News roundup, week ending 7 June

The Council Executive (cabinet) of Waverley Borough Council had its regular meeting this Tuesday, 4^th June.  It is too early to get the minutes, but the agenda papers were quite revealing on a couple of points.  Firstly, as shown in the snapshot below from the capital budget summaries (bottom right of image) a budget of £342,000 is to be carried forward beyond the end of the current financial year (ending March 2014) for the resurfacing and other works at the Weyhill “Fairground” car park, the explanation being “project on hold”.  In other words, the project has been postponed, not cancelled.  I’ll update when (if) more explanation becomes available.

 



Secondly, the meeting was due to take decisions on the appointment of the car park management contractor for the new contract which is impending, and on which option to choose for cashless payment of car parking charges.

Well, that last is good news.  Personally, I have absolutely no issue with paying less than £1 an hour to park my car in Haslemere or Godalming (50p for two hours in Tanners Lane) – I might easily spend more on the fuel to drive there and back, especially if, like so many of our town centre visitors, I were driving a wannabe Humvee.  It can however be irritating to find you don’t have the right change so either have to go and create some by making a small purchase with a note (say a newspaper in our excellent independent newsagent?) or have to use too large a denomination of coin and not get any change.

South West Trains has for some time been offering payment by mobile phone – you register your details of phone number (for caller ID) and car registrations with the payment agent, then when you park you make a quick call, enter the car park’s code number, and specify the amount of time you want.  If you need more time, for example if you'd rather not have to  bolt down your scalding latte in one of our excellent independent cafés, you simply make another call and purchase more time without returning to your car.  Simples!  As yet I don’t know whether WBC is choosing this option, but again, you will know as soon as I do.

 

Staying on the subject of council committee meetings, I see that Haslemere Town Council had various meetings in May – perhaps these are not “hot off the press” except that the minutes are only posted some time later so are quite newly available.

Full council did little other than elect the new mayor, Libby Piper.  The Finance & Audit Committee met on 8 May, and discussed grants procedures and the visitor information centre at the museum.  On grants, it seems that most councillors on the committee want to continue with the practice, abandoned by nearly all local authorities now, of holding their grants deliberations “In exempt” (In secret, to you or me), a practice which many criticise, including our new county councillor.  Perhaps it has something to do with the identified shortcomings in their procedures, for example not all councillors were getting a copy of the paperwork ahead of the meetings, and that decisions were not demonstrably being taken with due reference to the policies and criteria which are supposed to be applied?  This is our money we are talking about here, and I think we are entitled to some transparency about how it is spent, and proper assurance that it is adequately safeguarded.  Let us hope that the arrival of a new Mayor will see changes in that respect.

The planning committee met on 2 May.  Most of the agenda is a case-by-case consideration of planning applications in the town being submitted to the planning authority, Waverley Borough Council, and on this occasion there were no presentations from "co-opted members" instructing councillors to oppose zebra crossings or paint railings white.  There was however one application to which the committee objected, which caught my eye.  Shall we play a little game?  Shall we speculate that the objection might have had something to do with the fact that the adjoining property is occupied by one of the former Mayor’s mates?
 

Surely our former Mayor would not corruptly use her influence to her own advantage or the advantage of a friend?
 

Of course not.  Any more than our current Waverley Borough Council leader would when parking in Beech Road is under discussion.

 

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest, something stirs.

In central London, Westminster City Council is planning to instal remote parking sensors in the street surface on the outer edges of parking bays, to monitor arrivals and departures of vehicles.  To quote from the Evening Standard:

Every paid-for parking bay in London’s West End will be remote-controlled by the end of next year in a move which has raised concerns that motorists may be hit with new peak tariffs and electronic fines. Westminster council will spend £1.5m fitting sensors to up to 10,000 bays in the borough, beginning with the installation of 3,000 of the devices in three of the busiest parking zones in the West End.

The sensors are sunk into the street on the edge of each bay to detect vehicle movements and they send a signal to the “ParkRight” smartphone app to enable drivers to quickly find a vacant parking space.

Westminster insists the technology will initially be limited to boosting occupancy rates and ensuring motorists cannot avoid parking charges. It claims road congestion will be reduced, citing research that says a third of urban traffic consists of motorists searching for somewhere to park.

But they also admit that the technology could be used to set new peak hourly charges -  with the current maximum set at £4.40 per hour - and off-peak discounts using a system of  “variable tariffs”.

Of course Westminster is an easy target for accusations of profiteering – after all it raises more than £30m a year surplus from parking charges, permitting it to have one of the lowest council tax precepts in the country, which is politically helpful to the ruling Tory group.  However, London’s local newspaper can at least see how such a move, and indeed the acknowledged scope for increasing charges to respond to information on high use, would be beneficial, in making the parking spaces work harder for motorists, as their editorial on the subject shows:

 

Would that the Haslemere Herald were as practical.

Pictured below is a photograph, taken on Thursday afternoon about 3pm, of the Tanners Lane Car Park

You can see that there are free spaces, in fact I can tell you, as I counted them, on the way through, that there were 20, including the one just vacated by the car you can see just going through the exit.  That is about 40% of the total available.  Now, the High St car park behind Waitrose, seen a minute or two later, was no more heavily used, but evidently there was no shortage of visitors who are not so concerned about the outrageous demands of our rapacious, profiteering borough council putting up the High St charge from 70p to 80p for the first hour, or £1.80 for two, that they were moved to choose Tanners Lane at 50p for two hours!