8 October - Hold on to your wallets
Bexley Council held a budget meeting on Tuesday evening and the object of the
exercise was as usual how to extract more money from your pocket. The meeting
was ably chaired by Councillor Dourmoush who struggled with occasionally lousy
broadband connections and a long Agenda. The meeting ran for three and a quarter
hours. Being a Councillor is not always the easiest of jobs, nor is robbing
residents without them really noticing.
Today Bonkers will cover car parking charges.
Free out of office hours before June 2011 and typically £1·40 an hour now all
day long and heading towards £2 sometime soon. The 30 minute tariffs will mainly go.
What did Councillors have to say about a proposed 30% increase?
Err,
well nothing at first… Chairman Dourmoush couldn’t get a peep out of any of them. Maybe
it was because half the Councillors are too mean to pay for anything better than a lousy TalkTalk connection.
Eventually Councillor Stefano Borella (Labour, Slade Green & Northend ) broke the silence.
He pointed out that since the price modelling was done Covid19 had hit parking
revenue rather hard. Pictured is the Gayton Road car park yesterday afternoon.
19 spaces occupied, four of them disabled.
Stefano spoke up for small businesses which he said are already suffering quite enough
without Bexley Council driving more custom away. He was well aware that car
parks near stations were close to being deserted and he thought the decision to
raise prices should be deferred.
Cabinet Member Peter Craske was asked to reply but he was yet another Councillor on TalkTalk.
Ms. Ainge (Deputy Director of Communities) came to his rescue while Councillor Betts (Conservative,
Falconwood & Welling) sent a text message in support of Councillor Borella’s reservations.
Ms. Ainge said she was acutely aware that the modelling was inaccurate but
Bexley was one of 18 boroughs she knew of which were going to rack up parking
fees without any evidence of the likely effect so that made it OK or as she put it “not out of kilter”.
At that point Councillor Craske came in on the phone to remind us that parking
revenue paid for “highways maintenance, school road safety training and…" at
which point he ran out of ideas. Parking revenue is halved from about £4 million
a year and PCN income will be down to about £700,000 this year. “We have to have it [the
prices] at a higher rate for when it [business] comes back.”
He went on to say that he had
“spent a huge amount of money” on installing bus lanes along Harrow Manorway and he has plans for extending residents’ parking
zones around the Crossrail station [yes please and double yellows if possible] “so we need to enforce the bus
lane; it is set up to get people to the station without driving”.
“It all needs to be kept under review”
which is a little ‘out of kilter’ with “we have to have the prices at a higher
rate for when business comes back”. Councillor Craske at his devious best.
Councillor Caroline Newton (Conservative,
East Wickham) finally got the better of TalkTalk and asked an interesting question. Is the
Council trying to discourage parking or trying to maximise the revenue from it?
No answer obviously.
Councillor Seymour (Conservative, Crayford) thought that raising car parking fees was “a narrow view” and
a 30% increase was “not sustainable and business owners will never forgive us.
People will lose their jobs”. And there speaks a successful local businessman.
And that was it. The Chairman Councillor Dourmoush did not agree with Councillor Seymour, he didn’t think it was much of an
increase, a few pence on a half hour stay is not much. (Except that most places will no
longer have a half hour tariff.) “It is a modest increase”. Councillor Sue Gower
(Conservative, Bexleyheath) said she agreed with him. (†)
The increases were proposed and seconded by Councillors Munur (Conservative, Blackfen & Lamorbey) and Gower
respectively and the proposals were recommended to be put forward.
Councillor Borella called for a vote but his
call to defer the recommendation on increases was defeated by the votes of
Councillors Diment, Dourmoush, Downing, Hall, Jackson, Munur, Newton, Pallen and
Gower. All Conservative. Only Councillor Seymour was brave enough to side with
Labour and be against yet another attack on residents’ wallets without any
accurate modelling data being available.
† Councillor Gower also said that Bluewater’s free parking didn’t really compete
with Bexleyheath because of the cost of petrol. Go electric Sue, Bluewater not
only provides free parking but free car charging too. As opposed to Bexley which
has 13 over-priced
charging points spread across the borough.
KR68 ONK. He’s back.