Sutton Parking Consultations - Sutton and Cheam Labour Party

Council Website on the Parking Consultation

The Council’s recent parking proposals

Sutton and Cheam Labour has called on the Council to improve its consultation over parking proposals after a past series of controversies. We set out a better approach to involve residents which is below. We are pleased that as a result of past protests, the Council slowed down its consultation process to give residents more time to become aware of the impact of proposals.

Our basic demands over future Parking Consultations

In late 2018 Labour successfully got the Council to delay the consultation timing for a month. Labour have now set out some basic demands to Councillors for a proper and fair parking consutation:

1.A guarantee that nothing will be implemented for at least 6 months to give adequate time for residents to express their views

2. A declaration that all the current stages up to now are defined as “pre-consultation” rather than formal consultation so it is clear that nothing is set in stone at this stage

3. A minimum 75% response rate from any road in the pre-consultation period before any move to formal consultation

4. A round of Local Committee Meetings where residents are given adequate time to attend and to make public representations to the Committee on their roads before any move to formal consultation.

Labour’s 10 point plan for better parking in Sutton

Consultation

We believe that future Parking decisions should be resident driven with residents initiating petitions and delegations to request it rather than a top down approach. This creates a strong local “social norm” where residents see the changes are driven by them and other residents elsewhere then seek change themselves as a response to other changes.

The parking consultation has been poor with many residents claiming they saw no publicity about stage 1 and thus have been very angry over stage 2 proposals. There does not seem to be clarity on what level of support is needed to establish a policy for a local road. Labour campaigners have put pressure on the Council to extend the stage 2 deadline and were pleased to secure a later date for residents to comment. However this is not enough and Labour proposes the following:

Stage 2 consultations should be extended in future to give residents more time over this important process

For a road to proceed to further consultation there needs to be an absolute majority of households in the road in favour not just a simple majority on what might be a low response

Where there is no clear consensus roads should not be added to the scheme and there should be further consultation to explore alternatives

The Council should set out a system where existing CPZ roads can also be reviewed and residents can propose changes that can be consulted on

Money

Parking charges cost people a lot of money in tough times and we need more transparency over costs to justify what is proposed. Sutton also has out of date systems that make payment more expensive for short -term parking, Labour proposes the following:

The Council should set out comparisons over parking charges with other outer London local authorities so people can see whether current charges are fair or not

The Council needs to clearly set out what parking charge income has been spent locally over the last 5 years

The Council needs to clearly set out how much is going to be raised and all the potential projects that parking changes could be spent on in the next 5 years

The Council should introduce phone payment system like other Councils to enable people to pay for shorter time periods

Long-term challenges

Many local residents will see current proposals as solving long-term parking issues, but as an attack on them and their livelihoods and caring responsibilities and simply a way to raise revenue for Council projects that benefit the few, not the many. The proposals themselves don’t solve the longer term challenges around reducing the need to travel. More local jobs, better local childcare and better broadband to increase working from home are better long-term solutions to increasing car ownership. Labour proposes the following:

Actually consult residents on what their needs are to make them use cars less and build Council strategies around real needs. Developing local level resident led car sharing/delivery/collection co-ops might be one of the solutions which the council could get local coders to produce a Sutton based local app for

Work with the Mayor of London to identify quick wins on public transport. This might be a review of bus routes or a better “metro service” on the Thameslink loop. A Rapid Bus or Tram will take a long time to implement and currently it suffers from a massive £130-330 million funding gap and would also lead to a potentially controversial Angel Hill flyover which mean any proposed scheme is likely to take longer than currently proposed, so we see no benefits for the next decade

More information on our local policies on this issue and our full local manifesto can be read here.