Issue - meetings

The Council, with partners, operate 2-hour parking schemes in Littlehampton and Bognor Regis to support town centre footfall. The current 2-hour parking schemes in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton town centres both expire in 2023. This report sets out proposals to continue 2-hour parking schemes in each town centre beyond 2023.

[Councillor Blanchard-Cooper re-declared his Personal Interest as a Member of Littlehampton Town Council during discussion of this item]

          Upon the invitation of the Chair, the Group Head of Technical Services introduced the report to Committee. He explained that there were currently two town centre 2 hour free parking schemes in operation in the District, which both expired at the end of 2023. The purpose of these parking schemes was to support footfall in the town centres of Littlehampton and Bognor Regis. Both schemes currently used a cardboard clock disc.

In Littlehampton Arun made available 3 car parks and forwent car parking revenue from those 349 parking spaces. Littlehampton Town Council made a contribution to Arun of £28500 per annum towards this loss of revenue. Littlehampton Traders Partnership Ltd had been contributing £6,600 per annum, however were to be dissolved as they had been unable to collect the contributions from traders and owed the Council £14000 in outstanding contributions. Approximately 30,000 discs were produced and distributed to retailers each year at a cost of £4,500 per annum. The discs were given free of charge to drivers.

In Bognor Regis Arun made available 3 car parks and forwent car parking revenue from those 605 parking spaces. Bognor Regis Town Council made a contribution to Arun of £21000 per annum towards this loss of revenue. Bognor Regis Business Improvement District (BID) contributed £5000. Around 25,000 discs were produced and distributed to retailers each year by the BID at a cost of around £35-40K per annum. The discs were sold by the BID to businesses for £1.60, and the discs were retailed at £2 equating to gross profit for retailing businesses in total of around £10000 per annum.

There were limitations of the current scheme, which included misuse as carboard discs were impractical to enforce.  Some clocks were moved forward once the initial 2 hour free period had expired leading to further lost revenue to Arun; The cardboard disc scheme provided the Council with no data on use of the scheme. This meant there was no data on how much these schemes cost the Council to operate. If each disc obtained by a driver each year was used for just 1 hour on one occasion, taking account of the contributions from partners, the schemes cost Arun £28K per annum. If each disc was used on average once per month for 1 hour, the schemes cost Arun £935,500 every year. This lack of cost information was clearly unsatisfactory.

The proposal within the report would address these limitations. It was proposed to continue to operate two, 2 hour free parking schemes in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. Arun would operate these schemes by moving to a virtual permit using software and the MiPermit app it already used successfully for all other types of parking permits. Arun would sell cardboard discs alongside the virtual permit during 2024 as a transition year. If agreement could not be reached with Town Councils,  who, along with the BID were not in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 230