A proposed big rise in parking fees is likely to be formally scrapped at a meeting this week.
The council said: “Reversing a planned change to parking charges in four areas of Brighton and Hove will be one of the options considered when councillors meet this Thursday.”
“Members of the Strategy, Finance and City Regeneration Committee will discuss proposals for the London Road Station, Queen’s Park, Central Hove and the Royal Sussex County Hospital areas.”
The council said this afternoon (Monday 10 July): “Among the recommendations in the ‘parking fees and charges report’ is to keep all four zones on the city’s low parking tariff.
“This would reverse a decision to switch them to a high tariff. The previously proposed changes would have increased the charge for parking for one hour from £1.50 to £5.60.
“The report going to the committee comes just two weeks after a review of these fees and charges was announced by council leader Bella Sankey in response to concerns raised by residents, visitors and businesses.”
Councillor Sankey said: “We’ve taken swift action to look at the changes we inherited in response to acute and understandable concerns raised by our residents, businesses and visitors.
“While we have to work hard to balance the council’s budget, it’s wrong to raise parking fees and charges so sharply in key areas of our city especially while we’re in the middle of a ‘cost of living crisis’.
“This is especially true around the Royal Sussex County Hospital where we should be supporting NHS staff, patients, families and carers.”
The council added: “The report says that the financial implication of keeping all four zones on the low tariff would be approximately £400,000.
“However, it also says it the move could increase demand for these spaces and limit the deficit.
“In particular, officers have taken into account the need to ensure patients, carers and staff have affordable access to the city’s hospitals and other important services.
“Thursday’s paper comes ahead of a more detailed review of parking charges across the city which will report back to the committee over the autumn period.”
>”The report says that the financial implication of keeping all four zones on the low tariff would be approximately £400,000″
So now the reported ‘£11 million black hole’ is an £11.4 million black hole?
Time to pull VG3 and find out how The Beryl bike scheme cost £13m!
Good! Now consider a trial to offer free parking for shoppers/tourists at the weekends to encourage people to spend time and money in our City!
The town is absolutely packed at the weekend and often most car parks are one in one out, despite the high prices. Making them free would be idiotic and the city would grind to a halt from the congestion it would cause (not to mention making it impossible to park given supply would be much lower than demand). I can only assume you have either never visited the city centre at a weekend or don’t drive…
Cancel the stupidly priced bike scheme and let a private company foot the bill like a normal council would do. Whoever signed off on that £13 million deal should be Infront of a judge for fraud. Unbelievable. Oh and just so happens we are in £11million debt. Thanks greens what a wonderful legacy you left us. Debt, un-cyclable broken roads, increased pollution and businesses+ residents struggling. AMAZING!!!
I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
For a start, we are waiting to see what the seafront summer holiday parking charges will be – and for the inner city area it’s already over £5 per hour.
At the Kemp Town end of Madeira Drive, and for Kingsway in Hove it’s still £1.40 per hour just to get near the beach, although now you have to pay by phone so their administration surcharge means it’s actually £1.50 per hour that you’ll pay.
All the parking meters have been covered up, to save on the manual cash collections, and that change is really annoying for the casual visitor or day-tripper – because you can waste ages downloading the app and entering your card details, and then trying to work out what location you are trying to pay for parking in. Not a great visitor experience.
If the seafront fees then go up to the levels the Greens were suggesting, then your brief visit to the city could end up costing way more than you expected – and locals have already noted that seafront parking in Worthing remains free.
So, if we are not welcoming people in cars anymore, then where are the affordable park and ride schemes at the west, east and north sides of the city? Where do our friends or relatives park up when they come to stay for a long weekend? Or do we just meet up in Worthing, instead?
The real problem is that Labour will have to fund the budget shortfall one way or another.
This budget shortfall is down to several things but we can certainly ask why the Greens funded Beryl to the tune of £13millions, when all they have done is to provide electric bike hire for at ten quid per hour – fun maybe, but not a cost the local commuter will afford and so it’s hardly part of promoting ‘active travel’ . Instead it’s a private company that the council have financed.
The Greens similarly used our money to bankroll another private company which provides rented bike storage, with again no benefit to either the council coffers or for us local ratepayers. Those bike sheds are mostly placed taking up road space which the council was previously charging car owners for. So I think this is what we might call a lose-lose situation.
What were they thinking?
Billy+Short, commenting above, asks: “What were they thinking?” – the Greens, that is.
The answer to that emerged in the public domain in early 2020. Back then the now-departed Director of Environrnent (one Nick Hibberd) went on the record to say, in terms: ‘We’re working to make driving in our City so frustrating that almost no-one will ever want to visit us by car ever again!’.
Since Town Hall officers are required to only follow policies approve by a majority vote of Councillors the logical conclusion is that such a startling revelation was based on instructions from that Labour/Green quasi-coalition?
As with so many repressive actions taken since 1997 by Labour and/or the Greens the fundamental error has almost always been that no reasonable and viable ALTERNATIVE has been offered, let alone implemented – and such alternatives have usually been available, with a bit more thought and more effort!
Yes, and frequently with more investment than repressive bullying (which BHCC rarely does well, anyway – such as inadequate control of party-time residential noise, and lots more, such as pavement obstruction by pubs and other businesses etc?).
And as for Beryl Bikes?
Well; the Greens (2011-2015) started on the wrong foot with the Amex hire bikes, by not having a mix of pedelecs and standard bikes – a bitter irony being that their Green colleagues in,Oxford already had a mixed fleet of hire-bikes (from the same provider) in operation. With a further irony being that
Oxford is in relatively flat country, whilst our City is built on so many hills and valleys that few people will have ever counted the total number of roads which run uphill!
Another flaw of the Amex scheme was that the pricing did not appear to provide for a City resident to ride home in the evening and to keep the hire-bike overnight, at no extra cost, ready for riding back into the city-centre the next morning!
And did the true (audited?) amount of taxpayers money paid out for what should have been a self-funding commercial project (with sponsorship contributions from Amex etc) ever get released by BHCC?
Particularly concerning is that a former Green Councillor (Ian Davey) was recruited by the contractor to be their Manager for the scheme!
Not quite as venal as the Green’s culpable financial disaster with the i360, and with the still not-fully revealed financial and social scandal of the transfer away of some 499 Council houses (to the great financial benefit of Banco Santander, and possibly that of a few insiders, too?), but still ….
However a plus is that the first bikes were excellent machines, being specialiy designed and built for arduous service as hire bikes. A very laudable feature being the adoption of a fully-enlosed and reliable shaft-drive system, rather than the usual greasy open chain! Indeed, such good bikes that Councillors agreed to buy more of them being offered cheaply by another LA in England – but did they ever arrive?
Thus it appears to be a valid question, given the excellence of the Amex bikes, as to why we didn’t simply buy the entire fleet (especially given the large amount of taxpayers money already invested in it)?
Surely we have plenty of bike mechanics in the City who’d be happy to contract with BHCC for maintenance of the fleet, possibly also contracting with a local vehicle operator to bring bikes back to empty hire-points, and taking any needing repair to a contracted workshop?
Yes, there could be an issue with the existing electronics said to work over the almost-superseded 3G mobile network. However, given the small amounts of operational data actually needing to be communicated, a fall-back to simpler 2G operation is very likely to be possible?
But if not then upgrading the electronics to 4G should not be prohibitively expensive – given the ready availability of such equipment at keen prices from China?
Which then leaves the question of how to manage the system and collect the hire payments? Looks to be a no-brainer – BHCC collects money daily from thousands of people for various services, so adding bike-hire to that workstream looks to be a minimal addition (if Town Hall computer systems are adjusted accordingly)?
In passing it seems to be a lacune that those not wishing, or not able, to make payments over the insecure internet are not offered the facility to buy hire-time at the Town Hall, or to top-up their credit balance by purchasing a voucher at a PayPoint. Unlawful digital discrimination, perhaps?
The logical conclusion of all of the above looks to be that we should not have committed to spending £13m with a commercial provider (whose bikes look to be significantly inferior to the previous Amex ones)?
And possibly we, as taxpayers, cannot afford the luxury(?) pedelec e-bikes, with the added costs of charging stations etc – perhaps that market, if actually viable, should be left to those knowing how to operate such a service profitably?
But regrettably, with the long-standing rotten corporate-culture of our inadequately-staffed (both as to numbers and to levels of competence) City Council officers seem to prefer to spend our hard-earned tax-money on over-priced contracting out (which they then usually fail to manage competently!), rather than getting organised to do the work in-house at a lower cost, whilst also providing decent employment for local people!
Presumably because the organisation has become so hollowed-out, and that many waste so much time trying to defend the indefensible, that there’s almost no-one with the time to think creatively, with an all round helicopter-view, and to work really hard at implementing a true Best Value culture?
With the landslide vote of confidence given to the Labour group back in May many electors will be looking to that Administration to do much better than their predecessors have done since 1997, surely?
With an early step being a strategy to exit from that £13m Beryl Bikes contract, surely?
Albeit the costs of doing that will be dwarfed by those of an early exit from the Veolia contract for the Newhaven incinerator, and the development of alternative ways, not involving combustion, of disposing of our rubbish – essential to meet the policy of ‘No more GHG emissions by 2030’ (January 2031, actually?) – an elephant in the room which no councillors seem willing to talk about? Yet 6-1/2 years already leaves very little time in which to complete the major capital works likely to be needed – SNAFU, yet again?
How about getting the money back that was a loan for the i360 parking charges for citizens and visitors easy targets.Council lent it do the job you are elected and paid to do the best for citizens of Brighton &Hove
This is both welcome and predictable. However, given that there was indeed a review as had been suggested by the Labour councillors all along, it seems like last week’s story that there wasn’t a review was just a bit of free publicity for local “activist” Laura King. I enjoy reading B&H News but would appreciate it if they didn’t act as a mouthpiece for some of Brighton’s local cranks quite so often.
The title is misleading if it’s only 4 areas where parking rises are being frozen on Thursday.
The rest of the city has to wait until an ‘Autumn’ parking review but there is no clarity on what happens between now and then. A freeze for the whole city until all parking reviews are completed is the only fair option.
It is disappointing that all Labour seem to be doing so far is continuing the Greens’ plans, not reversing the Greens’ damage to our city and economy, which would automatically bring more income in for everyone including the council.
Hopefully, we will hear a bit more information when they meet on Thursday to discuss this issue.