Parking: Town Centres

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar) for securing this important debate and for the powerful case that she made.

It is one of the great joys of being the Minister responsible for high streets and town centres that I get to attend these debates where people talk about their communities. It is always interesting to hear the commonalities, differences, and challenges they are facing, though I might say with a degree of mischief that it is not often that such debates inspire such coverage of all the nations and regions of the UK as we have today. That is a sign that my hon. Friend is in exactly the right space.

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the Minister recognises that as our shopping habits have changed so has the need for parking in town centres. In my biggest town of Kirkcaldy, we are blessed to be right on the coast: we could have beautiful sea views, housing, workspaces, and facilities to attract tourists, but instead we have dilapidated, unused car parks which are a true blight on our town centre and on our seafront. Redevelopment funding is badly needed so that our town can fulfil its potential and meet the needs of its residents today.

[Alex Norris]

That is a really important challenge. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley finished by saying that the issue is not peripheral, and that we need to address broader matters in terms of parking, town centre vibrancy and having a more planned approach to what the future could look like. Doubtless, there would need to be support from the Government of the day, and that message was heard very clearly.

My hon. Friend made an important point, similar to the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) just made, about the reasons for the decline in our high streets and town centres—those obvious changing patterns of behaviour. Colleagues could easily order a book, probably several, in the time I am speaking—I am sure they would not—and that is different and is not going to go away.

Times have been hard for people. Austerity has been a really difficult period for our communities and people are still struggling with the money in their pockets. All that contributes to challenges, so it behoves us to try to drive footfall and to use any levers we have to do so. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley said, parking is an important one. In her contribution, the voices of her constituents, be they businesses, long-term residents, students or leisure centre users, came into this Chamber. I hope they see that their views are being echoed, expressed and taken seriously in this place.

I want to cover some of the points that my hon. Friend made, and I do not want to miss out the final contribution, from my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle). Like others, I have seen the coverage of Dudley council’s decision to scrap two hours of free parking, and I recognise the pain, the impact on motorists and the disappointment for residents and visitors that that has caused. I have seen the rally and I was sad to hear from my hon. Friend that there is a sense that the consultation was not done properly because that is an important part of conducting a process properly, even if the results are disappointing.

Parking, together with effective public transport and decent active travel, is essential to the resilience of our towns and cities. However, as has been said, the provision of accessible and affordable parking is particularly important outside the major metropolitan cities and in rural communities. Where public transport is limited, people need their cars—as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan) said.

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

In one of my major towns, Harpenden, I have had a lot of businesses, such as Threads and Oui, which have said that parking charges are changing and they are worried. The Minister mentioned services such as parking and transport. Is it not sad that after 14 years of Conservative Government, and cuts and cuts to local councils, local authorities have been forced to make some of these difficult decisions? It is now time for us to empower local authorities to support businesses and high streets and to invest in our communities to ensure that they thrive.

[Alex Norris]

I absolutely agree. It is at the heart of this Government’s approach to give communities tools to change places, and I will go through some of those at the end. There is a financial aspect to that, but there also a power aspect about shaping the things that shape the community. The debate gets to the heart of that, because parking is one of the major levers that a community has. The important point is that it is the community’s lever. Yes, it is held by the local authority, but it is the community’s lever.

Fundamentally, responsibility for parking provision in town centres rests with the relevant local authority under the Traffic Management Act 2004. The accompanying statutory guidance clearly sets out that parking policies have to be proportionate and have to support town centre prosperity, and that it is for local authorities to decide how parking should support that—whether it should be free, whether it should be tariffed and for how long. Local authorities are best placed to do that, through their local transport plans and their local insight. They have to find a balance between residents, local businesses, those who live and work in an amenity and of course access for emergency services. Under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, local authorities can set their own parking tariffs. I think almost everybody will at some point set tariffs, certainly in a busy area, but they must be proportionate and should not be set at unreasonable levels.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley emphasised that the point of local parking policies is not to be revenue raisers or indeed cash cows. How a surplus is spent is prescribed under section 55 of the 1984 Act, which requires any surplus raised from parking schemes to go back into local authority-funded transport or environmental schemes—back into communities, as my hon. Friend said. Colleagues need to keep a discerning eye on that to ensure that that is really taking place, and that, crucially, communities have a voice. I and other colleagues in the Chamber have been council members. I remember wrestling with the problem of how to create that convection in Nottingham. We do not want people to come to a town centre and park there all day for work and then go home again and not contribute to the local economy. We want a turnover, but we want incentivisation as well.

Colleagues have talked about the effectiveness of providing a free hour in pulling people through. There are very good examples of where that has worked. The challenge for me and for local authority colleagues who are listening to this debate is that, yes, this is a local authority function, but local authorities are their community. All our local authorities should ensure that their policies reflect the wishes and interests of the local community and that they are getting the public into the conversation—I was challenged to do this when I was a member of my local authority and I challenge mine to do so now.

Local authorities must also get business into that conversation. I was surprised to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley that local businesses clearly do not feel that that has happened.

[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for visiting Rugby and having a walk around. One bit of the town that we did not reach was Elliott’s Field, which is an out-of-town shopping centre. Does he agree that those out-of-town shopping centres compete with town centres, not least because they can attract anchor clients, but also because they can offer free parking?

Rugby borough council—I must declare an interest as I am still a councillor—is thinking very carefully about innovative measures that it can take, whether that is free parking, which was offered in some car parks in December, or making rapid decisions on opening one particular council-owned car park when the theatre was showing a production. Is there anything else that central Government can do to help councils achieve this difficult balance?

[Alex Norris]

That is a really important intervention. I wonder whether, looking back on some of those decisions on out-of-town retail, communities would make the same decisions now as they did at the time. It is clear from my hon. Friend’s intervention that parking is a driving factor in success. To some degree the public are telling us what they want to see and we really ought to listen to them. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley talked about broader support, particularly around vacancy. I encourage colleagues to support their local authorities in promoting the new high street rental auctions to bring those vacant units back into use.

I also point to our work on safety in town centres. If we are driving footfall, people will only come, or come a second time, if they feel that they are safe. Footfall alone promotes community safety because energy and people being present deter crime and antisocial behaviour. Nevertheless, our commitment to 13,000 more police and police community support officers will have town centres at its heart, so there is that visible presence and our town centres are places where people feel safe to park their cars and shop.

I want to address the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East about parent and child parking bays. There is no current legislative requirement in this space. I am conscious that my hon. Friend has a ten-minute rule Bill designed to change this. In the interests, as she says, of challenging colleagues—particularly male colleagues—to come up with solutions, there is a possible workaround solution using the current legislative framework. Authorities can make parking provisions for specific road users, whether residents or blue badge users—we have many examples in our own communities. Under current rules, it would be feasible for a local authority to make specific on-street bays permit holder only, and to include a permanent identifier on that sign—again, we see those in our resident schemes and in our communities—but then issue those permits only to pregnant women or parents with children. Authorities would have to justify reserving those spaces—I think my hon. Friend probably did that for them—and find a decent way to publicise where those bays are located. I expect it would probably be about those being in the right place. That is something that colleagues can raise with local authorities. It is a bit of a workaround, but in the spirit of meeting her challenge to be being solutions focused, it would be one option. I thank her for her contribution.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley again for securing this important debate. She set out clearly some of the challenges that face our town centres. At the heart of it comes footfall, and at the heart of footfall is that lever of available and affordable parking facilities. Local authorities have leadership, responsibility and stewardship of local transport plans, but fundamentally that is for the community, and should be something that reflects the needs of local residents and local businesses. Clearly, that is not happening here, and that is why my hon. Friend had to take the significant step of bringing this from the high street in Dudley all the way to Parliament. She was right to do so. It is hugely important that the communities in Dudley, Kirkcaldy, Ilford, Bolton, Southend, and all the other places we have heard from today, are heard. The subject is clearly important throughout the country and I am grateful to colleagues for raising it.

Question put and agreed to.