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 Justin Guest on
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It has occurred to me that I should sell them off, one by one, to recover my losses.
For Sale: Vintage Haringey parking permits - #MakeMeAnOffer
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Permalink Reply by Aligator on
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This is daylight robbery! I don't remember any communication on consultation with the residents. How can we object to this?
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I am drafting an email for councillors, i will share once complete - i am also planning to start a petition asap. Will provide details of both
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I’ve already written to Harringay ward councillors (below) and had a response from Cllr Brabazon saying she will take up the issues and come back to me. The more letters the better!
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Thanks Michael! can you please paste this as text so people can easily copy and paste? Thank you!
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I wrote to Seema on Wednesday, no response yet
Dear Seema,
I was surprised to hear that there had been a consultation around parking charges and changes to they system. Given that there were only 100 responses to this consultation, and 50% of those were by phone, it is very clear that this consultation was poorly publicised and not particularly representative of the borough.
Although the proposals which were put through at the council meeting contained some interesting proposals such as charging by size I felt that the proposal to remove daily parking permits was poorly justified and discriminatory.
Screenshot 2024-07-23 at 17.08.02.png
I listened to your justification of this and had issue with a number of the points raised:
Firstly, this seemed very focussed on complaints from businesses, as I'm sure you will appreciate the vast majority of parking spaces are in residential areas and that is where visitors will be using them.
Secondly, I do not understand why this decision is being based on circumstantial evidence. Surely with the online parking system there is a wealth of data to review numberplates, the frequency with which permits are being applied for and who is applying for them. It appears that the lazy option of a blanket ban is being used rather than actual enforcement against those who are abusing the system.
Thirdly, the suggestion seemed to be that visitors are just parking for longer because it doesn't cost anything extra and if that wasn't the case then they would go sooner. Again, this seemed very focussed on visitors not visiting residents which is a strange position to take. If someone visits me I don't want to be ushering them away because someone else may need the parking spot or, in the more realistic scenario of tradespeople visiting or family staying at my home they will still be parking as long as previously as there is not other option.
Looking out of the window at the moment I can see 20+ free parking spaces and this is the case across many of the resedential areas of the borough. The type of "churn" that you desire is just not necessary across the vast majority and this change policy is using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
I would also note that this makes parking charges even more discriminatory between the west of the borough where there are only two hours per day restrictions (so a cost of £2.40 for a visitor to park for the day) and the east where there are restrictions for 10.5 hours (so £13.20 per day) or even 14 hours (so £16.80 per day) in some areas.
This proposal seems to have totally ignored the additional cost (an increase of 164% from £5 to £13.20 per day) that residents will incur when tradesmen are carrying out work for a full day or friends and family come to stay.
A much more sensible proposal would have been to cap the number of daily visitor permits available at say 30 or so which would stop the most egregious offenders. Historically there were caps on daily visitor permits but, for whatever reason, these were increased to a clearly excessive 999.
I, and I suspect many others, am disappointed at the very poorly publicised consultation and the lack of consideration given to the majority of residents with this proposed change. I hope that the council will reconsider what it actually wants to achieve with this change and take a sensible, evidence based approach rather than the current lazy option of punishing many to satisfy the requirements of a small number of businesses.
I look forward to hearing from you on this.
Many thanks,
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Well done, Andrew. For the avoidance of doubt, whilst I chose not to wait on councillors' answers before making this post, immediately after posting I did contact Harringay Ward councillor Anna Abela and Cllrs Chandawani and Hakata about this issue and referred them to this thread, asking both for an accuracy check and comment on the complaints being voiced.
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I'm finding it difficult to keep track of this thread ie which are the latest posts when the link just leads us to a page. I've been awake all night worrying about this since I have workmen this week and a whole week later in August.
Am I right in thinking that this system cannot start yet as notice and consultation have not been done??
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Hi Roslyn, you are correct it cannot start yet. However as the policy change has been approved, it is likely to go ahead in the next few months so we all still need to make our opinions known asap :)
Good luck with the work!
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Thanks - and it's only because of me people around here have heard ot it. I do hope they all write in!
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Roslyn, when you see a response on the front page, if you click on the “replied” link, the software does a pretty good job of landing you on target. Before you click the link, check whose comment it is that you’re looking for then, that information and the fairly accurate landing after clicking “replied“, you shouldn’t find it hard to locate the comment you’re looking for. Test it out.
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Permalink Reply by Gina Fenton on
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I have lived in this borough for almost 40 years. Our grown up children could not afford to settle here and when they visit with the grandkids it is we hosts that foot the bill for their parking. As we live in Tottenham we don’t get the benefit of many other parts where paid parking is restricted to only a couple of hours each day, and with more and more Sundays being ‘event days’ for non footie events we’d be saddle with a £50 bill if they both came for the weekend!
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