Following our blog post about councils introducing schemes to charge businesses for their parking spaces , it seems things have taken a step forward with Nottingham City Council set to introduce the scheme in 2012.
It will see all firms with more than 11 staff parking spaces being charged £250 a year for each space, with the company then left to decide whether to pass the cost onto the staff or to absorb it themselves. Other councils considering the proposal at the moment are Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Birmingham and Bristol, all cities which have car club provisions.
This raises the question of whether it is fair to impose levies on businesses, or whether councils should look to other schemes which promote sustainable transport rather than punishing car drivers? Here at WhizzGo, we certainly hope that by providing an alternative to private vehicles, we can encourage businesses to use more sustainable transport wherever possible.
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I think it is not something I would describe as ‘fair’.
It will again sustain the argument that climate change is ‘just a tool to scare people and get more money of them’…
Councils should use the carrot, not the stick.
However, as we know, businesses have been given many chances to improve their transport policy and the ones which have not made efforts will be the most inconvenienced by this new charge.
So it’s not fair to create new charges as businesses are already struggling, yet, only the businesses that have not taken climate charge seriously will be affected.
At work, we have no parking spaces, we walk/bus/cycle to work and we do use WhizzGo for meetings on an occasional basis. Shoudl the scheme be implemented in Leeds, we wouldn’t be affected whatsoever.