Council’s proposal to tackle parking issues

After years of seeing ‘inadequate’ off-street parking being included with newly built homes, Horsham District Council is exploring ways to move away from county council rules and take the wheel itself.

At the moment, the county highways team is called on to comment on plans for new developments.

If they raise no issues, the council has little chance of opposing those plans, even if they feel not enough parking has been included.

More and more this leads to people having to park in the road – sometimes not even their own road.

Following the example of both Arun District Council and Crawley Borough Council, Horsham would like to set its own rules for parking standards to replace the current ‘one size fits all’ approach.

While the idea is still very much in the ‘what if?’ stage, a list of recommendations will be presented to a meeting of the full council next month.

They include requiring all new one and two-bedroom homes to have two parking spaces, three and fourbedroom homes to have three spaces, and five-bedroom homes to have four spaces.

The recommendations were drawn up by a Task and Finish Group and discussed by the overview and scrutiny committee. Group chairman Brian Donnelly called the parking situation ‘drastic’ and said the council should have reviewed it ten years ago.

He added: “Our towns and areas have been turned into giant car parks.”

Mr Donnelly acknowledged that the county’s highways department has to deal with thousands of planning applications every year, making it impossible for staff to physically go out and look at each one. But he felt councillors were in a better position to judge parking problems in their areas.