Monday 30 January 2012

Permit sales down = parking fines up

In our last post, we exposed how sales of visitor vouchers at £4 each have collapsed.  The Council is therefore making much less money from CPZ permit and voucher sales than it had forecast.

But there is one area of parking revenue that is surging.  Parking fines!  Not surprisingly, many people are refusing to pay £4 for what may just be a few minutes of parking.  Barnet Council is now routinely issuing one thousand more parking tickets each week compared with the previous year.

Unbelievably, this financial year Barnet Council has issued more parking tickets than it has sold visitor vouchers!

 

Thursday 26 January 2012

While we wait for our Court hearing on 8 February, some interesting facts

In the days leading up to our Court hearing on 8 February, we will be posting some of the facts that we have discovered whilst preparing our case.

Fact No 1: Quadrupling the cost of a visitor voucher to £4 has raised little extra money. 
The Council's own "Parking Recovery Plan" acknowledges that there have been "high levels of resistance" to the CPZ charges. You bet there has!  Papers published by the Council just last week reveal the extent of this resistance:

Visitor Vouchers sold in 2010/11: 298,506  i.e  £298,506 of revenue
Visitor vouchers sold 2011/12 to date (9.5 months): 79,200  i.e. £316,800 of revenue

In a few days time we will reveal what has happened to the number of parking tickets issued by Barnet.

Friday 6 January 2012

Important News!

Happy New Year to all our supporters. 

We have two important pieces of news to report.

Date of Court hearing: Wednesday 8th February 2012  

There will be a vital court hearing in the legal action against Barnet Council on Wednesday 8th February.  We will be asking the High Court to give David Attfield permission to take his claim against Barnet to trial.  We must win this hearing if the action is to proceed.

The hearing will be at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2 and David will be represented by Martin Westgate QC.   This is a public hearing and we hope that as many of you as possible will wish to attend in order to convey to the judge what the strength of feeling is.  Unfortunately we won't know the time of the hearing until the day before.  It is likely to last 1.5 to 2 hours.  If you are interested in attending, please email us at barnetcpz@gmail.com and we will let you know the time as soon as it is known.

CPZ charges are to increase again! 

Barnet are planning to increase the cost of a resident's permit to £105 (up from £100).  Visitor vouchers will soon cost £50 for 12 (meaning each voucher will cost an absolutely absurd £4.17!).  Other CPZ charges are also increasing: A permit for a second car will cost £130.  Pity anyone who needs a three month temporary permit which will now cost £252!  If you need a parking suspension outside your home, the cost will be an eye watering £63 per space per day.

You can let the council know what you think of these proposals by emailing eando.consultation@barnet.gov.uk.
Please do this as soon as possible as the consultation about these increases ends on 20 January. Full details of the consultation can be found at this link (the new CPZ charges are on page 9 of the last attachment): http://engage.barnet.gov.uk/environment-and-operations/epr_feesandcharges2

You may also want to put your views direct to the people who really matter:  You can email Councillor Brian Coleman (the cabinet member putting forward these proposals) at cllr.b.coleman@barnet.gov.uk. The email address of the council leader (Richard Cornelius) is cllr.r.cornelius@barnet.gov.uk


You could also tell your MP about how you are being treated by the council.
Mike Freer MP: mike.freer.mp@parliament.uk
Theresa Villiers MP: theresa@theresavilliers.co.uk


Finally, email addresses for all Barnet Councillors can be found here: http://committeepapers.barnet.gov.uk/democracy/council/listcouncillorname.asp?intSubSectionID=13&intSectionID=9