Source London do charge a premium which includes a parking charge but these lamppost chargers are Ubitricity and are in resident bays.
Either way, it is inconsiderate simply to park at a charging point and block it for an EV wanting to charge. Would a petrol car think of parking at petrol pump and leaving it for several hours?
Similar problem in Ealing where Ubitricity lamp posts are frequently ICEed because there was no special parking or signage. Source London used to charge by the minute, which sort of makes sense when they are effectively selling a parking spot at the same time. It made for very bad value in terms of kWh cost. Even worse value if you had a local parking permit, but at least they remained clear of ICE or overstaying EVs. I don't know if anyone has ever plugged up but not initiated charging - that should be obvious to a passing warden by the colour of the lights on top of the post. Last December they changed their pricing structure to the more standard price per kWh, but they have an "idle time" charge which starts to apply after the charge current drops below a threshold. There's something like a 5 minute grace period after which you start to pay per minute. (They do send an email warning I believe)
I never use Source London - TOO expensive!
The Ubitricity sockets on lampposts are almost too discrete and they present a problem for a warden to recognise charging or not...
In the past Ealing Council hasn't created reserved bays and the result has been that some of the local sockets are never free. I pretty much know which ones where I have a 30% chance of it being accessible and which have zero accessibility. Such a waste of money to put in a resource in places which are densely parked and not to protect the space. There are often end of street locations of link roads between terraced streets which don't have people parking "outside their house".
Anyway, the lamp post sockets from Ubitricity have one small LED by the socket which is blue if the thing is idle, amber when you have plugged in and it detects the car and green when "charging". It remains green even if your car has reached 100%. It's great, because they don't cut you off and email the receipt until the driver unlocks the car and unplugs. That means in really cold weather you can send the car an instruction to pre-heat before a departure and arrive to a warm car at 100% SOC (perhaps not these days). It worked when I tried it for a bit of fun when the car was new.
That nice simple approach of the 240V remaining available to the vehicle is great in many ways, but it means the traffic warden passing by has no idea whether you are charging. Because these are AC power points we are dealing with periods of many hours, overnight often, picking up several hours after the charge may have completed in the small hours, or you moved and plugged up at 10am and it completed at 4pm but you couldn't collect the car until 5.15pm.
What's a warden to do? Ticket a car that's on the same socket the next day? Who's to say it hasn't been out and back?
If anything, it should be up to the charge point operator to monitor use and provide some signal at the charge point. The Source London chargers will carry on taking the driver's money, but they could revert to showing an idle lamp after long enough, so the driver might get a ticket for not charging. Ubitricity could decide that 5 hours after charging kW has dwindled to near nothing they disconnect and return the LED state to "blue".
And then we would need the councils to have the money to employ the staff and train them to issue tickets for an offence that probably hasn't been written yet.
We are an appallingly badly governed country, distracted by identity politics rather than the daily issues and evolving technology.
