Our clampdown on supercars in Knightsbridge, central London, has been very widely reported over the past few days, with press calls coming in from all over the place. It makes a change I suppose from enquiries from Local Government Computing Monthly, which is more the sort of publicity I’m used to.

So what’s it all about? Well I hate to disappoint my Guardian chums, but what this is not is the council joining the fight against globalisation and the international super rich.

It’s much more straightforward than that: it’s about a good night’s sleep for our residents.

We’re not killjoys. I know the joy of taking my wheels for a ride on a summer’s evening – but my Honda Jazz and Elgar CD are barely audible even at the kerbside.

McLarens, Ferraris, Bugattis and Lamborghinis are a very different story.

Over the past few years, Knightsbridge has become a magnet for a number of young men, mostly from the Middle East, who drive supercars. It’s a sort of competitive peacocking really and routes and behaviours have quickly evolved – including speeding, causing obstruction and, worst of all, engine revving.

Good news if you are a Top Gear type who wants to see a Bugatti Veyron up close, but if you are a resident living in a formerly quiet backstreet, it’s a disaster.

Switch your supercar to “sports mode” and rev your engine while stationary and it’s loud enough to raise the dead, never mind blow someone’s hat off. If you have got several cars doing it intermittently into the small hours it soon becomes intolerable. Many of our residents are at the end of their tether and we felt we had to do something.

We are going to use a public space protection order, which among other things will make it an offence to rev engines in certain streets in Knightsbridge. If we catch someone breaching the order we can issue a fixed penalty notice of £100.

Of course we’re not expecting Zonda and Veyron drivers to quail at a ticket for a mere hundred quid but we’ll be keeping track. If they rack up a few tickets they might just find their cars being seized by police. Hopefully that will start to have a salutary effect.

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