Campaigner Urges Drivers In Brighton & Hove To Ignore Parking Increases

A campaigner has called on Brighton and Hove City Council to act faster to stop parking charges from going up.

Friends of Brighton and Hove Citizens member Laura King said that the council had not acted quickly enough after a pending quadrupling of parking charges came to light.

At the end of last month it emerged that a big rise in charges was due to affect a number of parking zones from Monday 17 July.

There was outrage from staff at the Royal Sussex County Hospital who park in the zone H area of Kemp Town.

Charges there are due to increase from £5.50 to £15.70 for four hours and from £7.60 to £22.70 for 11 hours.

One and two-hour parking is scheduled to go up from £1.40 to £5.60 and from £2.80 to £9.30 respectively.

Other affected areas include zone N in central Hove, including the town hall and station area, zone J, which includes streets near London Road station area and Fiveways, and zone C, around Queen’s Park.

Ms King, who stood in the local elections in May, said that nothing seemed to have happened since Councillor Bella Sankey, the new Labour leader of the council, announced a review of the proposed price increases a week ago.

She suggested that drivers leave a note on their windscreens saying:

“Will pay what I owe pending the outcome of the promised parking charge review.”

Ms King said:

“They should either be freezing the current parking charges or suspending charges altogether pending an official review, preferably a judicial review.

“Or citizens should refuse to pay until the disputed charge review is complete, which you can certainly do with other bills, and I know plenty of people who do that.

“If they’re in dispute with their power company, they’ll say: ‘Okay, we’ll pay you when you’ve sorted it out.’ That’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do when they’re in dispute.”

She said that the sharp increase could drive workers to leave their jobs and move to other areas, leading to businesses closing.

In the run up to polling day, Ms King said that Labour leaflets had said that the party would “support you through the ‘cost of living crisis’”.

Ms King added:

“How are they supporting people through the crisis doing this?

“They’re blaming the Greens for the parking charge hikes but are quite happy to implement them despite national publicity.”

Ms King said that councils were not permitted to make “unreasonable profits” from parking after a ruling in 2013 when the RAC took Barnet Council to court.

In the High Court, in London, Mrs Justice Lang said that the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act was “not a fiscal measure and does not authorise the authority to use its powers to charge local residents for parking in order to raise surplus revenue for other transport purposes”.

The council’s parking charge surplus has been used to cover the cost of concessionary bus fares for older people and the disabled and to subsidise some bus routes and transport-related spending.

In 2021-22, surplus parking income went up to £20.5 million from £15.1 million the previous year.