Minutes:
DECLARATION OF INTEREST
CouncillorsBoulton, Clark, Dean and Stewart declared an interest in the following article by virtue of their membership of NESTRANS, but did not consider it necessary to withdraw from the meeting. Also, Councillor Fletcher declared a pecuniary interest vis-à-vis his position as an office holder in COSLA, but, again, did not consider it necessary to withdraw from the meeting.
The Interim Director of Corporate Governance and the Director of Enterprise, Planning and Infrastructure had submitted a joint report dealing with the implications for the Council of the above legislation, which had received Royal Assent on 1 April this year and would come into operation on 1 October.
The narrative went into a great deal of close analysis, of which the central import was that the new Act contained much that was welcome but other aspects that were of considerable concern.
First of all, the legislation obliged local authorities to do something which Aberdeen City Council had actually done of its own accord several years ago, namely, inviting the owners of private off-street car parking areas (most obviously supermarkets and large shops) to consider allowing the Council to manage blue badge parking bays in those areas by including them in off-street car parking legislation, with the effect of making them enforceable by the City Wardens.
The Council had done this with the John Lewis car park, which had been given over exclusively to blue badge holders. John Lewis had invited the Council to manage the area by putting it into the off-street traffic order. Unfortunately, the car park had been obliterated subsequently in the course of road realignment.
Now, under the new Act, every local authority was obliged to approach not only major supermarkets and large shops but any owner of off-street car parking areas in which disabled spaces had been established.
Even if the Council’s invitation was turned down - which was perhaps fairly unlikely in most cases – there was an obligation to go back every two years to try again. The report enthused over this most positive aspect of the new legislation.
On the other hand, the on-street aspects were quite troubling. Here, the fundamental significance was an alteration in the current position vis-à-vis the familiar individualised (but advisory) bays established outside the homes of people with disabilities. Aberdeen City Council had around 1,300 of these, but they were common in other cities and towns throughout Scotland. The new legislation would actively outlaw such bays in their current form.
In other words, it would be illegal to continue to have advisory individualised bays; instead, there would be an obligation to replace them with non-individualised regulatory bays, accessible to any blue badge holder.
An individual resident would still be the precipitant of the process to establish a bay. But he or she would not have privileged or individualised access to it once it had been established.
Of course this meant that the Council would have to promote traffic orders to provide the authority for the new on-street spaces. In reality, many orders a year would probably be necessary.
This would be extremely cumbersome, and would also beg questions about how realistically autonomous the Council would be able to claim to be if it had to hear statutory objections to orders. Broadly speaking, the report concluded that this was not really the stuff of traffic orders, and brought into disrepute the impartiality with which objections should be addressed.
Also, each on-street bay would have to be marked and signed in conformity with the legislation (and associated statutory instruments) which would entail an enormous administrative and financial burden. The point here was that the 1,300 spaces established throughout the city on an advisory basis at the moment were all insufficient in terms of their markings and signs, and so all of those markings and signs would have to be changed in an extensive audit of existing arrangements. An early estimate of the financial burden for on-street aspects alone – attributable to next year’s budgets – was £400,000.
The off-street aspect – approaching supermarkets, etc. – remained an unknown quantity. Needless to say, none of this expenditure would be covered by existing resources.
The Committee resolved:-
(i) that the Council’s obligations under the legislation be pursued as outlined in the report, with a further report back in October, 2009;
(ii) that a £15,000 saving previously allocated to on-street disabled parking for 2009/2010 (ie the proposed introduction of charges for providing advisory on-street bays) be made not by introducing charges but by reducing the budget for making the provision, with the effect that, when funds had been used up for the current year, subsequent applicants would then have to wait until further finance became available; and
(iii) that Aberdeen City Council write to the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change at Holyrood, and also to COSLA, NESTRANS and SCOTS (the Society of Chief Officers for Transportation in Scotland), outlining its serious concern about this situation, calling for significant financial support to enable local authorities to deal with their new obligations, and exploring lines of enquiry that could ameliorate some of the worst difficulties now being confronted.