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
Aside from the increase in price (which is bad enough) this change seems likely to prove very inconvenient for legitimate users of visitor permits such as myself. I regretted that two-hour permits were dropped and rarely use the present one-hour permits. If my garden helper is coming for the day, I simply allocate a day permit and tell him to start any time he likes. The idea that I might have to set up a sequence of one hour permits is intolerable. The expression hammer and nut springs to mind. This nonsense should be put on hold until councilors have had a chance to consider it properly.
On this note it’s also very difficult for local tradespeople!
Apologies if this has already been said but the chain here has (encouragingly) grown enormously.
What can residents do to try and oppose this? Who should we write to for best effect? Who specifically? And what are our chances if the council have already passed it?
Thanks
I think the more fuss that's made, the more people who lift finger to keyboard (or more), the better chance we have of embarrassing the council into a climbdown. They needn't even admit a reversal of policy: they can just say that they took note of consultation feedback - wouldn't that be a nice change!
I'd get in touch with your ward councillors and cabinet member Seema Chandawani. It won't hurt to also contact Joanne McCartney who is our very active GLA rep. Emails are good, face-to-face is even better. Your ward councillors will have regular face-to-face 'surgeries' in your ward, the times and dates of which are noted on the council website along with their contact info. Make a nuisance of yourselves and go and represent your views ad demand that your councillors do the same.
In connection with, but part of a wider issue, the current hot debate about Parking Permits.
I have often wondered why consumer rights programmes such as Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ (but there are many others) never seem to tackle public bodies, such as Haringey Council, When they appear to impose change without following proper consultation.
Does anyone on here know, if there is some journalistic reason for this, Or if it’s because they’ve been elected so therefore cannot be held to account in the same way as other bodies are, Including lots of private companies.
And the council will still find a way, any way, to do what it wants. There’s been so much discussion on this, but they’ll just ignore it. Shameless.
we'll have to make sure they don't ignore it. Musn't be defeatist.
Something that we can do now, Is to ensure that every single Councillor receives a freedom of information request for the following:
1. Data on the number of day passes per household by Ward in the last 12 months, In clusters such as less than 20; 21 to 50; 51 to 150; 151 to 499, More than 499. Surely they used such data to reach conclusions?
2. A copy of the full consultation plan as soon as it is available. And Assurance that every household that has bought a day visitorParking permit will be emailed and invited to join the consultation. (They are totally capable of emailing us to ask for money!)
3. Detailed and accurate costing Of the Consultation (advance notice helps accuracy and will focus minds on the fact that it is a total waste of money!)
I’m about to ask Mayor Sue Jamieson.
And tweet your Councillors! https://x.com/PeepODaze/status/1821999513747276271
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