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Parking Policy

I am a new member of the Transport Select Committee and I am disappointed not to have been on it earlier so that I could take part in the preparation of the report. I want to commend the Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), on the report and to say how much I have enjoyed my first few weeks on the Committee. I congratulate the other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, who made some extremely pertinent points. Paragraph 242 of the report states:"““Parking management has the potential to help to enable us to manage our road system with sophistication, balancing a complex number of demands, reducing urban stresses, and mitigating congestion and the intrusion of traffic for local residents. But this vision is not yet being realised widely. In order to maximise the positive impact of parking policies and enforcement regimes on a council’s transport objectives, it is essential that parking be properly planned and integrated into a comprehensive, clear, and local transport policy framework.””" That is the best paragraph in the report. The problem is that while we recognise what needs to be done, unfortunately in reality it is not being done. We have just had an excellent example from the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) of the fact that we can sit in meetings and talk about the ideal, but in terms of actually living where we live and parking where we want to park, the reality does not live up to the ideal. The problem is that parking falls between too many Departmental stools and, in Kettering, the parking situation illustrates that. Kettering is a small and fairly typical town in Northamptonshire in the middle of England and it has the same typical problems as most towns of that nature. There are all sorts of different Government agencies, local authorities and other bodies involved in enforcing parking. First, there is obviously the police. However, the police have given up enforcing parking in Kettering. The two basic reasons for that are that parking enforcement is not a target set by the Home Office and they do not have the money to do it. Kettering has one traffic warden who works 16 hours a week. He is now largely paid for by the local borough council and if it did not do so there simply would not be a traffic warden. As an illustration that there has to be a practical approach to parking issues, instead of spending most of his time putting tickets on cars parked in the wrong place, on busy days—for example a Saturday morning—he quite rightly stands at the top of Gold street in Kettering, which is Kettering high street, and stops cars from travelling illegally down the pedestrianised area. He has to do that because of the red tape involved in trying to persuade the county council to put a barrier up to prevent cars from entering the pedestrianised area. It may be different in areas that have unitary authorities, but in Northamptonshire, like in most of England, we have a borough council and a county council. Despite the fact that we both want to achieve the same objectives, it seems very difficult to introduce a sensible traffic management system. My first point was that the police have given up, despite the fact it is their responsibility to enforce parking regulations until local parking is decriminalised.