Last week I wrote in Brighton and Hove News about whether we are slowly silencing councillors in Brighton and Hove. This week, events in my own ward have given me another reason to worry.
This time it is parking. For years, residents in parts of Westdene and Hove Park have been telling the council exactly what their problems are and asking for practical solutions. Too often the response has been delay, process and another consultation somewhere down the road.
Back in July 2022, residents of Nevill Avenue came to the council asking for help with worsening parking pressure. They raised concerns about commuter parking, large vehicles, road safety and the displacement caused by controlled parking zones elsewhere.
They did everything we ask residents to do. They organised. They prepared a deputation. They came to the council. They explained the problem. I asked for an officer report so that solutions could at least be investigated.
The committee voted it down. Residents were effectively told that dealing with individual roads was not viable and that they needed to demonstrate support across a wider area.
Four years later, those residents could reasonably ask: why did it have to take this long? But there is an even bigger problem.
While some residents have spent years asking the council to act, many residents in Aldrington are now telling me very clearly that they do not want a controlled parking scheme imposed on their streets. That distinction matters.
Aldrington Avenue is not Nevill Avenue. Amherst Crescent is not Nevill Road. Different streets have different pressures, different layouts and different views.
Yet Brighton and Hove City Council appears determined to keep dealing with parking through what I can only describe as controlled parking creep.
It introduces a zone, displaces parking into the streets beyond it, waits for the resulting problems and then consults on extending controlled parking still further.
Instead of addressing displacement strategically, we progressively move the boundary.
Zone P illustrates the absurdity. Residents suffering parking displacement have repeatedly asked why the existing Zone P could not simply be extended where there was demonstrable local support.
Instead, we have endured years of delay while pressure has moved from street to street.
The council now acknowledges that the proposed area could include Aldrington Avenue, Amherst Crescent, Lullington Avenue and Milcote Avenue as well as Nevill Avenue, Nevill Road, Holmes Avenue and the Orchards.
That is an enormous and diverse area to treat as though it has one parking problem requiring one answer.
And now we have another example of why I am increasingly losing confidence in how the council handles local engagement. We were expecting a public meeting about these proposals. Instead, the council has changed the format to a four-hour “drop-in session”.
I am angry about that change. A drop-in may be convenient administratively but it is not the same thing as a public meeting.
At a public meeting, residents hear what their neighbours are saying. They hear the questions being asked. They hear the answers given by officers and councillors. Statements can be challenged. Different experiences can be compared. And the strength of feeling in a community becomes visible.
At a drop-in, conversations become fragmented. One resident speaks to one officer. Another resident speaks to somebody else. Nobody necessarily hears the same answer and the community never gets to hear itself.
Most importantly, the role of elected ward councillors is diminished. We are not an inconvenient extra in this process. We are elected to represent these communities.
I know these streets. I speak to the people who live in them. I have been pursuing these parking problems for years. My fellow ward councillors have also been raising residents’ concerns.
Council officers have technical expertise and an important job to do. But officers are not elected to represent Westdene and Hove Park. We are. That is why this matters beyond parking.
In recent months, as I have previously noted, I have become increasingly concerned about a culture at Brighton and Hove City Council in which the role of councillors is slowly being narrowed.
We now also have consultation formats in which councillors can too easily become spectators to discussions about the communities we represent.
None of these things individually destroys local democracy. Together, however, they begin to change the relationship between residents, their elected representatives and the council. And parking in this part of Hove is a particularly good illustration of what has gone wrong.
We have had residents asking for action and being told to wait. We have other residents saying they do not want a parking scheme and fearing they will nevertheless be swept into one.
We have had the sudden enforcement by the council of restrictions in Nevill Road creating further disruption. We have School Streets adding another layer of traffic and parking pressure around Nevill Road.
And throughout it all, we have continued with a piecemeal approach in which solving a problem on one street can simply push it on to the next. That is not strategic parking management. It is displacement management.
There is a much simpler principle the council could adopt: Listen to residents.
Where residents overwhelmingly want controls because they face serious displacement, work with them to find a proportionate solution. Where residents overwhelmingly do not want controlled parking, respect that too.
Do not manufacture larger parking zones simply because they are administratively easier to operate.
Do not wait four years to respond to residents who have asked for help. And do not sideline the councillors those residents elected to speak for them.
I do not expect the council always to agree with me. Nor should officers simply do whatever a councillor asks.
But I do expect residents to be listened to, evidence to matter and elected representatives to be allowed to represent their communities properly.
The forthcoming Aldrington and Nevill consultation therefore needs to begin with a genuinely open question: what do residents actually want? Not with a predetermined answer of where the next controlled parking zone should go.
And I would still like the council to restore the public meeting that residents were expecting.
Let Aldrington residents sit together. Let Nevill residents explain what they have endured. Let council officers explain their proposals publicly. Let residents challenge us. Let councillors challenge officers. Let everybody hear the answers.
It may be noisier and less convenient than a drop-in session. But, as I wrote last week, democracy is sometimes noisy and inconvenient. It is supposed to be.
Professor Samer Bagaeen is an Independent councillor for Westdene and Hove Park on Brighton and Hove City Council.
Well said!
Brighton council suffers greatly from the phenomenon known as Employee Capture. Councillors have to work very hard to get the council to do anything. I am sure some councillors just give up. The illusion of democracy is fading.