Ten Bristol city car parks to begin charging in autumn

Mark Weston said introducing car park charges will do "untold harm to our high streets for very little revenue"

Charges are to be introduced at 10 city car parks despite scores of residents labelling the decision to introduce pay and display "discriminatory".

The fees were mooted at a Bristol City Council meeting earlier in February.

GP patients who use Westbury Hill car park in Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, attended the meeting with some calling fees a "tax on people for being ill" as the car park is next to a GP surgery.

Charges are due to be introduced this autumn.

The fee, expected to be £1-an-hour, seven-days-a-week, has upset cross-party councillors who backed calls for the idea to be scrapped or scaled back.

Conservative group leader and Henbury and Brentry ward, councillor Mark Weston, said he does not understand the "intellectual gymnastics the council goes through".

"We can afford to throw tens of millions of pounds at the Colston Hall [now Bristol Beacon] because we recognise the value it provides to the city but we are going to start charging a tiny amount in small car parks because we don't recognise the importance they have to secondary high streets.

"Small car parks are vital for those areas," he added.

'Kill shopping centres'

Stoke Bishop ward councillor, Conservative John Goulandris, said medical patients needed to park at Waverley Road in Shirehampton where fees are also being introduced so "we will be hitting people who are sick".

"These charges could... kill our suburban shopping centres which are suffering already," he added.

Mr Goulandris said the amount the council expected to earn was a "drop in the ocean" totalling just £150,000 a year, compared with the overall £483.5m proposed revenue budget which contains a raft of other price hikes, cuts and cost-saving measures.

However, the Labour cabinet member for transport, councillor Don Alexander, defended the proposals, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

He said people have been subsidised for a long time with free car parks but "we would prefer to use that money to support bus services and active travel".

The other eight car parks are Beechwood Road in Frome Vale; Callington Road in Brislington; Chalks Road in St George; Derby Street in St George; Ducie Road in Lawrence Hill; Machin Road in Henbury; Repton Road in Brislington and Stoke View Road in Eastville.

Blue badge parking spaces will remain free in every car park.

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