Parking meters are to be abolished in areas of Central London — thanks partly to thieves breaking into them and stealing thousands of pounds a week.

Westminster City Council, which last year issued 715,000 parking tickets, more than any other local authority, will begin removing its meters today.

Drivers will now pay by debit or credit card via mobile phone if they want to use 440 bays in Covent Garden or Soho. Several other authorities are considering adopting the same system, or making drivers use pay-and-display machines that may be in another street.

Westminster’s decision was prompted partly by an increase in theft from meters by gangs. In the past three months the amount stolen in the borough has doubled to £20,000 a week.

The gangs use angle grinders and pipe cutters to slice through meter posts and remove the heads, which typically contain about £70. The more time-consuming process of smashing open the reinforced cash boxes can then be done behind closed doors.

Thieves have sometimes attached chains to the posts and yanked them out of the ground using four-wheel drive vehicles.

The gangs tend to target only one meter in each street to reduce the risk of being caught, but will steal from five or six streets in one outing. They sometimes wear overalls and high-visibility waistcoats to make it look as though they are working for the council. The more sophisticated gangs study the lock mechanism on the meter heads and fashion keys that can be used to steal from meters without removing them.

Police are investigating assaults arising from a turf war between the gangs over the “right” to steal from meters in different parts of the borough.

Under the new system, drivers will call or text an automated payment service. They will tap in their registration number and a four-digit number displayed on a nearby sign that identifies where they are parked. They can choose to pay for as little as a minute or as long as four hours, with prices ranging from £1 to £4 an hour. There will also be an administration fee of 10p or 20p.

Parking wardens can check whether a motorist has paid via their hand-held computers. Drivers can send a text message to top up the time, up to the limit on the bay.

Westminster will also offer a reminder service which, for 10p, will send a driver a text message five minutes before the purchased time expires.

Alastair Gilchrist, Westminster’s director of parking, said that the the new system would save on the costs of collecting, counting and banking large amounts of cash.

Meters are also vulnerable to petty thieves who insert paper into coin slots and pull out the money once the driver has walked away. The meter does not register the payment and the driver may get a ticket.

Mr Gilchrist said that a deadline for removing all meters would be decided once the council had seen how well the mobile phone payments system was received by motorists.

The new system will also be used to catch drivers who have failed to pay three or more tickets. The software can trigger a message to a clamping van, telling the operator where to find an offending vehicle.

The council has created a £20,000 reward fund for information leading to the conviction of meter thieves.

Driving tickets

7m fines were issued last year

1.4m were later cancelled

Source: parliamentary report, June 2006