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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Permalink Reply by Hugh
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Thanks, Eugene.
The line that no decision has been taken is not strictly speaking 100% true. In fact, if you look at the video of the full cabinet, you’ll witness that they quite explicitly took a decision. The paperwork shows that the item was agreed only subject to a statutory consultation. The normal consultation phase was missed out. The statutory consultation is a legal requirement. It does not represent the cabinet taking the opportunity to find out what the residents think before making any decision - which would’ve been the normal course of events.
The decision has now been delegated to officers and it would only come back to the cabinet if the officers decide that that is appropriate. Having said that the amount of attention that this issue has got, including from the BBC should ensure that it is sent back to the cabinet.
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Permalink Reply by EMC2
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That's helpful Hugh. Cllr Peray Ahmet is one of our Councillors - I am very tempted to write to her with your points but I suspect I'd get the same response cut 'n' pasted...
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Permalink Reply by Roslyn Byfield
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This is exactly the response I got,which I posted weeks ago, following the enquiry to my MP.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton
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"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." (Juan Ramón Jiménez Spanish poet)
"As a Viennese expression puts it, “If two choices appear before you, there’s usually a third.”
(Maryanne Wolf, American Professor of Child Development)
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I suggest That if the councillors in charge of daily street parking really can't come up with any better options then it's time to change councillors and vote the other way.
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Hi All,
An update - the issue of the daily permits was discused at the Climate, Community Safety & Environment Scrutiny you can watch the recording here.
The topic comes up at 1hour 40, raised eloquently by Ian Sygrave (I believe the chair of the Haringey Association of Neighbourhood Watches), and then again at 1 hr 41m by Cllr Cawley-Harrison (crouch end) answered at 1 hour 48.There is limited new information, by my key takeaways are:
- Statutory consultation should be out on October 16th-It seems for all CPZ changes, despite their policy, the council are going straight to Statutory Consultation and skipping the oublic engagement
- There was no mention or confirmation that the permit issue will be discussed again at cabinet on Decemcer 10th, so the decision is still delegated to an officer
- No other options to solve the undocumented problem of permit misuse, such as capping the number of visitor passes, are being considered
- We should encourage as many residents and councillors as possible to object to the decision in the statuory consultation, particularly raising the huge inequity of cost burden on the poorer areas of the borough
- Harringey ward is making a lot of noise; once the consuiltation is our we need to ensure we are getting equal input from councillors and residents across the borough
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Thanks Caitlin, for your prompt update and taking the trouble to add the link to the online meeting.
I started trying to watch the meeting. It may be the fault of my elderly computer's sound quality; and/or it's my ears. But several people on the committee seemed unclear. Gabbling even. I'll give it another go later.Is "- Harringay ward .... making a lot of noise" about this? If you mean the issues being discussed on this website, surely they're far from noise. More a set of quiet, fair, reasoned arguments. As you say, explicitly the huge key issue is inequity.
Your apt use of that word highlighted the apparent nonsense of being obliged to do stupid stuff by rigid formal/legal rules. One vital point of having separate Scrutiny committees is rethinking and critiquing the rigidities of the bureaucratic mindset.
I hope at least a few of our councillors know some ancient legal history. I once had to learn it. But never thought it would come in handy for parking.
https://lawtutor.co.uk/what-is-equity
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Permalink Reply by Niall
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Thanks Caitlin for wandering down the rabbit hole that is the Climate, Community Safety & Environment Scrutiny Committe and for sharing outcomes.I think your timings might be out for the recorded rather than live version? I got these:
- 1hr 23 for Ian Sygrave
- 1 hr 41 for Cllr Cawley-Harrison
- and 1hr 48 for Seema's response
Agree completely with your conclusions and also note that Seema 'downgrades' the abolition of the Daily Pass as a 'notional proposal' . Despite admitting that the statutory consultation will be binary and that the full cost implications will not be shared, it is obvious that the often used defence 'there is no alternative' has been well and truly scuppered.
Yes, Harringay is making lots of noise - due largely to the impact of HoL and Hugh picking up on the issue at an early stage.
Councillors in the borough would be wise to see this as a ‘Canary in the Coalmine’ moment. If this hugely inequitable proposal were to go through, voters will be reminded on a daily and weekly basis - through their pockets - just how insensitive their councillors are to their needs. They need to start talking to their constituents, and quickly.
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