East Barnet is a small local centre, at the heart of a community, with a selection of shops. They have a great dry cleaners who are incredibly friendly and helpful, newsagents, an electrical shop, an optician, a florist, a chemist and post office, cafes, etc. Behind the shops in Churchill Road is a small car park which has approximately 50 spaces. When I go to the dry cleaners or opticians I always use the car park because it is free and makes using the local shops easy.
The problems is Barnet Council have a focus on generating money and tough luck if it hurts people on the way. They want to introduce charges for this car park; £1.05 for 30 mins £2.10 for up to an hour and if you are staying more than 3 hours it will cost you £5.25. Now on the face of it some people would say that car parks should have a charge but most people are just popping in for one or two things; picking up your dry cleaning, nipping to the chemist. Up at Potters Bar the first hour is free. What it will do is either encourage some people to pull up on the bus stop or on double yellow lines. More likely is that they will drive elsewhere where they can park for free or get other shopping at the same time.
Will it generate that much money - no. Barnet council have identified that the revenue generated form charging in all the free car parks will generate about £6k a year of revenue. Speaking to a few of the shopkeepers today they are all pretty angry with Barnet saying that it will ruin business. Some of the shop staff park in the car park to keep the road free outside the shops for the passing trade but that will stop when the parking charges are introduced.
Now given that Boris has just ploughed over £400k into tarting up High Barnet, you would have thought that £6k per annum could have been found to keep these car parks free.
I hope that our three local councillors, Robert Rams, Joanna Tambourides and Barry Evangeli are ashamed of their actions and make a rapid u-turn. If they don't then they shouldn't be surprised when yet more business in East Barnet close down.
Standing up for common sense in New Barnet
I imagine, Mr Reasonable, that this will be one of those issues that they latterly decide to block so that they can then look like local heroes, while the rest of the borough goes to hell in a hand cart.
ReplyDeleteThere are already rumours that the scheme has been dropped.
This is, however, uncertain, as it is impossible to second guess anything this Tory council may decide to do.
Retribution may take a little while to arrive but come polling day these 3 permit holders can be de-permitted by voting for someone else who has a better policy of helping local businesses.
ReplyDeleteTaking away free parking for users in East Barnet will prevent a lot of people visiting the High Street making it even more difficult for local shop keepers. People will just go to Brent Cross and park for free and get all their dry cleaning and what have you in one place.
ReplyDeleteSadly the final acts in introducing cashless parking have re-commenced. The off street parking meters in the East Barnet road car parks have been removed.
ReplyDeleteClearly the contractual difficulties that caused a suspension in meter removal has been resolved by Barnet Council. Or have they? Does anyone know?
We had hoped that the off street meters had been left to facilitate the potential for a compromise. Perhaps they had, and an order has now been spitefully issued as a result of the East Barnet campaign, both within the council and amongst locals.