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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Yes, thanks Caitlin!
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Petition to stop Haringey visitor parking permit cost rise
YESTERDAY, the Ham and High published a story about visitor parking.
The Haringey council cabinet normally rubber-stamps the proposals of officers but sometimes, "their" decisions cause irritation.
(Cabinet Member) Cllr Chandwani said: “Our residents and businesses have been instrumental in helping to develop our parking strategy, …" Putting aside just how instrumental residents and businesses really were in developing the visitor parking strategy, there are other aspects of parking.
The council's glossy parking strategy document talks all around the subject of parking.
However, the big omission in the strategy document is a coherent strategy, or even any strategy, especially relating to the claimed policy of active travel.
The Borough's single biggest obstacle to furthering active travel is the council's continuing policy of pavement parking that has the side-effect of obstructing pedestrians of all kinds. However, the council Highwaymen seem determined to maintain 102 streets with official, "footway" parking bays.
Residents need Cabinet Members who lead and are more than just mouthpieces for council employees. And residents need Cabinet Members for parking who do more than heap praise on the Highwaymen.
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Permalink Reply by Jeremyb on
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The parking permit issue is featured in an item in today's Daily Telegraph.
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris
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It seems to me that talking about the so-called Parking Strategy and new rules and prices made under it, is a case of putting the cart before the horse. Haringey's ongoing consultation on Transport is surely something that should have preceded the questions around parking. After all, the first things is for Haringey to decide what its roads are to be used for and in whose interests they are to be managed. It wouldn't make much sense if irksome parking restrictions were imposed on residents and the main beneficiaries turned out to be drivers passing through. It is vehicles just passing through our streets that we are anxious to restrict. I have made my contribution to the Haringey Safe and Sustainable Transport Strategy and will now make a contribution to the highly controversial consultation on parking rules the deadline for which is tomorrow.
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Permalink Reply by Anna Abela
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Dear all,
Thanks again to those residents who have been copying the Harringay ward councillors into their responses to the statutory consultation on the proposed parking policy changes.
For full transparency, I thought I'd share my own response here. I decided to focus my response on what I believe are the four strongest arguments against the proposed removal of daily visitor permits to maximise the impact of my response. That said, I do acknowledge that there are many other strong arguments to be made, which I know many residents have been raising in their own responses.
Best wishes,
Cllr Anna Abela (Harringay ward)
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Dear Traffic Management Group,In my capacity as the local councillor for Harringay ward, I am writing to express my strong objection to the proposed removal of daily visitor parking permits. I wish to emphasise that the concerns raised below are widely shared among residents in the ward I was elected to represent, hundreds of whom have contacted me since the proposed measure was announced.- The introduction of hourly visitor parking permits will bring the cost of one day of parking in my ward up from £5 to £13.20. This is a financially prohibitive cost, which will be especially difficult to bear for low-income residents. The effect of this significant price increase will be to limit the number of visits that residents on modest incomes can receive each month, which will pose an especially great hardship for certain groups of people in our community. For instance, I have been contacted by several elderly residents with a modest pension who have outlined that this proposed measure would limit the number of visits they can receive from family members, thus putting them at risk of loneliness and social isolation. I have also been contacted by new mothers on statutory maternity pay (£184.03 per week) – including mothers of babies requiring special care and support – who have pointed out that this high cost could limit their ability to regularly seek support from friends and family at a time when this is especially needed.
- The proposed measure is also inequitable as it will have a far greater financial impact on residents in those wards in our Borough that face the highest levels of deprivation. The removal of daily visitor permits will disproportionately impact wards in the east of the Borough where CPZs are in effect all day. Meanwhile, residents in more affluent wards like Crouch End and Muswell Hill, where parking restrictions apply for a much shorter time, will need to purchase fewer hourly permits. The image below, which a Harringay resident shared with me, highlights that the highest costs for a full day of visitor parking will be paid by residents in wards in the highest deciles of deprivation.
3. The proposed measure would also impose an unreasonable administrative burden on residents. In Harringay ward, where parking controls are enforced for 10.5 hours per day, residents would be required to obtain eleven consecutive permits just to cover one day. This is excessively time-consuming and will inevitably lead to human error and resultant fines.
- Finally, I am unconvinced that sufficient evidence has been brought forward to justify this proposal. Haringey Council’s Highways & Parking Service has confirmed that the proposal is only supported by anecdotal evidence of incidents of misuse of parking permits. Anecdotal evidence is insufficient to justify the introduction of a measure that will impose such significant financial and administrative burdens on residents. Moreover, while it is no doubt true that a minority of residents misuse the parking permit system, it is unfair to increase the costs faced by all residents to curb the abuses of a small non-compliant minority. It would be more appropriate to address these incidents of misuse through enforcement measures.
While thanking you for kindly considering my objection, I strongly urge you not to proceed with the introduction of this measure.Regards,Cllr Anna Abela (Harringay ward)
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Thank you Anna - one of the few responses from Councillors in this debate which looks at the reality of what this change actually means for the population you represent. I am lucky enough to live in the west of the borough so I will not be affected by this proposal but I still object to it strongly precisely because of the points that you make (an indeed others have made). I just wish we would see more objections from councillors representing the many residents who will be adversely affected by these proposals but the they seem to be very silent. Where comments have been made they try to excuse the proposal and place emphasis on the fact that a statutory consultation had not been made, although that has little to do with the approval by cabinet of this proposal earlier in the year. Congratulations to you, if I still lived in Harringay Ward (I did until 1973) you would have my vote!
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Paul, as you note, this was initially passed by Cabinet in July. Does this post just minutes after a short consultation period ended warrant such lavish praise? I appreciate that in the current environment it is often deemed churlish, but I have an old fashioned expectation that those who choose to represent us actually do the job they have been elected to do.
Posting an apology for missing such a glaring balls up rather than handing in someone else's homework could have been a little more appropriate. That goes for all the local Councillors.
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