24 January 2003

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I enclose for your attention a copy of a letter I have hastily cobbled together to send to Councillor Andrew Retter (one of our three Ward Councillors).

Please let the Residents’ Association know my thoughts on this matter.

I am ready to support an arrangement whereby the residents of Highland and York Roads and their temporarily invited visitors are accorded exclusive rights to park in the carriageway of the road in which the said residents have their homes, but I am outraged by the suggestion that the residents should be charged (again) for this right.

I am also contemptuous of the blatantly inept way the Council has seen fit to advance, for supposed "discussion," or "consultation," a scheme to control parking in the area, and then clouded the discussion ab initio, by inserting a totally irrelevant matter of charges before any chance of arguing the merits of the parking-arrangements has occurred.

These people are so hot for revenue they are as indecent as they are incompetent.

Yours sincerely

Dear Andrew,
The questionnaire published by the council is a specious fraud: they combine a fully-thought-out tariff of charges (penalties, in effect) to residents with what purports to be a professionally disinterested enquiry into the attitude of the residents to the proposals in respect of parking.

This implies that a resident has no special entitlement to parking on the road for which he has paid the original road charges (which are for ever incorporated in the value of the land he occupies) but that the highways authority does have a right to charge the resident to stand a vehicle there.

Has this ever been challenged?

I, personally, am prepared to concede that position if it is to be applied everywhere to all vehicle owners; but the law has developed in a way which now by default slackly gives a resident with a vehicle an implied right to occupy the carriageway outside his home without further charge.

The insertion into this questionnaire of a structure of completely arbitrary charging is prejudicial nonsense and improperly distorts the fundamental discussion in respect of the control of parking.As stated above, the charge to residents will be a penalty or even a levy, not a legitimate contractual charge (no warranty of a parking-space will be provided) and the answers to the questionnaire will be coloured by the irrelevant monetary aspect.

The questionnaire is a sham.