Brent Council Fined Drivers Nearly £12 Million Under School Street Cameras in a Year

One London borough issued more than 70,000 camera fines to drivers on streets outside its schools in a single year, and councillors are now asking whether the signage warning them was ever good enough to justify it.

Between April 2025 and March 2026, Brent Council issued 73,018 Penalty Charge Notices to drivers on roads serving 33 of its schools. Paid in full, that batch of fines would have generated more than £11.6 million. Paid at the discounted rate offered for settling within 14 days, it still comes to £5.8 million. Either way, it works out at roughly 384 fines for every school day in the borough.

The Numbers Behind Brent’s School Street Crackdown

Brent runs a School Streets scheme that closes selected roads to through traffic over drop-off and pick-up windows, typically 8am to 9am and 2:30pm to 4pm. Cameras and mobile enforcement teams, rather than physical barriers, catch anyone without a permit or exemption driving through. A first offence costs £160, cut to £80 if paid within a fortnight.

The single worst-hit zone surrounds Preston Manor School, where four streets, Carlton Avenue East, Princess Avenue, Bowling Green Court and Elmstead Avenue, were brought into the scheme in November 2024. In the twelve months to March 2026, those four roads alone generated 12,250 fines. Streets around John Keble C of E, Maple Walk and St Claudine’s in Harlesden produced 12,171 more, while Kingsbury Green and St Robert Southwell schools saw 8,337 PCNs issued between them.

Brent is not unusual. In Kent, Medway Council issued 24,669 PCNs across School Streets outside 11 schools between March 2024 and October 2025. One of those fined, Stephen Jackson from Ramsgate, told the BBC he missed the sign on Richmond Road in Gillingham as the road was “severely damaged” and he had never received a resident’s letter warning him restrictions were coming, as he lived outside the area covered by the mailout.

Councillors Question the Signage

Conservative councillor Michael Maurice raised the scale of the fines at Brent’s Full Council meeting on 6 July, asking for a review of the signage at every enforced location and a full breakdown of the figures. He wants confirmation that drivers are being caught by genuine rule-breaking rather than “inadequate signage or poor scheme design”, and pressed the council to show the schemes are not simply “revenue generating measures” dressed up as safety schemes.

In Medway, councillor Alex Paterson defended the scheme when residents complained, telling BBC Radio Kent that two signs were sufficient warning and that the restrictions followed an “extensive prior consultation period” with a six-month grace period when drivers received warnings rather than fines.

The Council’s Defence

Brent’s cabinet member for Cleaner Streets, Transport and Public Realm, councillor Promise Knight, said every School Street sign in the borough meets the legal minimum set out in national traffic signs regulations. She pointed to a borough-wide signage review carried out in 2023, after which additional advance warning signs went up at approach roads, a step the regulations do not actually require. A second review followed in 2024, adding more warning signs as funding allowed.

Knight said the high PCN numbers likely reflect traffic volumes and a road’s position relative to other busy routes rather than confusing signage, and pointed to a council review of 22 School Street schemes which found child casualty numbers stayed low, several schools saw casualty reductions, and NO2 levels dropped over the monitoring period as more families walked, cycled or scooted instead of driving.

A Scheme Built for Safety, Enforced by Camera

School Streets began as a road safety idea: close the immediate approach to a school gate for a short window twice a day, and fewer children walk past idling engines and exhaust fumes at the exact moment they are most exposed to traffic. Councils across England have expanded the schemes rapidly from 2020 onward, and Brent’s own review found genuine gains in walking, cycling and scooting rates alongside falling NO2 readings. Nobody disputes that keeping cars away from a school gate at 8.45am makes the pavement safer for an eight-year-old.

What residents and councillors are pushing back on is not the safety principle but the enforcement model built on top of it. Camera enforcement removes the human judgement a traffic warden might apply, the kind that lets a plainly lost visitor off with a warning rather than an automatic £160 charge. A camera logs a number plate crossing a line at a banned time and generates a PCN regardless of whether the driver was a repeat offender deliberately cutting through or a delivery driver following a satnav route that predates the restriction.

Why the Postcode Changes How You Fight It

A School Street PCN is not treated the same way in every part of the country, and knowing which system applies to you changes how you fight it. Brent sits in London, so a rejected challenge goes to London Tribunals, run by independent adjudicators separate from the council. Medway sits outside London, so an appeal there goes to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, which covers England outside London and Wales. Both are free to use and both adjudicators can, and regularly do, cancel PCNs where signage falls short of the legal standard, even where a driver did break the restriction.

The legal standard itself comes from the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016, which sets exact requirements for the size, wording, reflectivity and positioning of prohibition signs. A council does not need to prove a driver saw the sign, only that a sign meeting the regulations was in place. That single technical point is why so many School Street appeals succeed or fail on photographic evidence of the actual sign a driver passed, not on whether the restriction itself was reasonable.

How to Fight Back

If you receive a School Street PCN, act before the discount period expires and before you pay anything, as paying is treated as accepting the fine.

Request the case evidence from the council, including photographs or video from the moment of the alleged contravention and a site plan showing every sign on your approach to the restricted road. Compare the signage in the photos against the legal requirements: a red circle prohibition sign with the operating hours and days clearly stated, positioned so a driver has a genuine chance to see it and turn away before entering the restricted section.

If the first sign you would have passed was missing, obscured by parked vehicles or foliage, faded, or simply too far past the point where you could still divert, submit a formal representation to the council within 28 days citing inadequate signage under the 2016 regulations. Keep it factual and specific: cite the road, the direction of travel, and exactly what was missing or wrong.

If the council rejects your representation, you can appeal for free to London Tribunals (London boroughs) or the Traffic Penalty Tribunal (England outside London, and Wales). Both accept photographic evidence you gather yourself, including a dashcam pass of the same route on the same approach. Adjudicators publish their reasoning, and a search of past decisions for your council and road can show whether the same signage issue has already been successfully challenged by someone else.

Residents in a School Street zone should also check whether they qualify for a permit or exemption, as these schemes typically allow residents, Blue Badge holders and businesses with deliveries to apply for access that removes the risk of a fine altogether.

Sources:

• Brent issues more than 73,000 School Street fines in just one year, Harrow Online
• School Streets fines are ‘unfair’, say motorists, BBC
• The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016
• London Tribunals
• Traffic Penalty Tribunal