Plans to introduce weekends and overnight charges for the borough’s car parks were almost approved earlier this month – despite strong opposition from residents.
An Individual Executive Member Decision (IEMD) committee was due to be held on Tuesday, February 16, but was cancelled after being challenged by the Liberal Democrats. The Council said this now means it has more time to consider the consultation responses.
An IEMD meeting sees one member of the Council’s executive take decisions on the committee’s behalf. In this case, it would have been Cllr John Kaiser, Wokingham Borough Council’s (WBC) executive member for planning and highways, who approved the plans.
Had it gone ahead it would have been with a recommendation to approve the charges despite considerable opposition from respondents.
Briefing documents state: “These proposed charges will ensure that the council’s off street car parks provide a best value return on the asset.”
In a statement to The Wokingham Paper, the Council said that no decision had been taken on parking charges and the 300+ responses were still being analysed: this is despite the documents showing that an analysis has already taken place and the majority of respondents were against the charges being introduced.
Cllr Kaiser said: “What we were going to do was agree the traffic order which would allow us to do it [make the changes to parking], we hadn’t decided that we were actually going to do. We had a request from some town and parish councils to do something different to what we were proposing.
“[The cancellation of the meeting] gives us a great opportunity to sit down and go through these with town and parish councils and other interested parties. It’s going to be coming along to March executive hopefully by which time we may have explored some of the other options.”
The documents for the IEMD meeting reveal that the council predicts parking charges would generate £150,000 a year from April 2017. The original budget that was approved on Thursday, February 18, shows that the council expected to generate £137,000 a year from April this year. This was removed from the approved budget.
The leader of Wokingham’s Liberal Democrats has told The Wokingham Paper that the planned changes are not “trivial” and the consultation process should not have been “snuck through”.
Councillor Prue Bray, who represents Winnersh, added that the consultation documents allow increased fees but not new ones.
She said: “As you will know there has been a consultation on the introduction of charges in the car parks on Sundays and overnight.
“No previous decision had been made that I could find that had established the principle that this would happen. It is, as you can imagine, a tiny bit controversial and there was quite a lot of opposition in the consultation responses.”
She added: “They cancelled the meeting because I challenged it. It would have gone ahead otherwise.
“I think what happened was that someone wanted to get these charges through in time to include them in the budget and hadn’t got it on to the Executive Forward Programme in time, so they rushed through a surprise consultation – nobody was expecting it – and organised an IEMD, forgetting the rules.
“This is not a trivial change. It is a significant one and should have been handled openly and transparently. They should not have tried to sneak it through.”
