The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

If you are ever unfortunate enough to entertain Lib Dems to tea, make sure you bake two cakes – one for them to have and one to eat. Having moaned for ages that Woking parking charges were too high, they are now moaning that the action the Conservatives have taken to reduce charges at commercially sensitive times are inadequate.

His latest blog, imaginatively entitled Parking Charges seem to go up and up under the Tories, offers nothing new in the way of ideas about how to address this issue. Yes, charges have gone up. Yes, the council needs to increase its revenue to cover increasing costs.

“I wonder if in Woking parking charges should be linked to cost of providing
parking services and public transport and that the money raised should not be
spent on other things. In Woking this would probably mean a threat to
services that are paid for by the profit from parking.”

He muses. Profit from parking? Can Cllr Wells please explain what this profit is – the parking service is not run as an independently operating financial unit but as part of Woking Borough Council, which doesn’t make a “profit”.

“The money raised should not be spent on other things”- yes, he’d like that, wouldn’t he? Then the nasty old Tories would have no money to provide any other services, which he would then be able to crow about when they got cut. The Conservatives will not cut front-line services in Woking.

“What about restricting any additional income from rises in parking charges to be
ring fenced to only be spent on improvements in parking facilities and better
public transport.”

This gets funnier. Is Cllr Wells seriously saying that Woking should hand over part of its income to Surrey County Council for it to make improvements to public transport in other parts of the county? Are the Lib Dems saying that they would do that? And the parking facilities have only just undergone a multi-million pound capital overhaul. Where is he going to spend this ring-fenced revenue to any effect?

Car parking income is dropping because the recession means that fewer people are using their cars and they are not buying so many goods. The increased cost can never be a good thing – but it is not the primary factor for most people staying away. Woking Borough Council’s experience in the past is that dropping the charges has no effect on takeup.

Cllr Wells’s pie-in-the-sky nonsense shows a total lack of understanding about local government finance, the respective responsibilities of tiered authorities, not to mention a great deal of naivety about how to bring about increased revenues, a vibrant town centre and transport improvements.

God help us if this is the level of the Lib Dem thinking we can expect if they take control next year. But mark my words – if they do, car parking charges will increase in the same way that they have this year.

When the Lib Dems were last in charge, parking charges in Woking went up twice in the same year.