Haslemere Solidarity: News Roundup week ending 5 July

The July meeting of the Waverley Local Committee, of Surrey County Councillors for Waverley divisions plus a selection of WBC councillors, met this Friday. Having had an urgent hair-washing appointment (or as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot would have said, sorting my stamps in order of size) I was not present, and it is too early for the minutes.

However, at least two questions were submitted as written questions for the public for the committee’s attention. Both concerned the apparently indecent haste with which the committee seemed to be embarking, in December, on a review of the residents’ parking schemes which have not, as yet, even commenced. I’ll report responses in due course, although I have heard that the responses are likely to be unsatisfactory to the questioners.

Update: I have now learnt that Nikki Barton did not attend her FIRST meeting of the local committee for Waverley!

Certainly, the Haslemere Action Group against the parking proposals (HAG for short) is beginning to wake up again, after a hibernation period since the parking schemes were resolved on and their website’s “Volunteer Editor” took on a new role as Nikki Barton’s election agent. It seems they have demanded a response from Councillor Pat Frost, local committee chairperson, on the subject of filming their proceedings. The demand was copied to Communities and Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, who will no doubt tear his attention away from his campaign to force local authorities to resume weekly refuse collections to study this missive with due interest.

Waverley Borough Council has apparently this week approved a proposal (Appendix Q) for a small-scale, time limited trial of a pre-pay weekday shopper’s permit for the High Street car park. 50 permits in total will be offered permitting unlimited parking between 3pm and 5:30pm, Monday-Wednesday, for twelve months. A permit holder requiring just one hour per week would be slightly out of pocket but one who wanted to use all 7.5 hours per week would save substantially.

The proposal arises from meetings with Haslemere Chamber of Commerce, and states (in tones which imply that they find the argument far from convincing) that

“town centre parking is considered one of the main issues of concern among retailers, with the two specific issues being the cost of parking and the inconvenience of having to find the right change..”

It goes on to say that it is impossible to predict the take-up, or usage, of such a scheme or what impact it may have on town centre footfall. The proposal memo suggests that a small scale trial would provide useful information on these points but it doesn’t go into any detail on how this would be measured.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, one of the Barton/HAG tendency has had a good moan about the proposal:

Well doh! Surely one of the fundamental objectives of an incentive scheme like this is to enhance the utilisation of parking spaces, by incentivising people to use them at less busy times so freeing up spaces in the peak hours? The numbers indicate that in those morning hours, the High St car park typically issues over 8,000 tickets a month, compared with only about 5,000 a month in the three hours from 3pm. If this trial is successful, it will inevitably lead to a loss of revenue for Waverley in those concession hours, in pursuit of the mission to get more parkers – ie more shoppers – into the car park overall. Surely our good shopkeepers can see the sense in that?

Well, they have welcomed the scheme, as reported in this week's Haslemere Herald, but there is a touch of the Judean Peoples' Liberation Front about their response:

Eh? Put forward by local shopkeepers but not the right one? So, why did they put it forward, if it is not the right one?

Perhaps because the "right one" was this:

(Mrs Evans, by the way, is incorrectly identified by the Herald as president of the Haslemere Chamber of Trade. Not any more she isn't) That's right: they wanted the council to pay for it! In any case, there is no reason why they should not also implement a refund scheme if they wish. After all, Waitrose has done it since their first arrival here. As Councillor Carole King, WBC Portfolio member for parking, was reported as saying:

Yes, retailers could fund this themselves if they wish, and if they think it would be effective. For WBC to give back money which they have taken off parkers primarily as part of a strategy to optimise the utilisation of their car parks, to the benefit of all including town centre retailers, would make no sense - it contradicts the very stategy they have put in place.

Meanwhile, our Independent ~~Shopkeepers’~~ county councillor, Mrs Barton, has had her ha’porth:

There it is again, that word “consultation”. I wonder whether many of the residents of the various roads who now eagerly await the commencement of their parking schemes can confirm the quality and extent of consultation which they have received from their county councillor, who even now is rumoured to be hell-bent on having those schemes abandoned entirely at the earliest opportunity, before any review determines what improvements, if any, might be made to them? And is a meeting between WBC and the Chamber of Trade (membership open to all retailers and other businesses in the town, and taken up by most of them) not “consultation” – at least rather more so than has been the case with Mrs B in, say, Beech Road?

And this is not the only distortion to feature in Mrs B's statement, as expanded below.

Turnover, or churn

Meanwhile, as hinted at above, information has come into my possession which shows that the peak rate (in any one hour) of purchase of parking in the High St car park was 3009 over a month: an average of 111 per charging day against a capacity of 169. As the information doesn’t distinguish between one-hour and longer tickets it isn’t possible to say how close to saturation it got, and in any case it is a Monday-Saturday average.

The same hour in Chestnut Avenue scored 1,246: an average of just 46 a day, in a slightly smaller (capacity 134 spaces) location. Evidently, the premium imposed for parking in High St has not put very many people off!

Nor have the attractions of Tanner’s Lane, with 2 hours parking costing a mere 50p, been able to draw motorists away from High St. While it appears that between 400 and 600 tickets per month are sold before 9am, suggesting local workers or commuters buying a full day’s parking occupy about half of the 50 available spaces, barely ten per hour each day are sold during shopping hours.

Our friends at Haslemereparkingdotcom have, predictably, managed to conflate the parking permit story with the increase in charges for use of the High Street car park, as seen on their website:

So evidently the “33% increase since 2012” (ie two years’ increases measured from immediately before the first increase to immediately after the second increase, a – shall we say – tendentious way of looking at it) has not obviously driven away custom, judging by the hourly issue rates quoted above. This in the context of increases at High St while Chestnut Avenue and Tanners' Lane charges have remained largely unchanged.

You may also note that the yellow peril website is not the only one to play fast and loose with parking facts. Mrs Barton's comments quoted in the Herald above imply that charges increased by 58% "immediately following" the gasworks road closures. Well no, actually: this is two increases, 14 months apart, one before the gasworks and one after, and both following a period of several years with no increases at all. Also, in choosing the highest value in the table, she has been highly selective because it is simply not representative - who on earth would park for four hours in that car park?

I hope in time to have more information on town centre parking trends over a more extended timeframe.

Rotten, to the core?

The main theme of the Herald letters page this week is the rejection of Waverley’s “Core Strategy” planning document by the inspector. I won’t rehearse the rights and wrongs of this situation, except to lift a short passage from one of the letters, from the chairman of the Planning Committee of the Farnham Society.

Immediately adjacent to this letter is another one, from the local Labour Party membership secretary, in very similar vein. Another correspondent from Farnham. Another demand to revisit Dunsfold Park as a “brownfield” site for development.

Perhaps what goes on in Dunsfold, stays in Dunsfold, but there are wider implications: Waverley has no influence over them, but broadly similar sites at Fernhurst and Easebourne, W Sussex (the King Edward Hospital site) which are also designated as “Brownfield” but are possibly not what government had in mind in introducing the concept – old factory sites requiring clearance and possibly decontamination – present similar problems for our local authorities in Waverley and Surrey. Residents would almost inevitably gravitate to their nearest town with a mainline rail connection to London. More pressure would be placed on the roads system, and more parking congestion would arise as commuters look for somewhere to park around the station. Unpalatable as it no doubt is to Farnham residents to have more homes built around their town, pushing the problem away to somewhere like Dunsfold merely shifts their problem to someone else, for example in Godalming or Guildford.

For all that the fundamental problem, of an insufficiency and unaffordability of housing for local residents, such as our own children in the future, isn’t solved by it, I can see where Waverley is coming from in its policy on Dunsfold.

And finally

No doubt prompted by this article from last week's Herald