Parking: Town Centres

Kirith Entwistle Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Kirith Entwistle (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I thank my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar) for tabling such an important debate on a topic that affects us all in so many different ways in daily life. I declare an interest as a member of the Women and Equalities Committee and I want to touch on a slightly different aspect of this issue of accessibility and public spaces.

As a long-time advocate for working families, this debate is personal for me. Across Britain—from Dudley and Sheffield to my own hometown of Bolton—we face a troubling problem. We are building more flats and homes, and encouraging people to move, without building the parking that is so needed alongside that. We are building family homes in town centres such as mine in Bolton, but we are failing to provide family friendly infrastructure that parents desperately need.

Parking in town centres is a prime example. Shopping centres, workplaces, and even hospitals all fall short of providing sufficient parent and child parking spaces with wider bays and convenient short walks to entrances. The problem is threefold. Parent and child spaces are too few, enforcement is lax and unclear regulations harm those who need them most. At my local supermarket, the scene is all too familiar: the few parent and child spaces are taken by large vans or two-door convertibles, vehicles with no sign of families in tow. The result is parents like me facing an almost impossible task—trying to load a toddler into a car seat in a standard space without bumping the car next door. The solution is not complex. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley mentioned, we need to design town centres with “public” in mind. Starting with public parking, let us expand family friendly spaces and curb rule breaking by enforcing the strict regulations used to safeguard blue badge holders. Once public places set the standard, private car parks will follow.

Even worse, town centre parking completely overlooks pregnant women. Imagine being eight or nine months pregnant—swollen feet, aching back, every step a marathon—yet being expected to walk in and queue at customer support to request case-by-case permission for parent and child parking at supermarkets. The irony is glaring. Spaces intended to make life easier are instead placing an even greater strain on pregnant women.

So why is progress on family-friendly parking moving so slowly? Why are pregnant women still being overlooked? When former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg was working at Google and became pregnant, the company’s car park lacked any spaces for pregnant women. Drawing on her lived experience, she raised the issue with Google’s male co-founders, and the policy was changed soon after. The problem: Google’s male leadership had never even considered the needs of pregnant women in the first place. That happens all too often. Similarly, in Westminster, it is often left to women Members of Parliament to draw attention to the problems that cause daily frustrations to women. I am confident that the Minister agrees that we must move to prioritise town centre parking for families and pregnant women, and accessibility for all.

Beyond that, I sincerely hope that the Minister agrees that we must also move towards a Parliament that proactively addresses these problems, rather than relying on us women to highlight them. Parking should be accessible to all—it provides a lifeline to our town centres, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley again for bringing this issue to the House.