Council wants to charge locals £70 to park outside their own homes
Residents will have to pay £70 to park outside their own homes, according to council plans.
Parking meters could be installed along roads within one kilometre (0.6 miles) of the seafront, with residents offered parking permits for £70, according to plans from Lib Dem-led Bournemouth, Christchurch and Pool (BCP) council.
Residents have accused the council of hypocrisy after it sold two 'key' seafront car parks, with the scheme labelled 'another attack' on motorists by the council, which has declared a climate emergency.
The local authority has previously been accused of causing traffic mayhem with prolonged roadworks to lay almost 50 miles of new cycle lanes in the area in an attempt to make travel more sustainable.
Plans for new parking meters come after a spate of 'Wild West' parking incidents as tourists left their cars on pavements, grass verges and even roundabouts.
Officials claim the extra revenue from the parking charges will help pay for more tow-trucks to take away illegally parked cars.
Motorists currently have to pay to park on most streets in the centre of Bournemouth but the large residential areas in Canford Cliffs, Branksome Chine and Westcliff, as well as Boscombe and Southbourne, are free.
Peter Schroeder, the chairman of the Branksome Park Residents Association, called the scheme 'stupid'.
He said: 'This proposal comes from the same council that is selling off key car parks. It is hypocrisy. We say no to residents paying to park their own cars on their own streets.
'We already have some of the highest council tax charges in the area. Charging residents and their guests and tradespeople doing work in houses and flats is a stupid idea.
'The council should give much stiffer penalties to those who do illegally park. £50 is probably nothing to them. If it was £1,000 they would think twice.'
Shaun White, a resident, said on social media: 'How is charging for parking spaces which are currently free going to prevent people from parking illegally on grass verges and double yellows?'
'Revenue for additional parking enforcement'
Last weekend, as thousands of tourists visited Bournemouth, more than 1,000 cars were ticketed for being illegally parked and ten were towed away.
Councillor Richard Herrett, the portfolio holder for destination, leisure and commercial operations at BCP Council, said: 'We welcome more than 10 million visitors annually to our seafront.
'We know at busy times we have a significant issue with illegal or inconsiderate parking. This significantly impacts road safety and can affect the quality of life for local residents.
'These proposals to extend seafront paid-for parking could generate revenue for additional parking enforcement and give us the ability to better enforce illegal parking across a wider area including increasing the number of vehicles which could be towed away in the worst parking instances.'
The proposal will now go out for public consultation before a final decision is made.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
30 minutes ago
- BBC News
Chris Mason: Labour still has a big persuasion job ahead
"I've not had as much quality time with my colleagues since the Brexit wars," a minister told me with a wry smile.A remark that gets to the heart of this benefits row within the Labour Party: this is a government with a big majority, that has already performed a big U-turn and yet is still involved in a big persuasion is not meant to happen, one year into government, with a working majority of prime minister himself will be getting stuck into some persuading today, making the case that these changes are, as he sees it, not only in keeping with Labour values but essential to ensure the long-term stability of the welfare if Monday's Commons statement from Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall was intended to reassure Labour MPs, it is an open question as to whether it worked."It turned a fair few colleagues off. I think it will get through, but it'll be close," said one MPs press Kendall on rollout of benefit changesWelfare cuts: What are the Pip and universal credit changes?What has been driving the rise in disability benefit claims?Faisal Islam: How much will U-turn on disability benefits cost?There has been plenty of talk of there being 40 to 50 Labour MPs who are opposed, but things remain the size of the working majority, rebels would need to amass around 80 of their colleagues to vote against the government to defeat them, everything else being a key factor could be how many choose to abstain in the vote on Tuesday Prof Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University of London notes that the biggest backbench rebellion Sir Keir Starmer has suffered so far is largest rebellion in Tony Blair's first year in Downing Street was 47 and also on the welfare state - over lone parent largest backbench rebellion for any governing party in 200 years was in 2003, over the Iraq the heart of plenty of the concern over these benefits changes is what is being proposed for the Personal Independence Payment (Pip) at the end of next November 2026, the plan is the eligibility criteria for the main disability benefit will be Labour MPs and ministers had hoped a review of Pip, conducted by Work and Pensions Minister Sir Stephen Timms and involving disabled people, would reassure colleagues the government's intentions were something they could over and over again in the Commons concerns were raised that the timeframe of the review - itself due to report in the autumn of next year - would mean it would be too late to have an influence on the eligibility criteria for Pip beginning that beneath that there is an underlying critique: that the reason the plans for late next year remain in place is because that way it makes it (a bit) easier for Chancellor Rachel Reeves' numbers to add up - and, to use the jargon, for the measures to be "scored" by the Office for Budget Responsibility when it produces its forecasts, which are so central to the government's management of the plenty of Labour MPs this is wrong-headed, topsy turvy and an increasingly hard-to-defend approach to it is also worth emphasising, as it always is when there is a debate dominated by noisy people, that there are quieter Labour MPs, many keeping their heads down right now, who find this whole row gratuitous and fundamentally naive - and, they argue, it is Labour's duty to grapple with a spiralling benefits Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves have long argued that Labour being seen as credible custodians of the economy is the building block upon which everything else is Chief Whip, Sir Alan Campbell, in charge of winning the vote for the prime minister, has issued a plea for unity - something that only happens when there isn't a surplus of it - and told Labour MPs they should "act as a team". The party, he said, would have to come back together after this difficult vote for will debate the plans all over again later, and the vote is expected early this even if the government does win, that won't be the end of the arguments and votes are expected in the next few weeks.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Starmer has no energy, vision or strategy for Britain on the world stage. He offers only weakness, decline and a disregard for the sovereignty of this nation: NILE GARDINER
Keir Starmer has been a disaster as British Prime Minister. Don't just take my word for it. In the week of the first anniversary of Starmer moving into No 10, the polling guru Sir John Curtice said that he has had 'the worst start for any newly-elected Prime Minister, or Conservative'. By this he means the Starmer government has suffered the biggest fall in public support for a new administration in history.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Glastonbury proves that I was right to try to reform the BBC: NADINE DORRIES
I have long believed that the BBC is one of the main supporting pillars of socialism in Britain today and that many who work for it are rootedly anti-Semitic. After the events of the weekend, when the Corporation live-streamed disgusting chants of 'death, death to the IDF [ Israel Defence Forces]' by punk duo Bob Vylan from Glastonbury, who can doubt it?
