The council manages more than 2,100 car park spaces across 18 car parks in the city, and it wants to make sure they are safe, attractive, welcoming to residents and visitors and convenient to use. This needs to be balanced with generating enough income, so the local authority can continue to make sure the car parks are kept in good condition and in doing so help support local shops and businesses.
This is why a number of changes to its car parking arrangements are now being considered by the council, including allowing customers to pay by credit or debit card for parking, as well as putting up parking charges and the cost of season tickets.
The council has put together a car park questionnaire to help it gauge public feeling about car parking and the proposed changes. This can be filled in right here.
Councillor Helen Fisher, Cabinet Member for Tourism & Communications, said: “Car parks are vital to the economic well being of Lichfield city centre, and we need to know how local people feel about them and our proposals.
We are considering a number of changes, including raising the cost of using our car parks. We have not increased our charges in city car parks since 2008 and in that time we have absorbed the 2.5% increase in VAT, yet the costs of managing and building new car parks, such as The Friary, have continued to increase.
So that we can continue to provide safe, clean and secure car parks across the city, and to make sure car parks do not become a burden on council tax payers across the district, we are considering increasing our current car parking charges. The charges have been compared to surrounding authorities and we are confident that our parking offer will remain competitive.
We now need residents and visitors to give us their views on our proposals by filling in our quick car park questionnaire.” Responses should be received by 5pm on Thursday 31 March 2016.
So please complete the survey as soon as you can and have your say.
Let’s work together to make Lichfield even better.
