Colchester City Council (Off-Street Parking Places) Order 2023

Colchester Borough Council (Off-Street Parking Places) Order 2023 – A Statement of Reasons

Colchester City Council’s Off-Street Order supports the aims that the City Council has for parking in its “Positive Parking Strategy”. There are four themes and principles within this strategy:

Protecting the environment

Consider air quality, traffic congestion and availability of other modes of transport when setting the quantity, location and charge of car parking.

Delivering good service

Providing clear signing to allow visitors to find appropriate, available parking more easily, and to manage the choice of routes taken to that parking.

Improving user experience by adopting new payment tariffs and channels. These systems could support new sophistications, such as promotions and caps on parking charges.

Varying the parking offered to meet different customer requirements spatially and temporally.

Providing social and financial value

Ensure parking prices take account of the full costs of providing the service and that this price is set to ensure that other, more sustainable methods of transport, remain attractive to users.

Vary charges applied to parking depending on user type. This is to take account of a user’s situation and support their needs, along with being a means to encourage certain behaviours.

Make revenues from parking available to support other transport options in order to deliver on overall objectives.

Support well-being and social inclusion

Design parking payments to make parking offers available to all.

Set and adjust Blue Badge parking provision over time based on the observed need.

A new Off-Street parking Order is proposed for the following reasons:

• To confirm the use of Osborne Street surface car park as a permit parking car park at any time. Permits, where available, will be charged at £750 per year. A permit will allow parking in a specified bay only. Licences that form part of nearby building tenancies will not be affected.
• New Schedules 7, 8, 9 and 10 are being introduced to the Order. This is to separate car parks by area and so make the Order more user friendly. Previously most public car parks have been listed in Schedule 1. Schedule 10 adds Convenience Fee charges to the Order. This concerns the convenience fee that customers will have when using the MiPermit Cashless Parking System.
• Technical changes are being proposed to the order to clarify the payment methods available in car parks, to update the tariffs following Notices of Variation made since the previous Off-Street Order was sealed, and to remove redundant Articles from the Order such as the removal of paper permits and confirmation of day and night charging times in some car parks.
• Changes are being made to the Interpretation and Definitions to introduce electric vehicles, electric vehicle charging place, electric vehicle charging point and electric vehicle car clubs.
• The charging times for the Victoria Esplanade and Willoughby car parks are being altered to match the advertised opening times of the car parks instead of the current situation where the charging times conclude before the advertised closing time for each car park.