Council's parking income falls after it raises charges

I NEVER for one second believed that squeezing motorists till the pips squeaked would work the required wonders for Wiltshire Council’s bank balance.

And hey ho, what do you know? I was right.

Quite by coincidence, in the week that city councillor Mark Timbrell called for Wiltshire to bring forward a review of our parking charges because of the hardship they are causing, I received a reply to a Freedom of Information request I submitted a little while ago.

I asked Wiltshire how much money it had taken from parking in Salisbury, both on and off street, in the most recent financial year, 2012-13. The answer was £2,991,894.

How much did it take in the financial year 2010-11, before its Conservative leadership imposed massive price rises? £3,171,553.

So one might argue that the policy that sent trade plummeting and led thousands of readers to join the Journal’s Show Some Sense campaign also resulted in a drop of £179,659 in annual car park income.

At the Maltings, takings were down £69,777 compared with two years earlier. At Culver Street, they slumped by £53,383.

Not exactly a howling financial success.

I asked for further figures, to work out how people’s behaviour has changed since the increase in charges.

Overall, they showed big falls in the numbers of vehicles using the council-owned car parks in the city.

And I’m sure the local ‘pop in’ shoppers didn’t all ‘pop out’ to the park and ride sites instead. Like me, they probably looked for a cheaper space on a meter, did what they had to do, and didn’t hang around browsing or making impulse buys.

I’ve saved a fortune, which is probably not what our traders want to hear, although it makes my husband happy!

Anyway, I decided to compare how many drivers parked in the Maltings in March 2011 and in March this year, the most recent month for which figures were available.

The total for just that one month was down more than 10 per cent, from 38,312 to 34,242.

One-hour stays were down from 19,048 to 15,094, so it wasn’t just a question of commuters moving out.  Two-hour stays were up by 4,529, though, so maybe people came in less frequently and stayed longer. But then again, three-hour stays were well down.

Sorry to bore you with statistics, but we need to know what’s going on.

At Culver Street, the number of users was down by well over 40 per cent. At that rate I expect Wiltshire will soon argue that the site is redundant and flog it off for some lucrative development. Which will be fine till all the new housing estates are built and the thousands of new residents want to do some shopping.

In Brown Street, user numbers were down by 1,512. Hoteliers have complained that the imposition of a three-hour limit there has damaged their conference trade.

It’s true that usage of Salt Lane, where a three-hour limit was also introduced, rose marginally. But its takings were more than £10,000 down. I can’t make head or tail of it … though I do know that some council staff used to be given free parking there at one time.

No questions about Southampton Road car park, though. It’s what the Sex Pistols might have called ‘pretty vacant’. Too expensive now for most students, it was used by just 258 vehicles in the whole of March.

All in all, there were 11,339 fewer vehicles using council car parks in Salisbury this March than there were two years previously.

Some all-day parkers have undoubtedly been forced out to the park and ride network, and they will account for some of its improved performance. Its income (not profit, I hasten to add) rose over the two-year period from £569,191 to £755,361.

And Wiltshire may be encouraged to see that the number of people opting to pay for two hours has risen in most car parks since one hour became relatively expensive. Perhaps it feels like better value?

I’d love to know what readers think. But please don’t accuse me of being negative and ‘talking down’ Salisbury.

I’d say I’m simply being realistic, and hoping our elected representatives will deign to reopen the debate about parking sooner rather than later, for their own good as well as ours.