Langley, visitors to the county dump are still causing problems for villagers.

About 600 tickets have been issued in the village in the four months since the scheme started, while just 27 tickets have been issued in Old Mill Road which is used to access the Hunton Bridge Household Waste Site.

Residents in the area, already unhappy with the traffic congestion generated by the dump, have complained that Three Rivers District Council is not properly enforcing parking restrictions in the road.

Old Mill Road currently has parking restrictions during the dump's opening hours, from 8am to 6pm, seven days a week.

However, councillor and resident of Old Mill Road John Peatey said the restrictions have had little effect because parking attendants were not visiting the road to enforce them.

Councillor Martin Trevett, executive member for physical environment, admitted that the figures for Old Mill Road were low.

He said there were problems with the service on Sundays when the dump is at its busiest but no parking attendants are employed on the ground to enforce restrictions.

A review is due in the early part of the year.

In the meantime, the council is looking into the possibility of diverting resources from other areas in the village to greater enforce restrictions in the road.

Councillor Trevett said: "It's still a fairly new scheme. There are lots of areas where we need to tighten up a little bit.

"If we are going to employ wardens on a Sunday, there's going to be a cost implication. Services have to break even at least."

He added: "Overall, the scheme seems to be going quite well: 1,608 tickets have been issued, which is more than what the police would have issued in a year."

Councillor Peatey said the scheme seemed to have made little difference to Old Mill Road.

He described weekends in the road as "chaotic".

There had been, he said, times when emergency vehicles had not been able to get through, as the road had been blocked by drivers queuing up to use the dump and cars parked illegally.

He said: "You can't stop there at all the whole time the dump is open, but people do stop there and that's what's causing the traffic congestion. It needs enforcing.

"Ideally, there should be somebody walking up and down on a Saturday and Sunday.

"It's a shame that people have to get parking tickets to deter them from doing this sort of thing."

He added: "At one stage, Hertfordshire County Council actually said if the problems continued they would consider closing the dump.

"There has been talk of the facility being moved. It would be a shame to lose such a facility because it's very very handy."

A spokesman for the county council said there were no plans to shut the site down.

However, the authority has land at Waterdale, where the M1 meets the A405, and has been granted planning permission to build a larger waste site with better access, which would relieve the pressure at the Hunton Bridge site.

Construction on the new site is due to start in February 2002.

The building work is expected to take about six months.

October 30, 2001 15:30