Unfairness of the pesky parking tax

Few things are more calculated to provoke irritation and opposition in Pembrokeshire than car parking charges in our town centres. Witness the 8,893 people who signed a petition against them in St Thomas Green near the centre of Haverfordwest. Or the people from Goodwick who protested outside County Hall last week against proposals to charge in the town’s Station Hill car park.

Why is the opposition so intense in this part of Wales when elsewhere, especially in city centres like Cardiff and Swansea, charging for parking is long established and relatively uncontroversial? Pembrokeshire Council’s Head of Paid Services Ian Westley says its because nobody wants to pay for something they aren’t already paying. But it’s not that simple.

There’s a clue in one argument against the proposals to charge in St Dogmaels’ High Street. Local councillor Mike James said, “St Dogmaels is a village not a town and it is not somewhere where people come to shop or browse.” He added that the community was being treated like Narberth and Haverfordwest and that was not fair.

There is a sense in Pembrokeshire that all our villages and towns are in a similar position, certainly in comparison with large urban centres in southeast Wales. For instance, many people who pay for car parking in Cardiff are commuters or shoppers who live outside. For them parking fees operate as a congestion charge. And people who live close to or inside cities have a real alternative choice with public transport. If they’re over sixty they can use their free bus pass.

It’s not the same in rural Wales. Here many people have no choice but to travel by car. For them parking charges are in effect just another tax, and one that does not vary according to their ability to pay.

It is noteworthy that a while ago the Welsh Government stopped the NHS from imposing charges in hospital car parks. The argument was that it was unfair to impose charges on outpatients and people visiting friends or relatives in hospital. The same certainly applies in Goodwick where the Station Hill car park is widely used by patients at the adjoining Health Centre.

There’s another consideration, too. Many of our towns are run-down with shops boarded up, to a great extent the result of the poor planning by the county that has led to a rash of out-of-town developments. Imposing parking charges in town centres will only make this worse.

So what could be an alternative income for our cash-strapped council for which, as Ian Westley says, “every little helps”? How else could the council collect the £12m it hopes to raise from the proposed new parking charges? We urgently need to up-date the value of properties across the county, the basis upon which council tax is calculated. The last such re-valuation in Wales was in 2005. Since then the value of properties has risen considerably. An up-to-date re-evaluation would result in putting more properties into higher tax bands. It would mean asking the better off to pay a bit more. That would be a fairer way to raise the money Pembrokeshire needs.