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 Gina Fenton on
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This is an excellent graphic. NB On event days in Bruce Grove we would need 13 1hour parking permits. 11x £1.25 is £13.25. If you expressed this as a whole week thing, Crouch end would have to spend £12.50 if a guest came to stay and brought their car. Here, it would be £96.25.
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Permalink Reply by Niall on
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Haringey Community Press. Well done Caitlin!
https://haringeycommunitypress.co.uk/2024/08/12/concern-over-visito...
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In this article Seema Chadwani says ‘some London boroughs don’t have visitor permits’. Really, which ones? I’ll happily email Seema myself, but does anyone already know? would feel sorry for the people banned from having their grandkids driven in for the occasional visit.
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Permalink Reply by Caitlin on
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Thank you for finding this detail Rich! Westminster City Council and Kensington and Chelsea are two of, if not the, most affluent boroughs in London. Haringey is the 4th most deprived, so I don't feel them to be reasonable benchmark for us - our needs are different.
Gina - i will submit ROIs this weekend, thanks for the suggestion!
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Yes, well done, Caitlin, but how irritating that twice Seema is quoted as saying 'Caitlin raises an interesting point' when she's done a lot more than that and when the Council itself should not have to have these problems drawn to their attention. And what a joke that job title is - Cabinet member for resident services and tackling inequality'. That's manifestly what she is not doing.
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Permalink Reply by Anna Abela on
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Thank you to those of you who wrote to me to share their concerns about this proposal.
I apologise for the delay in my response to your emails and this Harringay Online thread. I have just returned from a short period of annual leave as I have been visiting family members overseas, so I am currently drafting responses to all the correspondence I received while I was abroad.
I have read all the emails I have received on this matter and the arguments made in this thread. I have summed up my understanding of residents’ concerns in an email to the Cabinet Member for Resident Services & Tackling Inequality, as well as Haringey Council’s Director for Environment and Resident Experience and the Assistant Director for Direct Services. I have also supported Zena’s request for a meeting to discuss these concerns in greater depth.
Furthermore, I have asked for reassurance that residents’ concerns will be appropriately considered in the upcoming statutory consultation. That said, all of my exchanges so far with Seema and council officers suggest that this is very much the intention, so I would strongly encourage residents who are concerned about this proposal to participate in the statutory consultation, which is expected in the autumn.
I will keep residents updated on my exchanges with the Cabinet Member and council officers on this issue in the coming weeks.
Cllr Anna Abela - Harringay ward
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Can you make sure that residents are alerted to the Statutory Consultation when it is implemented. We have many years experience of looking at council proposals for CPZs etc and usually when a Statutory Consultation takes place it is AFTER due consideration of residents concerns and is just a dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's to make sure that no legal problems have been raised. Here we are being assured that this will be a real consultation (if such a thing existed) where residents concerns will be taken into account. I think, if you have read the arguments on this thread, that you will realise that this is one of the most outrageous attempts that council officers have made to deal with what they perceive as a problem (on the basis of evidence which is, on their own admission, circumstantial) by passing a huge volume of information past members who just rubber stamp it without considering what this means.
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Spot on, Paul.
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