AA says parking charges ‘cash cow’
THE council has earned more than £1 million over the past year from the ‘stealth tax’ of parking charges.
Parking services raised £1.1 million in revenue in 2017 to 2018, according to Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government data.
However, the council spent £1.1m on running, policing and maintaining parking services over the year, meaning it made a profit of just £17,000 in 2017 to 2018. Total income from parking charges has risen slightly since in 2016 to 2017, when the council took £988,000 in revenue.
Most of the money was made from pay-anddisplay parking, residents’ permits and parking tickets. Over the year, drivers paid the local authority £788,000 in these on-street parking charges.
Of this, 94 per cent came from drivers paying penalty charges for illegal parking. The rest was from council-run car parks.
The AA claims that parking charges are a ‘cash cow’ for local authorities and a ‘stealth tax’ paid by drivers.
However, director of neighbourhoods at Rochdale council, Mark Widdup, said ‘council car parks offer very good value in Rochdale.’
He explained that the first three hours of parking is free of charge, while six hours of parking costs £1.60, adding: “Civil parking enforcement must be self-financing, and any surplus is invested in local transport management schemes including parking, traffic management, better public transport and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. The cost of season tickets have remained the same since April 2017.”
Jack Cousens, the AA’s head of roads policy, said: “At a time of squeezed local authority budgets, drivers are not surprised that they are the cash cow council bosses turn to.
“Some councils receive millions of pounds worth of parking charges every year and still continue to increase their prices.
“The cost of parking should cover the cost of providing the service, not become a stealth tax.”
However the data did show that, overall, drivers in Rochdale paid an average of just £4.4 per year in parking charges.
Transport spokesman for the Local Government Association Coun Martin Tett said councils were ‘on the side of motorists and shoppers’. “Councils have to strike a balance when setting parking policy, to make sure that there are spaces available for residents, high streets are kept vibrant and traffic is kept moving,” he added.