CIVIC officials have written off up to £100,000 of parking fines as they cannot trace the drivers of the foreign-registered vehicles they were issued to.

The figures, pertaining to Bournemouth Borough and Borough of Poole councils during 2008 and 2009, reveal 1,690 tickets issued to foreign visitors were not paid.

Campaigners say both councils will continue to lose cash until the government establishes a system with other European countries to share vehicle information.

In Poole, 189 penalty charge notices were written off in 2009, while 471 were dropped in 2008. These fines would have been either £50 or £70 each, depending on the offence.

Meanwhile, 508 tickets were written off in Bournemouth in 2009, costing £29,990 in lost revenue. In 2008, the number of tickets was 522 – or £29,620.

Bill Blakemore, director of the Sparks Network, an association of public authorities that campaigns for more effective cross-border traffic enforcement, said: “Local authorities will carry on losing money and struggle to enforce parking tickets against foreign-registered vehicles until the government sets up working arrangements with other European countries to share ownership data.

“Councils need to be able to quickly and easily identify foreign vehicle owners through their number plates, as some continental countries already do. But so far the Department for Transport has not chosen to co-operate with our EU partners in this way.”

A Bournemouth council spokesman said the debts had not been completely written off. If a person contacted them to pay, the account would be reopened. And in Poole, since September 2009 some 163 cases have been passed to an external debt recovery company.

Borough of Poole assistant parking services manager Robert Pickernell said: “Through this company it is possible to trace vehicle owners in other European countries at no extra cost to the council and is a way [to collect] money it wouldn’t otherwise be able to recover.”