Scrapping plans to quadruple the charge for on-street parking in four areas of Brighton and Hove is expected to cost £400,000 in lost income, according to the council.
There was outrage when the big increases came to light in July, in public notices, with some areas due to switch from low tariff to high tariff.
Parking for an hour was due to go up from £1.40 to £5.60 in parts of central Hove, Queen’s Park, Kemp Town and the London Road area.
The Brighton and Hove City Council controlled parking zones affected were C, H, J and N.
A report to the council’s Transport and Sustainability Committee said that the parking services budget had a forecast overspend of £830,000 before the planned increase was put on hold.
The loss of the extra £400,000 would push the potential overspend to £1.23 million, the report said.
The report also said that the budget was being monitored and the impact analysed.
There were six responses to the traffic order to increase tariffs after it was published with the revised prices.
Commenters said that the money from parking should be used to support concessionary travel, walking and cycling infrastructure and encourage people away from driving.
The report said that the cost of on-street parking permits, tariffs and penalty charges must be used for highways and transport projects, including concessionary bus fairs and subsidised bus services.
Councillors are being asked to approve a proposal to keep all the zones on a low tariff except for Kingsway which would have a medium tariff.
The Transport and Sustainability Committee is due to meet at Hove Town Hall at 4pm next Tuesday (3 October). The meeting is scheduled to be webcast on the council’s website.
How on earth do support walking ?
Walking stick or crutches?😁
Scandalous, don’t u charge enough already, Disgusting especially with the cost of living crisis.
Easily. By creating infrastructure and furniture that supports active travel. This can be as simple as a bench halfway up a hill, so people can rest.
Excellent news for motorists within the city. Hopefully the council will put the council tax up for everyone to cover the lost revenue, so that we may all share by paying for the savings of the hard-done-by car owners.
Or perhaps just cut non-essential services like adult social care and children’s services. Cheap parking is far more of a priority.
Parking already generates a huge surplus in Brighton and Hove, £20 million in the last financial year. Council tax payers all benefit from this. Would you prefer to block all motorists from entering the city? It would become a ghost town in a couple of years.
Yet there’s forecast to be an overspend of £830,000, even without parking increases. It’s not rocket science David, either revenues need to go up or services need to be cut.
I don’t understand this, it looks like someone has presented some misleading or selective figures to me. Look it up yourself, ‘parking income surplus brighton and hove’, more than a £20 millon pound surplus last year. There may be an overspend in one particular area of parking, but it’s a huge moneyspinner for Brighton and Hove generally. One of the highest revenues generated from parking in the whole country actually.
Also bear in mind that revenues from parking can only be used for certain purposes, such as public transport and environmental improvements. This will not remove any funding from social services etc, because it can’t be used outside of very specific areas, it’s ring fenced money.
Therefore there is no reason to increase parking charges, unless you are an obsessive pro-cycling anti-motorist activist.
As usual, 68-year-old Portslade man Peter paints such a fantastical picture. A picture not based on any kind of reality as normal, well-grounded people see it, but a fantastical picture nonetheless. A man who hypocritically is pro-cyclist when he made a comment back in 2020 stating that BHCC should be “getting people out of cars and on to sustainable transport.”
The words flip and flop come to mind.
I’m not sure that keeping parking charges as they are will cost the council £400,00. This supposes that the same number of people would want to park at the £5.60 rate as they did when it cost £1.40. People can vote with their feet and wallets, many may have decided to avoid Brighton if parking became that expensive. We’ve already heard stories of shoppers moving to Worthing or Eastbourne because of parking problems here, this would have made things far worse. This is a welcome move.
I also don’t understand why the parking budget overspend would increase to £1.23 million. Parking generated a £20 million surplus in the last financial year as far as I know, what happened?
Correct that it was a £20m surplus, of which around half goes on providing concessionary fares.
https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/parking/parking-annual-report-2022/16-where-our-income-goes
That’s correct, over half in fact. And after spending on subsidised fares and public transport it still left about £8 million.
I think you’re right, that the £400,000 assumes absolutely no drop in usage. This raises the question, if whether it’s being done to discourage, yet financially anticipates the opposite.
Is it not possible to charge according to the size/power of the vehicle and it’s consequent pollution.
As a Yzone resident who works away carrying tools and equipment I need a car.
I’d love to go EV but there’s nowhere near enough places to charge.
Talk of surpluses seems to be missing the point.
The 24h procession of empty diesel-powered double-deckers howling along Buckingham Rd needs to be stopped or at least replaced by electric or H2 buses. We can’t sleep and we’re choking to death and our permits are paying for the privilege.
SOS!
About 15 minutes in Brighton town hall parking: £5.20 ( can’t remember the pennies exactly)
3hours pm in Southampton:£2.50
After 6pm parking in Botham: free
That says it all really;
Not much in Brighton to encourage shoppers to visit our local shops.
Heads should roll in the Parking Dept at BHCC.
For too long they’ve be acting against the best interests of residents and visitors. And could we ask them how they managed to lose £3m parking cash in a scam?
So we give Brighton and Hove buses £11m a year in subsidies and the last figures I could find was for 2018 where they made a £35m profit.
I was really pleased with the immediate response of Brighton & Hove City Council when I raised this formally at the East Area Panel and spoke on BBC Sussex about this issue when they suspended the increase. There is more work to be done around parking however; some of the work I’d like to get involved with is overhauling Guest Parking Permits, for example.
How can this move cost £400,000 that the council never had in the first place?
And what is happening about fleecing the rest of Brighton and Hove with similar permit hikes?
This is just scrapping four area parking permit hikes which they already announced back in the Summer because they didn’t want to seem to be targetting key workers.