Tuesday 21 August 2007 9:00pm – 10:00pm on ITV1.

Jennie Bond explores her three motoring pet hates: traffic wardens, wheel clamping and speed cameras.

She starts in London, the natural habitat of motorists’ number one hate figure, the traffic warden. With wardens issuing nine million parking tickets a year or one every four seconds at a cost of £1.5 billion to drivers, they naturally generate some ire.

Bond reckons that some councils aren’t playing fair. She speaks to Daniel Monford from Southampton who received 59 fixed penalty notices in just one year for parking in a resident’s bay outside his own home.

The local council had denied he was entitled to a parking permit because they thought he had a garage with his property – so he was sent £25,000 worth of tickets and when he didn’t pay up he sent in the bailiffs. With the help of a motoring campaigner Neil Herron, Daniel sets out to put the record straight but will he be able to clear his name?

Meanwhile Bond speaks to former policeman Richard Bentley whose detailed knowledge of our traffic laws come from his bible, the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions Manual. It lays down, in the finest detail, how various parking signs must be designed and marked. And if they fail to comply they’re legally invalid.

So what does the manual say about parking bays? Richard sets out onto the streets of central London armed with a measuring stick to find out whether, as he suspects, wardens are getting a bit overzealous when enforcing parking infringements.

According to the manual, the gaps between the broken lines on a parking bay should be at least 600 milimetres. In the space of just one hour he found no fewer than 40 parking bays that didn’t comply with the markings as specified in the legal manual.

Bentley concludes: “I believe the motorist should question every enforcement, every penalty notice, every ticket, because my experience is showing that the majority of people are being, for want of a better word, scammed.”

Following that shocking revelation, Bond has a go at being a traffic warden for the day and admits afterwards she found it “very dispiriting.”

Next she moves onto the subject of clamping. With a lack of regulation, rogue clamping firms have been cleaning up. Edmund King from the RAC Foundation says: “We’ve got these modern day highwaymen… basically saying to the motorists stand and deliver.”

DC Lorraine Bell from Portsmouth police recalls an incident where a local one lady was clamped by a local firm while she was in the middle of a three point turn.

But it’s not just the wardens and clampers after our cash: “If you’re lucky enough to escape the wardens and clampers on our roads there are still the speed cameras to contend with,” says Bond.

Netting £120 million per year in fines it’s no wonder that when a poll was taken 60% of drivers saw speed cameras as revenue raisers. In 1995 200,000 fines were imposed and by 2004 the figure had reached nearly two million.

With a growing number of law abiding motorists being caught out inadvertently by speed cameras some are taking their objections to the extreme. A group called Motorists Against Detection (MAD) claim to have destroyed more than 1,000 cameras in the last seven years.

Recently more and more drivers have been able to prove that cameras have mis-read their speed, leading to false accusations. This was definitely the case for Tom Mathews who was sent a ticket for apparently driving at 426 mph – faster than the land speed record – in his diesel car.