Parking Places (Variation of Charges) Bill

Debate between Kevin Foster and David Tredinnick

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 3rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jo Churchill]

Fine, but that takes me back to my earlier point, which is that that is already in the Bill. Are we not just adding a bit of jam to the cake?

[David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)]

This has already been a passionate debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) on moving this probing amendment. I hope I can convince him and my other hon. Friends, many of whom are here today, that he does not need to press it.

No amendments were moved in Committee on Wednesday, so the Bill was reported to the House unamended. This new clause is a somewhat late entry in the race.

[Kevin Foster]

I was not a member of the Committee, so I could not move an amendment at that stage. I am therefore raising the issue on Report. I am just clarifying the situation for those who are not familiar with the procedure of the House.

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[David Tredinnick]

I am flattered, Mr Speaker, that you should call me back to this point and ask me to explain myself. I also crave your indulgence, because in Committee I did, in error, produce the Christmas decoration and was rightly called to order, as we cannot call devices in aid when we make speeches. Wary of your determination to maintain procedures, I did not venture to do that today. The point I am trying to make is that this Bill, which was talked about as the Santa Claus Bill, is actually something that brings about a lot of goodwill and can be used, particularly in the run-up to Christmas, to help people do their shopping. Previously, the councils were unable to act quickly in response to situations. I will not labour that point any more.

My own local council in the main town of my constituency, Hinckley, just across the border from my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, has many car parks, and, if this Bill achieves Third Reading today, it will certainly have an impact on the way that Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council implements parking in the future.

Hinckley has been very successful as a town centre. Recently, it was a finalist in the Great British High Street competition. Cost-effective parking is clearly important for a town that can achieve that success.

[Kevin Foster]

My hon. Friend is right to talk about the success of towns. Does he agree that that is why it is so important that we are absolutely clear that this Bill is about varying the charges down, and not up, which would inhibit the success of those towns?

[David Tredinnick]

I am glad that my hon. Friend has intervened. He represents Torbay, which is a very beautiful seaside town. In fact, years ago I knew his Conservative predecessor who was also passionately concerned about the town. He was known as Spy 13 because of his other job, which was writing spy novels. I wish him well if he is tuning into this debate.

May I say to my hon. Friend that he is doing absolutely the right thing for his constituency of Torbay where parking is clearly critical? I can assure him that if he looks at clause 1 he will see that this Bill is about enabling councils to reduce charges. It means that, in the future, they will not have to go to the expense of publishing notices in local newspapers to reduce charges, and it will give them a degree of flexibility, which is really important.

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[David Tredinnick]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, who has been a great champion not only on the matter of parking charges, but on the cause of cancer. I am very pleased to serve with her as an officer on the all-party cancer group.

For clarity, I will make it absolutely clear what these two clauses do. Clause 1 provides government with a power to make regulations that simplify the procedure for lowering parking charges. At present, councils must give 21 days’ notification in the press, and place signage in the car parks—something to which I have not yet referred—if they want to lower their charges. The private sector, however, can take a business decision to lower them without going through that process. This clause would simplify the requirement and give councils the flexibility to reduce their charges, thereby putting local authorities on an even footing with the private sector. My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay has not picked up on that point, but he might like to do so now. I am sure that he would have mentioned it had he thought of it.

[Kevin Foster]

To be fair, I do accept the very valid points that my hon. Friend makes. Private sector operators can literally change the signs overnight if they wish to change the prices in a car park, whereas a council has to go through very lengthy procedures. Does he agree with me, though, that, at the end of the day councils are meant to be bodies that are charged with delivering the public good in an area? A company or a corporation is, to put it bluntly, looking to make as much money as it can from the asset it owns.

[David Tredinnick]

My hon. Friend helpfully leads me into an area that I wish to discuss in a moment, which is the impact of pricing on car parking charges generally. Let me just make this further point to him and to the House: it is equally important that councils should consider the effect of increased parking charges on the high street. To that end, the clause makes provision for a consultation requirement so that councils take on board the views of local businesses and residents when they are looking to increase parking charges on an existing traffic order. They must already consult when a traffic order is set up, but it is proportionate to expect them to consult if they are raising charges during the life of the traffic order. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay that he should not fear that this Bill—the de minimis Bill, to quote my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch—will increase parking charges; it cannot do that.

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[David Tredinnick]

I do agree. I shall discuss the impact the Bill will have throughout the country later in my speech, along with some other figures. First, I shall indulge my hon. Friend by referring to the Portas review, which showed clearly that car parking charges were the biggest barrier to the regeneration of our town centres. That is perhaps no surprise when we consider the fact that the average hourly parking rate in London is £8.44, which is 18% more than the minimum wage. That is a staggering figure.

The “Re-Think! Parking on the High Street” report clearly states that footfall does affect town centre performance, with those towns that have higher footfall generating a higher level of spend. If nothing is done, the high street will remain under threat from out-of-town and online retail facilities, where lack of, or expensive, parking is not an issue.

[Kevin Foster]

My hon. Friend just referred to London having extremely expensive parking charges, but it obviously still has thriving business centres around places such as Oxford Street. Does he agree that London’s economy operates very differently from the rest of the country? Anything like those charges in any other town would have devastated the shopping centres and high street businesses.

[David Tredinnick]

I accept that London is a special case and, of course, my hon. Friends and I do not represent London, but I thought it was instructive to make the point that the charges here are so high.

To follow up on the remarks by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker), it is important to look at how the provisions will operate in practice. For greater accuracy, I asked the Commons Library to provide some figures on the scale of natural settlements—known as built-up areas to most of us—in the country. According to the 2011 census, we have in our country 56 cities, 696 towns with a population of 5,000 or more, and 1,590 villages with a population of between 1,000 and 5,000. Each one of those settlements could be affected by the Bill’s provisions. Pride is a dangerous word in parliamentary life—we can sometimes get too proud—but I am absolutely delighted to have been able to introduce a Bill that does not just affect a particular constituency matter but has a national impact. This Bill is going to have huge ramifications for business.

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[Kevin Foster]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if special events are about communities coming together and bringing in a surge of trade and that if local authorities view them as an opportunity, bluntly, to turn their car parks into a bit of a cash cow and rip people off, we could see an effect similar to what happened with the solar eclipse in 1999 in Cornwall: where places increased prices, people just did not come?

[David Tredinnick]

I have a good recollection of those events, and the Bill is not about raising charges; it is about lowering charges and raising consultation levels. That is the soundbite; that is what the Bill is all about. That is why I ask my hon. Friend to withdraw his new clause.

My hon. Friend talks about private car park owners who wanted to ratchet up charges in Cornwall. My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray), who is not here today, has had her own issues with car parking. My hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), who also is not here, has had such issues and held a successful debate on them in Westminster Hall the other day. There was so much in the newspapers and so much media hype about what would happen and the pandemonium that would be caused by the huge number of people who would go to Cornwall to watch the eclipse, which totally blocked out the light of the sun for about a minute, that nobody actually turned up. As my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay will recall, the numbers were way down and quite the reverse of what was expected happened. Councils might therefore make provision to reduce charges, but then suddenly realise that there is no need to do so at all, rather than waiting for 21 days and losing revenue. In that situation, the opposite applied.

I shall conclude my remarks fairly soon, but I want first to refer to what the Federation of Small Businesses told me yesterday. Apart from generously congratulating me on negotiating the narrows of the rivers to get to this point with a private Member’s Bill, it says that it is wholly supportive of the measures in the Bill, that it will be an additional tool for the Government to support local small businesses and ensure that they and their customers can park, and that is why it is very welcome. The FSB’s research shows that seven in 10 small firms think that parking is a priority for the future of independent shops. It says that independent retailers in town centres are the engines that help to make the UK’s local communities what they are. In its report, “Going the extra mile”, it found that small businesses are overwhelmingly reliant on roads, with nine in 10 firms—about 89%—placing a high value on the network. With so many small businesses relying on the road network, it argues for greater investment. Well, that is predictable. Its final point is that consultation with businesses is required before local authorities increase the cost of parking. That is exactly what clause 2 will provide.