Agenda item

The Council’s parking services is facing significant operational cost pressures. To address the pressures facing the Council and the parking service, it was considered that a number of charging policies and practices needed to be looked at and possibly reviewed. In light of this, a public consultation exercise was held between 28 September and 23 November 2017.

Following Cabinet’s consideration of the pre-consultation LTP Car Parking Strategy report on 12 September 2017, the Environment Select Committee received the report at its meeting on 19 September 2017; where members were asked to consider the Committee’s role in the process to make any amendments to the Wiltshire LTP Car Parking Strategy.

This reports sets out the results of the consultation and the draft recommended option proposals. The Committee is invited to respond to both of the above, to help inform Cabinet’s consideration of the report on 30 January 2018. 

The Cabinet Member for Highways, Transport and Waste presented a report with the outcomes of the pubic consultation on the Council’s Car Parking Strategy.

Members suggested some of the questions in the survey had been leading and questioned why options suggested by respondents hadn’t been taken forward. In response the Head of Local Highways advised all suggestions had been thoroughly considered, however upon investigation were not cost effective and did not work alongside traffic movements as part of the wider strategy. The Committee expressed support for cashless parking, the Cabinet Member was also supportive of this however explained it was a significant cost to install. Other comments from the Committee included that policies on Resident Parking Zones should be considered in the strategy, and that responses to the survey may have been higher if it had indicated price rises. The impact of the proposals on individual car parks was also discussed.

Resolved:

To note the contents of the report and agrees that members continue to make individual representations to the Cabinet Member, in order to continue to help influence the Cabinet report.