26 Feb 2025
The Conservative group on St Albans district council has put together what they consider to be a means of scrapping the unpopular on-street parking charges in Harpenden.
Their amendment to SADC’s budget – which is set for ratification at this Wednesday’s Full Council meeting – suggests various ways to make up revenue lost from parking fees, which would amount to £268,000 for both Harpenden and St Albans.
These include reducing the spend on displays and promotions at St Albans Museums (£25K saving), reducing the free Community News publication to one hard copy a year (£9K saving), reducing the council’s learning and development budget by 50 per cent (£25k saving), removing two full-time posts in the SADC customer and digital services team (£87,686), and reducing the basic councillor allowance to 2019 levels (£74,248 saving).
Proposals to make a senior leadership role and removing two roles from the Museums team were unable to be included as they would be redundancies, so amended proposals made up this shortfall by other means, including funding the Christmas lights via other means (£6K) and a reduction in community grants (£10K).
Going forwards in the second year they propose creating further savings of £128K and £8K by devolving public toilets and free car parks to parish councils.
Group leader Cllr Matt Cowley said: “The Conservative Group have always maintained that the council does not need to introduce new parking charges to on-street parking to balance the books. Parking charges will damage local businesses and make our district less accessible to local residents.
“After some detailed work, we believe that our fully-costed plan to remove parking charges will deliver savings without hitting the vital public services that our residents rely on. And we have allowed a significant contingency to cover off any unexpected costs that might arise.
“The Liberal Democrats have often claimed that they had no choice but to put in parking charges. There is now a choice on the table. Will they back our plan to remove parking charges? Or will they put party politics ahead of the district’s residents?”
But the Lib Dems have slammed Tory councillors for claiming that they had a ‘fully costed’ plan to remove parking charges.
They say that under council rules, opposition parties can table amendments to the Budget but they have to be approved by the council’s financial officer as being financially sound.
In practice this means that if they want to propose spending more tax-payers’ money on one item, they must be able to say where they would take money from, but the largest items put forward were rejected as they failed to deliver the savings claimed.
But the replacement proposals have had no time for any assessment of the impact on residents’ service provision, while others cannot be delivered without incurring significant further cost and revenue impacts.
Council leader Cllr Paul de Kort said: “We Liberal Democrats have spent the last five years clearing up the mess left behind by the Conservatives and every year we’ve managed to protect vital services against the odds.
“No-one comes into politics to put up charges for local residents but after years of real-term funding cuts to our council under the Conservative and now Labour Governments, there are no other fair alternatives. And now we are presented with a Budget proposal from the Conservatives that is so ill-considered and ill-thought out that it seems that they must have brought in Kwasi Kwarteng as their consultant.
“Meanwhile, our Liberal Democrat team is putting forward a Budget which will continue to protect many services which we are not required to provide in law – such as our green spaces and parks, CCTV protection, museums, and leisure and cultural centres too, such as the Alban Arena and the Eric Morecambe Centre. We know these centres and spaces make our community a thriving place to live and work, and are cherished by local residents, so if our Budget passes, these will all be protected too.”
