Surrenden Road residents: 'Let us speak out on our nightmare parking issue'

Surrenden Area Parking Campaign chairwoman Mary Allen, who lives in Surrenden Road, Brighton, is upset she and her fellow campaigners will not be able to voice their calls for a new parking scheme at Brighton and Hove City Council’s environment, transport and sustainability meeting.

She said: “It is a bad day for democracy when a council uses its procedural rules to refuse to hear from a local community.

“We had an important message that we wanted to communicate to the committee. The parking situation is getting worse. Local people are getting even more angry. And we’ve offered a solution to the council that would enable them to solve the problem and make some money. Their response is to stop listening to us and to kick the can down the road.”

Campaign leader Rynd Smith, of Preston Drove, says he cannot believe the council is content to allow the dangerous situation in the area to continue. The majority of residents in 26 roads in this area want parking controls introduced.

He said: “There is a school campus with 6,000 students and staff, many of who come from outside the city. There is a major commuter railway station, Preston Park, within 200 yards of the western boundary of our area. There is a major city park and sports clubs: recreation facilities used across the city and beyond. There is Preston Manor, a historic visitor attraction. These facilities generate high and rising demand for parking, as do the effects of controlled parking zones that now surround us and result in vehicle owners ruining our community to get free parking. There is no other location within the city that also has these pressures and is not already subject to parking controls.

“We regularly monitor commercial and leisure vehicles parked in our area and there are routinely more than 70 abandoned or little-used trucks parked nose-to-tail beside the schools.

“These create a hazardous environment, navigated by buses, pedestrians and schoolchildren on a daily basis.

“Would you be happy for your children to pass through a wall of abandoned trucks on route to school?

“The pressures on the Surrenden area are not being created by local residents but by individuals and businesses from outside our area and outside Brighton and Hove.

“What was bad in 2017 became extremely bad in March 2018 and is worsening to a point of being intolerable.

“Residents in the Surrenden Area want to know when the council will start devoting its resources to managing issues for local council taxpayers as distinct from favouring people who do not live locally and who are taking advantage of free parking – subsidising their costs of living and costs of vehicle ownership?

“We understand that solutions cost money, but our preferred solution, a controlled parking zone, offers the council an opportunity to generate a medium to long-term income that will be significantly larger than the costs of administering a scheme and it will also assist the council to meet the rising cost of its transport initiatives. “Residents have told us that they know the council can solve this problem if they take it seriously; but by telling us to shut up and go away they have shown they are not taking it seriously and that is a sad comment on local democracy.”

As far as the residents are concerned the campaign goes on and they will shortly discuss their next moves.

A council spokesman said committee chairwoman Councillor Gill Mitchell is not trying to gag or refuse to hear residents.

He said: “The council has a duty to be fair to all our residents, and a timetable for parking scheme consultations was set up and agreed to ensure that fairness happens.

“This timetable includes areas that have not had any previous consultation and those areas have been given the assurance that their consultation will start as agreed.

“A second consultation for the Surrenden area is included in the timetable and will be heard by the environment, transport and sustainability committee later this year.”