John Heppell: “Keep you oar out.”
While Greater Manchester looked at – and rejected – congestion charging, Nottingham went down a different route.
Workplace parking levies.
The idea is simple. If you are a business based in the city centre, you pay up to £350 a year (by 2014) for each parking space you have. (Or you take it out of your staff’s wages. That’s still a possibility, I’m told.)
That’s approximately one per cent of turnover for 95 per cent of eligible businesses in Nottingham.
A so-called ‘WPL’ scheme has already been ruled out up here. The Association of Greater Manchester Authorities calculated it would make only £4.4m by 2016 if confined to the city centre – peanuts, in transport terms.
The AA, and various chambers of commerce, have also dismissed it as a terrible idea, particularly in the current economic climate.
But Nottingham is pushing on, because it wants to fund an expansion of its tram system. Local MP John Heppell has a message for other cities commenting on the wisdom of that decision this week: butt out.
“If I had been reading the local and national newspapers, I would have assumed that the workplace parking levy was some dreadful tax being forced on businesses, that it was not supported by anyone in Nottingham, whether business or the local community, and that it was badly thought out and should be dropped immediately,” he said. ” In reality, that picture is a long way from the truth.
“There has, in fact, been a good campaign. I congratulate the regional CBI, the Derby and Nottingham chamber of commerce, the national chamber of commerce and even Front-Bench Tory spokespeople, who seem to have swallowed the misinformation and exaggeration put across by some of the people opposed to the scheme…
“In some respects, others should not be interested in the issue because it is something for the people of Nottingham; it is not for the regional CBI, or the regional or national chambers of commerce. People in Derby, Leicester, Manchester and across the country can forget about the scheme; if it does not work in Nottingham, I guarantee that nobody will bring it in anywhere else. Nottingham city wants to bring in the scheme and, to be quite honest, we would appreciate it if people who are not involved in Nottingham city kept their oar out.”
He went on to say: “Powers for local authorities to introduce workplace parking levy schemes were included in the Transport Act 2000, along with powers to introduce road user charging schemes… Decisions on whether to introduce these schemes are a matter for the relevant local traffic authority, but schemes in England require the approval of the secretary of state before they can be brought into operation… We are consulting until 5 March on draft regulations for workplace parking levy schemes in general… A workplace parking levy order, which is required for each scheme, cannot come into force until confirmed by the secretary of state for transport.”
So correct me if am I wrong, but does this mean the government introduced powers for WPLs in a 2000 Act – but nine years later has still failed to carry out the consultation that would allow any WPL schemes to actually go ahead?
Sounds like ministers are none too keen, either…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under AGMA, Congestion charge, Labour, Local government, Transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.