Rye Town Council (RTC) will be discussing the introduction of Civil Parking Enforcement (CPE) with traffic wardens next Monday, October 30, at 6:30pm in the Town Hall in Market Street.
The meeting is open to the public and the council will discuss three questions raised by Rother District Council (RDC) about the introduction of CPE.
Rother is currently considering whether to ask the Highways Authority, East Sussex County Council (ESCC), to adopt CPE, which would allow ESCC to enforce all on-street parking.
RDC is one of a handful of councils that do not already have CPE, and Sussex Police has made it clear that it is unable to undertake the enforcement of parking restrictions generally because of limited resources.
It is also possible that the government may require councils that do not already have CPE to adopt it anyway in the near future.
RDC is therefore asking local town and parish councils to attend a CPE stakeholder meeting at Bexhill Town Hall on Wednesday November 29 at 11am.
Parliament has to approve CPE by ESCC on the basis of a detailed application to the Department for Transport (DfT) covering all existing Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) in the county.
These TROs cover parking details like yellow lines, loading bays and zig-zags and additional ones require public consultations. Even all the existing ones will have to be checked before CPE can be introduced and enforced by traffic wardens.
As parliament has to approve a detailed CPE application from DfT, the process – even if based only on existing restrictions – could take a couple of years, and an application introducing new restrictions could take much longer.
The invitation-only stakeholders meeting in November will be about the principle of introducing CPE and not the detail, and the stakeholder councils will be asked their views on three questions, which will be discussed at the RTC meeting on Monday.
- Should RDC ask ESCC to apply to the DfT to adopt CPE in East Sussex?
- Would stakeholders rather have CPE as soon as possible based on existing parking restrictions or would they rather identify all parking concerns and their possible solutions, and then introduce CPE? The latter would be a much longer process in terms of years as public consultations would be needed on additional restrictions.
- Is there a preference for businesses and residents to subsidise free parking through local taxation (ie council tax), or for CPE to be based on the “user pays” principle with parking charges introduced to cover the costs of the scheme?
Photos: Rye News Library
