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 JulieB on
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We rarely have people visiting with a car, but when we do we almost always use a day ticket.
This is an insane price increase, yet again!
We used to have 2 week permits, daily, 2 hours and 1 hour options - with limits on the number you could buy. This was much fairer, imo.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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JulieB your example prompted a memory.
A decade or so ago, a local resident came to see me asking for help — I was one of their three elected ward councillors. As far as I recall, they exolained how they and other church sisters were taking turns visiting a seriously ill neighbour; cooking and taking food and offering help.
And each getting parking tickets.I contacted the Parking Service who - I think - sorted out a sensible arrangement.
In today's jargon this was local Municipal bureaucracy supporting Prosocial Behaviour.
https://www.explorepsychology.com/prosocial-behavior/As well as these "Moral Sentiments" There are also good practical, financial, and economic reasons why a local council should support voluntary networks which enable someone to remain in their own home among family and friends.
JulieB, I imagine that people might perhaps see the example of the church sisters as one end of a spectrum. But tomorrow we are in a similar position as you. We have family visiting from Hampshire. They're with us for several days so their car is carrying a lot of stuff. They'll see other friends and family members in the London area. I'd suggest this is prosocial behaviour. But it also has economic aspects. They'll be paying to use London trains and buses. They're going to a theatre. They'll use local shops. We'll be taking them to a local restaurant.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Thanks for this Hugh. I’ve had a look at the report on the consultation and there were 100 responses. For a borough wide consultation, in a borough with around 180,000 adult residents, surely this would have triggered a few alarm bells that knowledge of the review was somewhat slight?
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Permalink Reply by JamesN on
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Following on from the work of the advocates for LTNs and traffic restrictions, shouldn't these visitors be cycling or walking anyway? Surely the increase in cost is insignificant in the context of the imminent erasure of life on this planet. And don't get me started on outsiders using my road with their noisy vehicles.
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James, none of my friends use cars to visit me. However medical staff do, sometimes needing to park outside of my home for several hours.
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Yes, similar arguments were made against other council policies aimed at disincentivising car travel. Let's not rehash them. The lighter point is that there seems to be an element of hypocrisy in the reaction this potential plan has caused. Calls for evidence and proper practice were met with derision in previous cases.
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But you just did
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The justification given by Seema was encouraging more vehicle use. They wanted people to use the space for less time so that more cars could drive there and park.
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You're entirely right, JamesN.
And now you've raised the question, I must plead guilty.With hindsight, of course I should have challenged the entire arrangement for "Church Sisters" cooking food in their own homes and delivering it in individual noisy petrol guzzling cars. Perhaps with car radios disturbing the peace. Was it really so hard for them to deliver healthy freshly-prepared cold food; on foot; carried in back packs; or in shopping carts with quiet pneumatic tyres?
Now to check out electric buses from Hampshire.
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Unfortunately for several here the ludicrous and inane arguments in my comment were not sufficiently hyperbolic to come across as parody. A fair indication of just how far down the rabbit hole we are.
As for Seema's 'justification', the 21 pages of council drivel linked to in Hugh's post contain as many internal inconsistencies and contradictions as the bible. The only underlying argument that stands out as unequivocal is that Parking Services needs to wash its own face. User pays until the books are balanced.
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Dear JamesN [2]
It's was a bit sneaky of you to use the same name as JamesN to suggest that their wise, balanced, helpful, and thoroughly evidenced comments are ludicrous, inane, and even hyperbolic trips down rabbit holes. Please let's not forget the key ethical teaching of the famed Thumper.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Guest on
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Bit of a shocker this- the council have contact details of every person who has ever bought parking permits, a residents parking permits, paid council tax etc, and it could have made contact and highlighted this through so many different routes it beggars belief. It feels some how very undemocratic. It does not meet the test of being evidenced based in any way and leaves itself open to be seen as a simple form of taxation.
As an aside, anybody remember these?
I have a full pack of weekend permits unused, and apparently unusable. I do not see any expiry date on them, but of course, the ground rules were changed after I purchased them, and no refunds were/are forthcoming. This and the 10 day permit I bought and was unable to use... Literal highway robbery. Well, my fault for trying to be prepared I guess.
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