Let me see if I’ve got this right.
In order to solve the car parking problem, the Borough Council have employed consultants at great expense to advise that the only way forward is to charge for parking on the road and put up charges in the car parks.
I may be stupid, but even I can see that this move will not be popular and will cost a fair amount of money.

The report that went to the Borough Council actually included 30,000 ‘fines’ for parking to provide £900,000 income to the Council.

If you are really interested:
Total implementation cost is £659,000 with total annual operating costs £929,000, leaving a deficit of just £270,000, but the annual income is expected to be almost £2,000,000 (providing we all just ignore the regulation as we do now and get caught together with ‘selling’ more parking permits than actually available!)

It looks as though this is another cunning plot to ‘balance the books’ by the Borough Council. They have a problem with national government trying to ‘redistribute’ money from district councils who manage their affairs well, to district councils who don’t. It just so happens that ours is one of the ‘haves’ having to give to the ‘have not's’. It is much easier than having to raise income tax to do it I suppose.

As you all know, Traffic Wardens, along with the Police, are paid for by Herts County Council and thus directly by us via the Council Tax. A tinny weensy problem is that parking fines actually go to the treasury coffers and is the reason why we only have one warden in the town. Now, the plan is to ‘decriminalise parking to allow the Borough Council to control all on-street parking within the Borough which has the beautiful side effect of allowing the Council to keep parking fines.

The logic goes along the following lines: we have a shortfall of income; we have a parking problem; we could make it difficult to park and collect parking fine money instead of it going to the treasury; sell more permits than spaces available; bring in outside enforcement with a ‘profit motive’; income goes up to cover shortfall taken by national government and we have the perfect excuse – you asked for better parking facilities – and we don’t get the blame!

Just remember who brought the details to your attention.
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