CHILTERN District Council is still trying to set up a Special Parking Area (SPA) for the whole district, which would give it responsibility for clamping down on illegal parking rather than the police, two years after promising such a scheme.

To do it, the council needs the agreement of Buckinghamshire County Council, which is the highways authority, and an order then has to be set before Parliament.

The Tories in Chiltern pledged they would set up the SPA to get a grip on illegal parking if they won back control of the council in May 1999 which they did.

They also consulted and got backing for the scheme.

But district and county councils have not yet agreed a system.

The district council wants its own staff to take over responsibility for policing the on-street parking in the district rather than leaving it to police and traffic wardens, but they cannot agree with Buckinghamshire County Council about how it should be done.

Chairman of the district council Don Phillips said there was parking anarchy in the district. In Amersham and Chesham people parked on kerbs and yellow lines. In Little Chalfont they were destroying the grass verges.

The Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police Charles Pollard had said he did not have enough officers to police car parking and his traffic wardens were hardly to be seen.

Drivers were prepared to gamble on getting away with it and park illegally. People commuted to London from Chalfont and Latimer station, leaving their cars on yellow lines for hours.

There is now to be a crunch meeting next Friday between the two councils.

Cllr Phillips said: "It has taken us two years to get to the stage of no perceptible progress."

The county council wants a guarantee that the scheme won't cost it any money. It wants £41,000 for its officers' time. It also thinks outside contractors should police the parking whereas Chiltern wants its own officers to do the job.

"We don't want to be heavy-handed with our locals," said Cllr Phillips, adding that when Wycombe District Council had introduced its SPA, it led to major protests.

"Wycombe had taken on people to enforce the rules and extended its yellow lines. Our aim is to keep residents happy and cars in line," he said.

It had been a disappointing two years but now the county council was coming back with alternative proposals, he added.

"They should share our concern about the anarchy in our streets about parking. It is very frustrating and we want to get it right."

A spokesman for the county council said county policy was that setting up an SPA should not cost its council taxpayers any extra money, so it had to be self-financing.

The new system will mean that yellow line areas are more intensively monitored in future and this may merely shift the problem to other streets, leading to calls for more yellow lines.