What possible justification can there be to raise the cost of on-street parking outside the shops along the Pinner Road and Station Road in North Harrow by 25 per cent?

If the recommendation being made by Harrow Council’s cabinet is agreed, then the cost of parking after the free first hour will rise from 40p to 50p. Some people may say it is only 10p more and what is all the fuss about? But that is not the point.

North Harrow’s beleaguered shopping centre is suffering more than most and the council’s own statistics point to an area that has declined severely during the past five years. The level of vacant retail frontage reached 23.09 per cent for the period 2009/10, double that of nearby Rayners Lane, and at a time when all but a handful of the other shopping areas across Harrow recorded vacant retail frontage of less than ten per cent.

To add insult to injury, virtually all other on-street parking charges elsewhere are to remain static with no increase at all. You would have to travel to Edgware (vacant retail frontage 7.33 per cent) to find a comparable increase to that of North Harrow, or to Pinner (vacant retail frontage 3.63 per cent) where the cost of on-street parking rises to 60p, representing a 20 per cent rise.

The council, in determining parking charges across the borough for the next financial year, had the golden opportunity to harmonise what motorists pay to park up alongside our shopping parades and in doing so extend an equality of opportunity to the vast majority of the borough’s shopkeepers.

Instead what we have got is a set of parking charges that appear utterly muddled, defy all logic and discriminate against those areas of the borough that need the biggest helping hand of all. We are living in a time of extreme financial hardship, where price rises and cut backs are the order of the day. But North Harrow, yet again, is being asked to carry a greater burden than the adjoining town centres.

I shall not let this go and residents and shopkeepers alike can rest assured that when the long-awaited parking review comes along later this year, I will speak up for the common sense and fairness that for now seems to be so sadly lacking.

Councillor James Bond
Independent, Headstone North