28 Sep 2024
Cllr Matt Cowley, who has been a district councillor for Harpenden South since May 2024, responds to MP Victoria Collins’ comments on the parking controversy in last week’s St Albans Times.
The introduction of parking charges by the Liberal Democrats represents the single biggest change – and threat – to Harpenden’s High Street since the pandemic.
Retailers have spoken persuasively about the loss of trade that they will suffer – putting the future of our independent businesses at risk.
I’ve heard powerful representations from older residents and those with mobility issues about the significant impact that this will have on their ability to use their High Street and socialise.
The Lib Dems themselves have admitted that this is about “discouraging people from parking on the street longer than they need”.
Given that most of the spaces concerned already have a one hour or two hour limit, it must be the new short free window that they are hoping people will use to do their shopping.
No more coffee with a friend and a browse of the shops, only a quick rush through a High Street designed for transient stays – in and out to grab a take-out from Costa or pick up a pre-order. A fundamental change to the way that we use our High Street.
It is a really serious proposal, and it deserves more careful consideration that the “don’t blame me, it was those mean Tories what did it” rhetoric underpinning Ms Collins’ response.
Although given the feedback I’ve received from residents about Ms Collins’ failure to respond to their emails about this, perhaps she has simply been too busy working to secure her recent promotion to the Lib Dem front bench in Westminster to fully take in the depth and breadth of concern.
I wanted to respond to a number of the points Ms Collins raised.
Firstly, she states that “the district council leadership are carefully reviewing consultation responses”, but the leader of the council has been very clear that this decision has already
been made. There might be some fiddling around the edges on the detail, but the council’s leader has already confirmed in the St. Albans Times that parking charges will have to be
implemented because they were in the budget.
In that same interview, Cllr De Kort said he hasn’t “found any piece of research that says parking charges are a key deterrent to people going into town or city centres”, but so far as I can tell, the council hasn’t done any research on what these proposals would mean for Harpenden.
At the public realm committee, I established that the council has done no specific modelling on the implications of parking charges for usage of Harpenden High Street. And they did no consultation in advance of budget-setting last year to find out what changes to behaviour it might result in for residents.
Nothing.
Decision-making like this is a dereliction of their duty to residents. That’s why at the next Full Council meeting I am going to be putting forward a motion to require a full consultation on the next Budget – paid for out of councillor allowances.
Because while our Lib Dem MP is focussed on what has happened in the past, our local Conservative team is looking to the future, to make sure mistakes like this parking charge fiasco never happen again.
And we understand that to have a tough conversation with residents, you need to bring them into the room.
Ms Collins also talks about the Conservatives making this a party political issue and claims that we have failed to put forward alternative measures.
The Liberal Democrats have roughly 85 per cent of the seats on the district council. The Conservatives have three councillors.
It speaks volumes to the effective Opposition campaigns that we have been running that our MP feels the need to attack us at all.
But fundamentally the idea that the Conservatives have turned this into some grubby party political issue reflects a fundamental truth: that despite their claims that they don’t need an opposition and can mark their own homework, the Liberal Democrats regard any dissent to their ideas as being somehow impure. Motivated not by earnest desire to do best for our residents but by grubby self-interest.
It is why we so desperately need more Conservative councillors to hold this short-sighted, short-termist Lib Dem leadership to account.
Because the truth is, at the last Budget-setting the Conservatives were hampered – not by a lack of ideas, but by a lack of councillors. We had four councillors, of whom two were
seriously ill. That’s simply not enough councillors to make inroads when the 40-plus Liberal Democrat councillors get an idea in their heads.
And I’m grateful in a way that Ms Collins has made the case for us.
We do have alternative suggestions, but the only way we’ll get the Lib Dems to listen to them is by electing more Conservative councillors.
We need a return to long-term planning to raise sustainable revenue streams, not budget-by-budget cutting because of a failure of leadership.
Because despite Ms Collins insistence that these cuts are the result of Government cuts putting pressure on funding, St Albans district council’s core spending power has risen by more than inflation since the Lib Dems took
control in 2019 – from £14.7m to £18.4m. A 25.1 per cent increase against inflation of 24.5 per cent in the same period.
What has caused the financial hole is years of Lib Dem mismanagement.
Capital projects like Jubilee Square over-budget and behind schedule – and more than £700K wasted on a failed project to re-develop the Harpenden Public Halls and a resultant loss of commercial income that could have been generated from the development.
£700K lost every single year in potential revenue because 49 per cent of the council’s garages sit unoccupied, despite a waiting list greater than the number of garages unlet.
No ANPR in virtually all council car parks, meaning missed revenue and traffic warden time spent in our car parks and not out tackling illegal parking in our streets – with further missed revenue there.
The council still owns and spends money on green spaces that could be better managed for residents by their parish or town council – at a saving for the council.
A move to all-out elections that could save over £180k across a four year council cycle, rejected in favour of the current model which entrenches Lib Dem control of the council.
Time and again, we have seen this Lib Dem council fail to plan for future revenue – taking quick, easy decisions to cut services at the expense of residents.
Free green bin collections cut, street cleaning services slashed, parking charges up, council taxes up, community grants cut, Sunday bus subsidies cut, universal senior parking permits removed, parking permits for healthcare professionals like doctors and carers cut, cash payments for parking gone, social housing rents hiked, now free parking on the High Street going.
Our new MP wants to know what the Conservatives would do differently?
We would plan properly for the future, so that residents don’t have to suffer any more of the failures of leadership that we’ve seen under the Lib Dems.
But still, at least they’ve managed to find room in their hard-pressed budgets to raise councillor pay by over 15 per cent since they took control of the council. Politics is all about priorities.
And the council’s finances are just one example of the cost of Lib Dem short-termism on our residents.
You could just as easily look at the Local Plan – where we’ve had five years of dither and delay, empty Lib Dem rhetoric on Conservative non-mandatory housing targets being too high and protecting the Green Belt, all while they campaigned nationally for higher housing targets and watched our Green Belt be eroded by speculative developments made possible by their failure to swiftly adopt a Local Plan.
It wasn’t possible to adopt a Plan faster, they said. Until they were threatened with really high mandatory housing targets by Labour, when suddenly they could get a Plan through at pace.
I appreciate that Ms Collins might not be aware of some of this background, given that since the Lib Dems took control of St. Albans district council she has run for election to be the
Member of Parliament for Poole in 2019, a councillor in Islington in 2021, and when she did eventually arrive in Hertfordshire’s politics in pursuit of the best place to launch her political career, she initially opted for Rickmansworth rather than Harpenden.
But hopefully she might take some time away from her new front bench role to reflect on the work her councillors are
doing locally.
Because St Albans district deserves better than the short-termism, blame game politics and empty populism of the Liberal Democrats. And that is what our Conservative team will keep fighting for.
