To note any requests to speak in accordance with the Council’s Public Speaking Scheme (see note at end of the agenda).
Minutes:
The Chair welcomed three members of the public to the meeting, namely Mrs Ellen Boylin, Mrs Mags Sinclair-Bailie and Mr Phil Gregg. All were present to address Council regarding potential changes to the residents’ parking scheme.
Speaker 1 – Mrs Ellen Boylin
“Good morning Madam Chair and thank you for the opportunity to address you all on the problems we foresee with the proposed changes to our visitors permits. We appreciate it doesn’t involve Rugby, it’s the whole of Warwickshire that is currently permitted.
Firstly, we feel these proposed changes to the visitor permitting are very unfair, unjust and totally unworkable. At the moment the details are very sketchy to say the least. We also feel it been an invasion of our privacy to have to log each and every visitor. And who will be registering with yourself? The County Council or NSL who it has been outsourced to, and to try and limit just to 50 visits per year is just unacceptable on so many levels. Is that 50 hours, 50 actual visits or 50 days? It is not clear and at what cost? At the moment, we all feel it feels very much like “Big Brother” is watching us. I’ve queried this with the council and Mr John Rollinson assures me that the council has no interest in how many visitors we actually receive.
So, in which case we are asking why are we having the register them at all? We have a lot of minority groups within the Rugby borough and I’ll leave my fellow neighbour here to address these issues in more detail when he speaks but I would like to give you a couple of examples from people who have contacted me. Number 1 is a single mother with two children, and she is concerned because she only currently has a resident’s permit which is £25 a year but she cannot afford a visitor’s permit which is also £25 a year. But as under the current proposal she wouldn’t be able to afford anything, but also as a single mum she occasionally needs help from her parents but has no visitor permit to give them. Equally her parents cannot risk the chance of getting a parking ticket. I’m sure those who are in the room who are parents and grandparents will acknowledge that children come with various risks i.e. they often need to be taken to a doctor’s appointments, hospital appointments etc. so a car is a definite necessity.
My second example is an elderly neighbour who is very worried and upset, because she currently has a visitor’s permit just so her son can visit her for one hour a week to bring her shopping. This group I’m very concerned about. The elderly are often very lonely as well and rely on visitors. This lady has no computer or smartphone so how is she meant to register her visitors under the new proposal? This question has been asked to the Council and I think I am right in saying that a phone line will be set up for those people with no internet access, but it will only be manned Monday to Friday 9-5pm. Again, this is limiting people to when and how they visitors and restricting one of the most vulnerable user groups.
Also, there’s the problem with people who are unregistered carers for their family members. Within our group we have a lady who visits her father four times a day every single day. Under these proposals are 50 visits. This lady would easily get through her entitlement very quickly and we also gather that once the entitlement is used up for that year there were no chance to buy any more, which we find totally unacceptable. The parking situation has been made worse by the amount of HMOs in our area and I'm sure Rugby is no exception. One near to me has five cars. I raised this very issue with our local MP Mark Pawsey back last year and pointed out that no one was keeping track of how many permits were issued as opposed to how much space is available the space is not stretchable is not an elastic, the terraced houses on the streets are where we have to work with what we've got”.
Speaker 2 – Mrs Mags Sinclair-Bailey
“I intend to speak about the service overall and the warden patrols. The service we are getting already, well we don't get the service we pay for. The existing system is inefficient in its costings and erratically enforced through both public and journalistic freedom of information inquiries I am informed that the scheme costs £2 million to administer. Everyone acknowledges the wardens are rarely seen, surely the question is how can this be run more competently or is it really necessary at all?
Rather than just deciding to increase the costs across the board to some of the poorest homeowners in our area. Just this week a local resident and a conversation with an NSL warden who informed him that in Rugby there were three or four wardens patrolling with average street check between 1 per week, maybe more if they're lucky. He went on to say that if the scheme becomes paperless, the physical scanning of the registration plates would take longer than having a site of a paper permit in a window which would actually extend the time taken to check a full road full of vehicles resulting in the end in less roads been checked overall. Concerning the wardens, they are not from our area.
They drive in and out of our town using their vehicles adding to the congestion that the county claim they want to reduce. They do not know or understand the local people or their needs; when the scheme was run by Rugby Council the wardens knew the area and the nuances regarding each road. Warden patrol times are always during the day time when a large majority of residents’ vehicles are not in their streets but after 5pm there is not a sign of a patrol regardless of the fact that most of the streets are actually restricted until 8pm. The struggle to park in any terraced road whether permitted or not, is draining and frustrating at any time after 5 or 6 pm therefore having a permit is of no benefit. Finally, the origin of the parking scheme.
Historically the permits were introduced in an attempt to control parking near the Rugby railway station, specifically in and around Abbey Street. This aspect of the suspected sale of visitors permits in this area is the reason that the Council are imposing changes to the whole visitors’ scheme across the town. I’m told by John Rollinson that in some cases permits have been revoked when caught selling visitors passes. In my opinion there should be a weightier penalty than that to pay for contributing to the hardship of their neighbours. Parking is already overstretched close to a rail service it will only become more fraught as our town is rapidly expanding. I suggest the council re-evaluate the scheme and consider the precedent already set.
In Elsee Road in Rugby each vehicle there has a permit specific to that one street. Could Abbey Road and its area benefit from this idea or be just be better served? Or you could shrink the size of the zones, reducing the number of streets where each permit is valid, this would alleviate spaces being taken in the station area by residents who maybe live further away but are using their permits to access the station”.
Speaker 3: Mr Phil Greg
“I want to tell you about the effect of the Warwickshire County Council parking permit proposals on those who are less well off in Rugby. They are disadvantaged by income, by age, by ethnicity, by language barriers, by lack of education. In Rugby these groups are more prominently represented in the areas where permits are required than in the more affluent suburbs where parking is free.
These disadvantaged groups will experience several problems.
One, the complex nature of the parking proposals, this scheme is unwieldy, difficult to understand. One of its requirements, has been said, is to predict an unknown level of future usage. I’ve been well educated, and I find this scheme daunting.
Problem two, remoteness of administration. The administration of this scheme is remote from these disadvantaged people in two ways.
Firstly, because the scheme is a county scheme, and secondly because it's administered by a private company only reachable by electronic means. This renders it inaccessible to these groups. In Rugby the previous scheme was administered locally. Users could walk into a local office and talk to the person responsible. For people in these groups that would be a far more accessible solution.
Problem three, the lack of computer technology. The proportion of these groups in Rugby who do not have access to computers or smart mobile phones is higher than the 10% quoted for the general population., they will have great difficulty in complying with the new online system as my colleague has said even if the parking permit internet site were reliable which currently it is not.
Problem four. Cost. Many households, we predict, will be unable to afford the number of parking permits they need at the proposed prices. If they need two permits, they will only buy one and so on. They will then use up the small number of non-permit parking spaces causing greater chaos in our town. To sum up, these disadvantaged groups need sympathetic treatment they do not need a faceless corporation riding roughshod over the difficulties in their everyday lives that they are already struggling to cope with.
For a Council which prides itself on its standards of equality this scheme risks breaching those principles”. The three speakers were thanked for their contribution. The issue would be raised again as a motion later on the agenda.