OPINION SAFER PARKING SCHEME
Pickles rats on PARKING PROFESSION
The anti-parking lobby has spoken but, as Belinda Webb points out, it is far from a voice of reason
E
ric Pickles has got his very own populist issue – parking. At the Conservative spring forum, the
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said that councils are using motorists as cash cows, and over-zealous and offi cious parking wardens are driving small businesses to the line, destroying our high streets in the process. Daily Telegraph doyenne and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea resident Cristina Odone pulled no punches in her support of ‘ever-sensible’ Pickles, despite not being a car owner herself. All this talk of saving high streets could not go unmissed by the highest profi le small business champion, Mary Portas. She rushed to tweet her support for Pickles ‘common- sense 10 minutes’.
Odone’s piece stood out for its harshness. She called traffi c wardens ‘rats and foxes; the new urban pest’. The vitriol that Odone levelled against ‘traffi c wardens’, for undertaking the very role required by the communities, businesses, schools, and residents – each of whom have been consulted on their particular enforcement needs – is alarming in the extreme. This language is dangerous and there is evidence that coverage of this nature often leads to a spike in the rate of incidents of abuse against CEOs on the street. What is more worrying, and disheartening, is the apparent lack of preparatory research. Even if any research fi ndings weren’t enough to successfully challenge their opinion, they may have served to temper their absolute certainty, and thus their name-calling and
vilifi cation of honest, hard-working people. The research is there, waiting to be consulted. February’s issue of Parking News highlighted the Re-think! Parking on the High Street report, which shows no conclusive evidence that parking tariffs are infl uencing decline in locations across the UK. In the BPA’s online library they would have found Kelvin Reynolds’s response to the Portas Review. Also available was the RAC’s Spaced Out – Perspectives on Parking Policy, which shows that: Only 17 per cent of motorists are going shopping when they park on street
80 per cent of motorists going shopping will park in a public car park The Department for Transport’s guidance to local authorities could also have been consulted. Parking policy, it states (2010), should be designed to address a range of issues, including: Manage the traffi c network to ensure the expeditious movement of traffi c, as required under the TMA network management duty
Meet the needs of disabled people, some of whom are unable to use public transport systems and depend entirely on the car And then we have the old chestnut of targets. Targets are illegal – and have been for some time and yet a legal expert on BBC Breakfast said that perhaps free parking wouldn’t be a good idea for ‘parking wardens’ – given that they’re all on targets. Which brings us back to yet another square one. But all is not lost. Reader comments on both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail websites clearly demonstrates that there are many who respond calmly and rationally, while declaring what chaos would ensue if there were no parking measures, or how unfair it would be if it was all down to whim and favour, and not consistency.
ABOUT the AUTHOR: Dr Belinda Webb MCIPR is head of communications at NSL. Twitter: @BWebbNSL
18 APRIL 2013
www.britishparking.co.uk
ERIC ISSELEE / SHUTTERSTOCK
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