LATER this year a private firm will be providing scores of new traffic wardens who will make sure we don't park where we shouldn't. That's because the police will no longer be responsible for enforcing parking regulations.

Instead it will fall to local councils to uphold the rules. We can expect to see more wardens - about 100 I gather - in their new uniforms, patrolling the streets and dishing out tickets to those who think they can park where they like. Fines will be about £60. So make sure you don't park where you shouldn't.

Now then, I hope that's all clear. It wasn't too hard to understand, was it?

But the thing that is hard to understand is just why Lancashire County Council has felt the need to spend £16,000 for a consultant to tell us the same thing. That's £16,000. You could buy a brand new Saab motor for that. Or half a full back for Burnley FC.

What the county council is hoping for is that we will all listen to this fancy consultancy and embrace this new era of decriminalised parking. Ideally, we will all come to accept that the increased parking fines and extra wardens are all for our benefit, and only naughty motorists will be punished. Honestly, if County Hall simply wanted to brainwash us, why didn't they just start a faux-religious cult? It would have been much cheaper.

ANYONE would think they are terrified of people getting the wrong end of the stick, and mistakenly believing they are going to use parking fines just to raise plenty of extra revenue for the under-funded councils by being over zealous!

For this has been the case in other areas of the country, where legions of smartly-uniformed wardens have taken over the role of traffic parking enforcement.

There have been some real horror stories of drivers being booked for going half a millimetre on to a double yellow line at the dead of night in residential areas, caught out by special "crack" teams sent out to generate fines. Others have been done for running over their allotted time in a car park by four seconds. To them, a £60 fine seems just a touch excessive.

In other areas still, some wardens have been paid to hit targets for the numbers of people fined. And more than a few councils have seen the amount of revenues brought in by parking fines leap by several thousand per cent.

Of course there is another, much more cost effective way of making sure we don't start accusing our traffic wardens of being the instruments of another "stealth tax" on motorists.

It doesn't involve spending the equivalent of a posh car on a consultant, and it doesn't mean setting up a cult either.

It's this - a radical suggestion I dreamt up over a cup of tea (total cost, 15p): simply don't use wardens as a thinly-disguised way of quickly generating lots of extra revenue. Now how hard could that be?. . .