Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Ending of Haringey Daily Visitor Permits to increase daily visitor parking charge by 164%
A parking review consultation run quietly at the start of the year seems to have been so little publicised that it attracted just 42 responses (augmented with another 58 garnered by phone).
The change it included that residents may feel most keenly is the abolition of daily visitor permits.
Currently Haringey's website gives the following prices for visitor permits:
Standard daily visitor permits are £5 and hourly are £1.20.
The "Parking Strategy and Policy/Charges Review, Appendix D: Updated parking permit policy / charges" shares the expectation that residents will henceforth be expected to make up a day's parking permit with hourly permits. For the Ladder where the CPZ runs from 08:00 to 18:30, this will require eleven hourly permits to make up a full day. If the hourly charge remains at £1.20, this will mean a total daily cost of £13.20, an increase of a mere 164%. The cutting below is extracted from that Appendix.
It's not clear to me why hourly permits should be less open to abuse than daily ones, but I'm all ears. If the primary motivation for this change was indeed to counter permit abuse, one would have thought it a fairly easy matter to protect residents from the affects of standing up to the abuse by simply putting a cap on daily charges like London Transport do. As far as I can make out, this hasn't happened.
At section 4.1 of the background papers (attached below), the Council has gone to the trouble of benchmarking the cost of daily business visitor permits. That's helpful. They looked at Camden, Islington, Ealing, Greenwich and Waltham Forest.
For some reason, no benchmarking was done on the cost of daily resident visitor parking costs. I've done my best to fill that gap. I've used the same boroughs and added Hackney since that was a missing neighbouring borough.
The current cost for a visitor to park in CPZ of those six boroughs for a day are as follows.
Camden: £8.79
Islington: £7.20 - £8.00 (on my calculationat £0.90 and £1.00 per hour)) discounted to £2.80 for 60+
Greenwich: Tradesmen £18.50 per week, and £9 per 10 vouchers (no information on time period validity)
Waltham Forest: £8.00 (at £1.00 per hour)
Hackney: £5.30.......................
...................vs Haringey: £13.20
....unless of course I'm misunderstanding Haringey's policy - only too happy to be set straight.
As part of the review, an Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) was run. As a part of that assessment, equality as it relates to socio-economic status was considered. In the case of the daily parking permits, the situation roughly divides the east of the borough, with all its indicators of deprivation, from the much wealthier west. In the west, two-hour CPZ predominate: in the east >8 hour zones are the rule. The shift from daily to hourly permits will barely affect the west of the borough, whereas it will have a significant impact on the east. The only outcomes noted under the socio-economic section of the EIA are "Positive", "Positive" and ... er ... "Positive". The unequal nature of the daily parking charge was not even considered. So the EIA as it relates to socio-economic status is badly flawed.
The change was part of a wider Parking strategy review that was passed by the Council last week. The recommendations of the review were adopted without dissent (see minute 48:30 of meeting on YouTube).
This change is unlikely to affect me personally but I fear that it may have an impact on some who are not is a strong position to absorb the increased charges.
Tags for Forum Posts: daily parking permits, parking, visitor parking, visitor parking permits
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Roslyn Byfield on
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I didn't mean overall reassuring - I meant that it won't at least happen for some weeks. Before that it wasn't clear to me when it was happening ie not right away.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Gotcha! Someone who posted above said that the Council is still selling paper dailies up at the library. Buying some of those may be one defence posture.
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Permalink Reply by Brian on
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A statutory consultation took place re. the recent introduction of the new Hornsey CPZ (For 38% Against 56%. for the consultation area as a whole) It went through 'on the nod' for those roads which had voted For - though with a threshold of a mere 10% response rate that meant that those roads where only 5.1% of total residents had voted For had a CPZ introduced. That's what passes for democracy in Haringey. I wouldn't hold out any hope for the Statutory Consultation making any difference to the intended increases.
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With regard to the issues that the proposal on daily vouchers raises (I.e. unequal impact on east vs west of borough), the report passed by Cabinet identifies taking due regard of socioeconomic status as part of its Public Sector Equality Duty. here are some excerpts from the report:
Parking management is one of the most important tools in tackling inequality.
The Council has a Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) under the Equality Act (2010) to have due regard to the need to:
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- Advance equality of opportunity between people who share protected characteristics and people who do not
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... The proposals are not going to result in any direct/indirect discrimination for any group that shares the relevant protected characteristics."
4j. Socioeconomic Status
Target Population Profile
Parking strategy and associated policy proposals concern the borough as a whole, or in the case of parking permit proposals for all controlled parking zone areas. Given this, there is no target population profile distinct from the borough profile. Furthermore, data is not held on parking users / parking permit holders’ socioeconomic status, therefore detailed impact analysis is not possible.
Potential Impacts
Parking Strategy - Positive, Postive, Positive
I added the full report at the foot of my original post at the time of posting.
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Just letting you know I've written to our new MP here, Bambos Charalambous, and contacted a Radio London journalist who's helped us around here in the past publicise key issues.
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Fabulous thank you! I've writen to Ham & High, Tottenham indepoended and Harringay Community Press :)
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Excellent... just wrote to Councillor Lotte as well and copied that to my neighbours, suggesting they do similar. No one around here knew anything about it except one who had seen it on the web.
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Dear all, just had a good conversation with Susana, the political correspondent of BBC Radio London. She's keen to cover this story and wants to meet a group us preferably tomorrow afternoon around 5 pm (we roughly agreed Duckett's Common) but it doesn't have to be there in order to record our views. Are you available then, Hugh, Caitlin and others able and willing? She is off the following week but would also like to fix an interview with one of you on Eddie Nestor's morning programme for next Monday, say.
Please could you let me know availability? If Wed eve is no good Thursday or Friday morning ok for her. If I have a say I'd rather Wed eve or Friday morning.
She also suggested emailing the Haringey Lib Dems about this so will do that.
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You might want to be able to suggest alternatives to funding the Parking Services budget deficit. One that stands out is the irrationally paltry charge of £65 for annual parking permits of households' second cars.
Second cars might not be especially prevalent in Harringay, but in outer parts of the borough the rates are surprisingly high. Overall, some 12% of Haringey households had 2 or more cars as of 2009.
A £100 uplift in the cost of these permits would put the budget in rude health.
Beyond this discussion of visitor permits, quite how a department with a monopoly for allocating, pricing and enforcing all street parking in the borough runs a deficit is a broader and probably more damning question for the council.
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Yes Susanna Mendonca is an excellent reporter, have heard and enjoyed her reports for a long time. Well done for catching her!
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