Monday 5 November 2007

Free Parking in Tenbury

As a token of their great generosity, Malvern Hills District Council have bestowed on the good people of Tenbury free parking starting from 30th November and lasting until Christmas.
Well that's the headline. The small print is that it only applies to parking on Fridays and Saturdays. Thankfully there is a good amount of Free Parking available in Tenbury if you know where to look.
That is a total of 8 days. This will loose the Council approximately £336 in revenue, about £4.20 per shop or 10p per head of population of Tenbury.

Of course they could have allowed free parking for the whole month but that would have been 36p per person!

Malvern Hills DC official position is as I understand it, that if they allow free car parking in one car park, then they have to allow it in all. Although the Teme Street Car Park provides only a minimal amount of revenue, other car parks in the district are big money earners.
Due to the small number of Tax generating properties in Tenbury, the facilities in Tenbury are a drain in the districts resources. Perhaps if the council had been more proactive in developing the business park, the area may have at least been revenue neutral?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said. If the District Council wants to help Tenbury recover, they should offer free parking for up to 4 hours in the Teme St car park - and get some publicity out advertising this. Money was made available to advertise the Applefest - look how many people came. Why not spend a few pounds on turning Tenbury from "The dying Town in the largely grubbed-up Orchard" into "The recovering Town with free parking".
Malvern theatres gets a subsidy of around £200,000 each year (the actual figure varies from year to year). Around £10,000 would permit free parking in Tenbury for the whole year. Is it right to spend 20 times as much on a theatre? Getting a discount on theatre tickets (for that is what the theatre subsidy really means) is not as important (let alone 10 times as important) as making a success of the second largest town in the Malvern Hills area.

Anonymous said...

There are lots of builders vehicles using the on-street parking. We all understand that. So the Council should make the car park free until the builders have finished and all the on-street parking spaces are once again available to shoppers. At present, the Council is make money by selling tickets to people who can't park on-street. That's not right.