Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Parking Permit Consultation
Dear Permit Holder,
Haringey Council is proposing to increase parking permit prices and introduce surcharges to diesel fuelled vehicles. These proposed changes will help to reduce parking pressures, congestion, reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality.
The statutory consultation which starts on Wednesday 3 June, will run for a period of 21 days, closing on Wednesday 24 June, and proposes the following changes:
- Parking permits – a £10 increase across all existing parking permits to support the significant costs of running, maintaining and enforcing our parking infrastructure.
- Additional parking permits – A £50 surcharge on second and subsequent permits to reduce car ownership, promote active travel and more sustainable modes of travel.
- Diesel fuelled vehicles – An £80 surcharge for diesel fuelled vehicles to highlight the impact of diesel emissions on local air quality and influence cleaner future vehicle choices.
- On-street pay-to-park and off-street car parks – a 25% surcharge to on-street pay-to-park areas and off-street car parks to discourage short trips within the borough.
- Visitor permits – households would be limited to no more than two daily visitor permits at any one time. Daily visitor permits would increase to £4 across all CPZ areas. A concessionary rate discount of 50% will be applied to the visitor permit charge for those aged 65 or over, or if registered disabled.
- Disabled Blue Badge Holders – a free residential permit for Disabled Blue Badge Holders to replace the companion badge scheme and the requirement to display that permit.
- Administration Fee for parking permit refunds – the council is proposing a £20 administration fee on processing parking permit refunds. It is also proposed that visitor scratch cards shall become non-refundable.
If the proposed changes are agreed by the council in September 2020, the new prices would be introduced in November 2020. For more information on these proposals, please visit our current parking consultations page.
Please email us at frontline.consultation@haringey.gov.uk if you have any comments on the proposals.
We would also like to take this opportunity to let you know that parking enforcement will be resuming soon and we will update Haringey residents once a date has been agreed.
Kind regards,
Frontline Consultation
Tags for Forum Posts: parking
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Oliver on
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A veritable catalogue of terrible ideas. Beyond belief.
I despair of Haringey Council. Proposals like this give a terrifying view into the Dantean depths of their thinking.
I would say you couldn't make this stuff up but sadly, we've all paid someone to do just that.
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Permalink Reply by Rob B on
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Visitor permits – households would be limited to no more than two daily visitor permits at any one time.
What does this even mean? Two people visiting you at the same time? Only allowed to buy 2 at a time?
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My guess is permits will go digital and it will only be possible to purchase 2 daily permits per day.
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They did away with the two hour permits so it will be crazy expensive with hourly permits if you have builders in or have visitors. I don’t have a car but why shoukd residents be left so out of pocket?
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Permalink Reply by adamvietnam on
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Personally I'd be very concerned about the changes to visitor permits especially for people who have relatives to stay or are looking to get tradespeople to do anything other than minor work on their property.
I'm sure HOL members, will have additional issues.
The consultation runs until the 24th June.
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About the limit of two visitor vouchers at any one time - here's the Council's logic, to be applied borough-wide 24/7 but apparently based on Spurs fans buying up visitor vouchers in the White Hart Lane area on match days:
Visitors Vouchers
The council currently takes a pragmatic approach and allows residents to purchase an uncapped number of visitor vouchers which includes hourly and daily vouchers. The council has noted that visitor voucher purchase has spiked, especially in the Tottenham Hotspur event day areas, creating additional parking pressures. There is evidence where third parties are woulding to purchase those permits at a premium from residents and the level of use suggests that some residents are selling those permits on
Whilst the existing terms and conditions require that permits are not resold, enforcement of this is not possible with the existing IT system. Furthermore, if enforcement were possible this would be contingent on a high evidential threshold and not anecdotal evidence.
In order to continue with the sales policy referred to above it is proposed that
- The use of a daily visitor permit both online and paper option, to be restricted to two concurrent live permits per account holder i.e. if a third permit is in use then the vehicle utilising the 3rd and subsequent permits may be issued with a Penalty Charge Notice.
- The cost of daily visitor vouchers to increase to £4 across all CPZ areas.
Why impose this borough-wide, rather than just in the problem area? CPZs with event days (like the Finsbury Park CPZ) already have extra provisions to control visitor parking on match days.
And correct me if I've missed it, but I can see no prices for hourly visitor vouchers - only daily vouchers in future.
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Council coffers won't be increased by very much - it's some years since charges were raised significantly, and these rises in residents' permit costs are minor compared to the costs (depreciation/insurance/servicing/fuel) of running a vehicle. This is more about aligning with the Mayor of London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and overall governmental aim to reduce emissions.
I'm guessing here, but having only daily visitor permits (particularly 'virtual' rather than paper) makes monitoring easier by wardens - it's a simple yes/no entry on the parking database for a vehicle on a day, rather than adding a start and finish time.
The unreasonableness of the two-visitor limit, borough-wide, is what stands out to me.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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It mentions that visitor scratch cards will become non-refundable so I assume from that that they will still exist.
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In the sense that the ones I bought this February are valid to 31/12/23, yes for now, but the digital-only scenario is not new - Hugh (I think) mentioned it in a previous discussion about refunding/exchanging outdated scratch cards.
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Does anyone have a unified response that others can copy & alter?
Most of this sounds more about increasing council coffers than reducing congestion or anything else, especially the single-day voucher restriction and £10 permit cost increase (is £10 really enough to make any resident sell their car??)
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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It's difficult to know what a generic objection would contain. How would one frame the arguments?
As I understand the situation we're in:
- Years of cuts to central government grants to councils mean that many if not all councils now face a situation of chronic underfunding.
- The current health crisis has further exacerbated the situation.
- We're about to enter one of the longest and deepest recessions for decades (centuries?).
- There's increasing agreement that car ownership is harmful to an environment that is recognised as being in crisis.
- Local taxation in the UK is pretty regressive (Even after accounting for council tax support, the poorest tenth of the population pay 8% of their income in council tax, while the next 50% pay 4-5% and the richest 40% pay 2-3%. (Figures from Institute for Fiscal Studies)
A change in our local taxation system and a look at how central government channels money to local ones is probably what's needed. But councils have to plan for the immediate situation. Whilst there are inevitably some efficiency savings still to be made, the margin for those is much very much slimmer than it used to be. So, councils either have to raise additional money or allow services to wither. The choice to me seems to be about where that money should be raised from.
Given that all the alternatives are pretty regressive, from my perspective, I find myself wondering if car ownership and car use aren't reasonable targets.
I raised the possibility of local road-charging during the discussions around the future of Wightman Road. Whilst the Council poo-pooed the idea at the time, it was interesting to see that they included it as a possibility in their recent presentations on Crouch End's low traffic neighbourhood scheme.
This option seems to be a possible alternative to me. But in the context of the current discussions, car owners (myself included) would have to be aware that as other councils followed suit, whilst it might shift the burden away from car ownership, it would inevitably shift it to car usage. But, perhaps that's where the real burden ought to lie: more harm arguably comes from car usage than it does from car ownership.
So, I think my position would be to accept the inevitable increase of the financial burden of car ownership in the short-term, whilst in the longer term urging a shift to raising money from car usage and a reform of the local tax raising system.
Having said all that, I'm not sure how much of this would be heard in a local consultation about parking permit pricing, the die for which, barring any seismic shifts, is already cast.
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