Baroness Pinnock

Financial provisions relating to the income and expenditure of local authorities in connection with parking are stipulated in the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. Subsection 4 of section 55 specifies the purposes for the application of any surplus income from parking. This includes making good any deficit charged to the general fund in the preceding four financial years.

In line with the Local Authority Transparency Code, local authorities should each year publish their costs and profits relating to their parking management, allowing the public to hold councils to account. Parking is the responsibility of local authorities, and it is for them to determine what is best for their own area.

Off-street parking and all matters relating to it are the responsibility of the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Future standards next year will set our new homes on a path that moves away from relying on volatile fossil fuels and towards more clean, secure energy. These homes will be future proofed with low carbon heating and high levels of energy efficiency. No further energy efficiency retrofit work will be necessary to enable them to become zero-carbon over time as the electricity grid continues to decarbonise.

The Future Homes Standard consultation was published in December 2023 and closed in March 2024. It set out detailed technical proposals for what future standards could entail. All the options that were proposed would preclude the use of fossil-fuel heating in new homes. We are reviewing proposals and feedback from the consultation and will publish the Government response in due course.