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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Thanks, Caitlin - it was so worth doing, wasn't it? I thought we came across well, especially you given the nature of your data analysis etc. I hear the council has the right of reply next week so will be interesting to hear that. They just can't keep using the specious argument about so-called abuse of permits.
My U3a (Crouch End & District) has now picked up on it as someone posted on the Facebook page so that should raise awareness further. Many of them aren't that affected but could well be indirectly if they have friends/relatives living in the affected areas. Anyway, in my view we should all be concerned at the council's lack of transparency.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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I suggest that abuse of permits should not be entirely dismissed.
Nor described as "specious"; which means appearing to be true but actually false or wrong.
The claimed abuse may be over-estimated or exaggerated but it's is not fictional. I recall a piece of work by Haringey staff a few years back, which investigated abuse of borrowed Blue Badges by people driving to games at Spurs stadium. The Haringey staff were responding to complaints by disabled people with Blue badges.
I also realise that a few examples of people using online websites to exploit driveways or public parking bays don't prove there's a widespread local problem. And I also assume that some people may take a different view to mine and see it as a legitimate informal way to make a few extra quid.
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To phase out one day permits when a person can still sell 11 one-hour permits just as easily (well almost) is not solving the problem. You can purchase up to 999 permits in one single transaction equivalent to 90 days worth of perking and whilst it will cost you more I am sure you can sell the right to park on for a lot more than this. The hourly permits are just as prone to being sold on as the daily ones, just a little bit less profitable for the vendor. If ending an abuse is not possible then the only effects that remain are penalising residents in all day parking zones whilst generating more money from parking. Haringey will claim that they don't create profit from parking - we're not allowed to they exclaim - but every pound in extra parking revenue means one pound less that has to allocated from central funds which creates one pounf more that can be spent on other things which is...parking profit.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Alan, I’m not sure what you’re referring to in your comment, but for the sake of clarity, as I’ve said before, I fully accept that abuse of permits happens. What I find it difficult to imagine is how abolishing daily permits and switching residents to hourly permits will, since as far as I’m aware the system for issuing both is now electronic, in any way tackle any existing abuse. If the issue is that paper permits are still being issued for daily passes, then the solution is simple – stop issuing those.
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This is the reason for the 'specious' descriptor - their illogical approach and lack of hard evidence.
Today a neighbour has forwarded me his very robust exchange with Councillor das Neves, during which she tries to big up Labour's achievements (my friend had cited equalities issues and wondering why people would bother voting Labour etc) and insists that the consultation will be happening. 'As I said, no decision has been taken to implement the scheme', when it manifestly has as per those minutes. I suspect she's relying on people generally not knowing that the circs of a decision being reversed by a consultation have been very rare. He told he he found her response very disappointing and unconvincing.
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If the resistance to this change continues through the consultation, then we may find that the cabinet member feels obliged to direct the officers as to the handling of the consultation feedback. Unless interest in this issue suddenly wains, I would’ve thought it unlikely that the council could resist addressing concerns that have been raised - but then, I am optimistic to a fault. So who knows!
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Paper permits are a red herring. Digital exclusion is a well known issue, not everyone can access and use online services. Digital permits have much more friction in use, need to know reg number in advance etc. All paper permits have serial numbers, these are tied to the account of the household who bought them, parking enforcement officers should be checking that the visitor permits are being used inline with the T&C’s.
Parking enforcement officers use PDAs, it would be very straightforward to capture details of use where there is suspicion of misuse and/or on a sample basis and then run analysis to identify when not being used appropriately.
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So far resistance has come, naturally, from the East of the borough but the West of the Borough is impacted as well in the Finsbury Park Zones which can be impacted even further as they are six day zones with Event Day further restrictions just like Tottenham and Highgate Inner next to Highgate station.
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People don’t necessarily need to be personally impacted to feel that the appropriate thing to do is to resist these changes. Just today I’ve had two messages of support/thanks from people I know in the west of the borough. Neither person will be personally impacted by the changes, but both are very much opposed to them.
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Absolutely right, Hugh. I included the parking issue in an email to my U3a members last night and said 'don't think this won't affect you'..... have also had some nice messages, though some reactions have been apathetic. You'd have thought even if not affected financially people would challenge the Council's lack of transparency.
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