Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Wrong to rely on parking income
Canterbury City Council is the council that supports anti-car smear campaigns, like voting unanimously for Car Free Days, allows city centre nudity in support of cycling, promotes pollution scare stories, and so on. But now I read the council wants to raise car parking charges by an inflation busting 33% [‘Cost of parking to soar as Covid losses bite hard’, Gazette, November 5].
It would seem that they now depend on despised car drivers’ parking charges for general income, as revenue has dropped because of Covid. Will they go down once the pandemic is over? Surely Covid is fulfilling their anti-car agenda, by having less cars on the roads?
All government or council transport related documents carry a message line or similar about about the importance of getting people/families out of their cars!
The Traffic Management
Act 2004 (Revised 2015) which appertains to parking, states: “Authorities should never use parking charges just to raise revenue or as a local tax”.
But I assume CCC will have an answer to that one, for ignoring the fact that this Act is not a revenue raising Act?
Terry Hudson
Russell Drive, Swalecliffe
I see in last week's paper that Ben Fitter-harding is writing to explain why council services are increasing in price.
Right at the end of the article the reduction of rents from Whitefriars is mentioned, down from around £8m to £4m! Much was made in the previous week’s piece from Ben FitterHarding about what things the council should involve themselves in.
Clearly buying large chunks of retail property is not one of them. Could we be told which councillors were the driving forces behind the Whitefriars purchase so that we know who is to blame for this “investment”? Could we also have a simple profit and loss for the project to show us how much of a shortfall there is between borrowing costs and revenue with a figure thrown in for capital repayment?
As the rate payers are going to have to fork out for this it seems reasonable that we should know. I suspect the council will refuse on the grounds of commercial sensitivity!
John Atkins
Amery Court, Blean