WIRRAL Council has provided an update on its plans to bring in a new parking charges policy later this year. This comes as the local authority said it was facing a £300k funding gap in parking and “significant challenges this year” with its overall budget.

At an environment and transport committee meeting on July 15, a budget report was brought forward which said a parking charging policy was needed later this year to help balance the local authority’s budget and close the shortfall. The issue of parking charges has previously been controversial.

During a discussion of the report, director of neighbourhoods, Jason Gooding, said information would be coming to committee later in the year about how the council uses parking resources as well as pressures in parking budgets. He said there was a difference in what on street and off street parking income could be used for and officers would present “a sensible, sustainable way forward.”

He said the local authority’s subsidised parking budget was becoming more important due to pressures from “uncontrollable” rises in demand, particularly in adults and children’s services that are “pushing up costs.”

The local authority previously proposed bringing in hugely controversial parking charges across areas like New Brighton, West Kirby, and Bromborough but these were dropped in 2022 after Labour pulled support. Those plans would have brought £1m into the local authority but didn’t go ahead after the threat of a legal challenge.

That policy had faced opposition from Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors but no specific concerns were raised by either party about the proposed policy at the meeting. Since 2022, the council has been developing a separate parking strategy for the borough with a number of changes to improve services as well as fluctuating prices for car parks with proposals to help raise an extra £15.4m for the local authority.

Mr Gooding said: “I want to provide some reassurance to members that we are taking this very seriously and even though perhaps the pressures in neighbourhoods don’t look so severe as they might in other parts of the authority, the fact that we have more control over them (…) I think it puts the special responsibility on us to play as much of a part as we can.”

In response, chair of the committee Cllr Liz Grey said the council had “to balance the books one way or another” and called for councillors to avoid “emotive rhetoric and clichés like cash cow and war on cars.”

To officers, she said: “You’ve highlighted a particularly challenging situation that we are heading into and it’s not sustainable that we can just keep dipping into reserves and things in sorting stuff out.

“We have to have a more sustainable long term way of addressing these problems and it would be good if we could all be a bit more grown up and work together when it comes to dealing with that and not politicise it.”

Cllr Grey added: “We are going to have to make very difficult choices about what we want to do with other libraries and leisure services and various other things if we don’t stop subsidising car parking to the tune of £300,000 a year.”