Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Removal of Unused Disabled Spaces
With parking places increasingly being at a premium on the Ladder (and I assume throughout Harringay), it's worth making sure that all appropriate parking spaces are available.
I fully support the use of disabled spaces by those who need them, but we've all seen a disabled space that is never used. Sometimes it's probably just a matter of appearances and the space is used, but infrequently. No problem. But others are unused because the person for whom it was established has moved out or, sadly, passed away.
This happened with one of my neighbours recently. He told me that he reported it to the Council around nine months ago. But still there's been no action. Just further up the road a new house was built on the garage plot of a house fronting on to Wightman. I think that was three years ago. The yellow line protecting the driveway remains in place eben though there's no driveway any more. and so no need for it.
So last week, I reported both on Fix My Street. Today I had a full and helpful repy about the disabled space. I thought it might be helpful to share what was said:
Parking spaces in Haringey are at a premium so we always appreciate these kind of emails.
We can propose to remove the bay but this will be subject to a consultation.
In order to make any changes to the highway we must first advertise the proposed changes in the local press. To advertise each location individually would not be a good use of limited funds so we must process our Disabled bays, both new installations and removals, in batches.
The placing of the advertisement in the local press triggers a 21 day consultation period whereby any interested parties may make representations to the council either in favour of or objecting to the proposals. 21 days is our legal requirement but we normally allow 28 days for these to reach us.
At the end of the consultation period we will then need to respond to any objections received and will not be able to begin work on the ground until all objections have been responded to. This legal process must be followed.
What this means is, although there may be no objection to the bay removal you have requested, we do anticipate objections to other locations on the advertisement and no work can begin until all responses have been sent out.
When we have sent out all of our responses, we will then be in a position to create the Traffic Order. We expect our responses and the traffic order writing to take around 3 weeks.
When the Traffic Order is in place, we can then place an order with our contractors who will have a 28 working day window in which to complete the works. There will be over 40 items on our next batch so the window is required.
Unfortunately, we have recently advertised our latest batch and do not plan to advertise the next one until the end of June.
I will add this location to our next batch and providing there are no objections to its removal, to have it removed from the highway by the end of August.
Other projects may take priority and these dates are approximate only.
I have no record of this ever being reported to me previously. The spreadsheet I use log all of our Disabled bays, both new installations and the removal of redundant bays, was started by a previous officer in 2013. There is no record of this bay on the spreadsheet.
So in a nutshell, there is a process, albeit a rather cumbersome one and due process must be followed. So these things take time. Haringey do apparently welcome reporting of unused disabled spaces, and they will investigate properly. I conclude that it is worth submitting a report or a space that you're fairly certain is now redundant (but I would advise against more speculative reporting!).
Tags for Forum Posts: disabled spaces, parking
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Geraldine B on
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I love a good process and maybe this could be sent to the new Home Sec as an example of diligent and good working of local government for his ideas box. The weak spot though is have to watch out for spreadsheet continuity management!
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Permalink Reply by Alix on
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This is great, and a much more professional response than we got! We moved into a house with a disabled parking bay, and as we aren’t disabled, and do at have a car, we let the council know right away that we didn’t need it. Six months later we chased, but they had no record of it. I think we had reported it to parking, rather then traffic services, or some such. It has now been removed, but it took about a year....But the neighbours are grateful.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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The Highways Act. All local authorities have to go through the same protracted process
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I'm not sure if it's just a protracted process, Michael.
By chance I spoke to my neighbour again yesterday and this issue came up. It was in fact 18 months ago since his mother died and he said that he'd told "the Council" at least twice that the disabled space was no longer needed. I checked and in this case "the Council" meant the Social Services department.
Since the need to remove this space never seems to have reached the relevant spreadsheet of the very efficient-sounding staff member I was in contact with, I'm going to hazard a guess that there's a failure of inter-dpertmental communication here.
It's one thing to live with a protracted process, but this seems to be a system failure. We are now 18 months on and the process hasn't even begun.
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Combination of protracted process and ineffective administration. Not good for anyone really
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Permalink Reply by Jane Bain on
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We have 2 Disabled Parking Bays on my Road, the Owners have both expired. One of them has not been needed for about 9 years. I am not sure if any of them have been reported to Traffic Services to be removed.
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I'm not sure who that person is, but the email I had was from Daniel Nye, Assistant Project Engineer. He wrote, "I have been the Officer responsible for the Disabled bays since July 2016".
He also commented:
"The best place to log this kind of issue is with our Frontline service. This will ensure your email is properly logged and allocated to an appropriate officer for a response. Frontline services can be contacted on Frontline@haringey.gov.uk"
I guess you can cc Daniel at daniel.nye@haringey.gov.uk.
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