Decision details

Wiltshire Council receives a high volume of requests for parking restrictions every year. In order to manage this demand in August 2011 a new procedure was developed and agreed, which involved the initial requests being managed by the Town and Parish Councils and submission on an annual basis to the Network Managers Team. On receipt of the annual submissions, officers would assess each individual request against a scoring matrix in order to determine a priority of order for progression.  These were then reported to the Cabinet Member for approval and a number of schemes (dependent on funding and staff resources) were agreed for progression.

Since the introduction of this process, there have been a number of staff changes in the Network Manager’s team and the impact of the voluntary redundancy programme has meant a reduction in the staffing resources and high staff turnover has heavily impacted on the ability of the team to deliver the parking reviews.  There is now a considerable backlog of outstanding requests from Town and Parish Councils. In addition to the staff resource issues, the funding available for this type of work has been reduced.

In order to be able manage this backlog it is proposed to change the way requests are assessed.  This report sets out the current programme, the outstanding areas for review, outlines the proposed way forward and identifies the priority list for the next few years.

I approvethat the proposals to manage the outstanding waiting restriction requests outlined in this report, and the priority for progression identified under paragraph 23, be adopted.

This decision was published on 1 August 2016 and will come into force on 9 August 2016.            

It is considered that adoption of the revised scoring process, together with the added flexibility set out in paragraph 22, will allow the Council to better manage the demand for changes to waiting restrictions given the resources available.  The continued engagement and involvement of the Town and Parish Councils in the process will ensure that only those requests with overall community support are taken forward.

To:

(i)            Agree the proposals and scheme priority recommended in paragraph 23 of this report.

(ii)          Not to agree the proposals and to request a further review of the scoring process for outstanding requests to be investigated and reported back to the Cabinet Member.          

This report relates to an internal process of assessing and prioritising requests for waiting restrictions to ensure that resources are directed appropriately to areas with the most significant issues, therefore no external consultation has taken place.