‘Free parking is no panacea for town centre ills’
MY social media feeds are all too often strafed with moans about parking charges in Swindon town centre.
The general thrust of these complaints is that, if only it were free to park in the town centre, then all its ills would be cured at a stroke. They go on to cite the out-of-town centres where parking is either free or, in the case of the McArthur Glen outlet centre, a measly £1 for up to five hours. And free if you spend over £100 in the centre – something you don’t have to try too hard to do.
It’s true that high parking charges have a detrimental effect on small businesses – in particular, those on the high street. Yet free parking isn’t the panacea keyboard warriors imagine.
The Federation of Small Businesses has argued against free parking in every case in town centres – not least because the chief result can be office and shop workers gleefully grabbing the free spaces, leaving even fewer spaces for those wanting to shop.
In also accepting that parking charges are an essential source of income for local councils, what is then the answer? Or an answer – because there surely can’t be a definitive one given that no two town centres have identical issues?
Sans consultation, Swindon Borough Council have run some free parking Sundays. This, as I’ve seen from my social media (yes, I need to get a life), doesn’t help the small and independent businesses because many of them are closed on that day.
And it has a knock-on effect. An owner of an independent café in Swindon told me how the free Sunday parking killed off 41 per cent of their Saturday trade, forcing him to cease Saturday trading. And further, the story for bigger businesses is similarly woeful. This same café owner has many anecdotal reports from customers who work in such shops as M&S and H&M that free Sunday parking brought them a significant drop in Saturday footfall – when they can open for longer hours.
If shops and services are the reason people travel to a town, then it surely makes sense to include business owners in shaping it?
Many commenters offer up nearby Cirencester’s ‘Free after 3pm’ scheme as a positive example (though I note Cirencester stopped that scheme earlier this year). What they’re doing now is offering free, all-day parking on weekends and public holidays in the staff car parks of civic buildings. And some free roadside parking on various streets across the town centre.
My personal view is that it’s not parking charges that are the problem – it’s the lack of an experience. Or perceived lack. I visit Kingston-uponThames quite often and there’s no shortage of people willing to pay to park. OK, that’s London not Swindon or a small West Country town, but you get the idea. As God said to Noah (not Kevin Costner!), build it and they will come.
As for free town centre parking – best to stop the meter on that one.
■ Angela Atkinson is the FSB area lead for Wiltshire. She is a published author and blogger and also runs the ‘Born Again Swindonian’ website.