Agenda item

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

            Councillor Jaffrey declared an interest in the following matter by reason of her having one of the current Disabled Persons’ spaces outside her home.

With reference to minute of meeting of the Committee of 1 September 2009 (Article 17 refers), there had now been circulated a new report by the Director of Enterprise, Planning and Infrastructure on the duties placed upon the Council as a result of the above-named legislation. 

The narrative went into a great deal of close analysis, of which the central import was that the new Act contained much to 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, there was an obligation to go back every two years to try again. 

The report now recommended a procedure for making contact with external agencies in this respect.  This was modelled on the approach taken by Edinburgh City Council and would take as its point of departure the distribution of hundreds of questionnaires to businesses throughout Aberdeen.  These questionnaires would clarify the implications and obligations involved, and the responses would allow the Council to have a much clearer picture of what it was dealing with in this respect. 

Moving to the on-street aspects of the new legislation, the fundamental significance here 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 bays, accessible to any other blue badge holders, but regulatory.

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. 

This meant that the Council would have to promote traffic orders to provide the authority for the new on-street spaces and the current report suggested that this change over be dealt with in a rolling programme in which a reasonable number of locations would be reported to Committee each cycle as part of the usual reports on small-scale traffic management.

This would of course be 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 Head of Legal and Democratic Services was of the view that this aspect of the new legislation was not really the stuff of traffic orders at all, and brought into disrepute the impartiality with which objections should be addressed. 

Also, each on-street bay (and indeed all off-street arrangements set up under that aspect of the legislation) would have to be marked and signed in conformity with the statutory specifications, which would entail an enormous administrative and financial burden.  Residents would have to be approached and a street-by-street audit would have to be carried out. 

The existing budget for all of this was £40,000.  This sum was sufficient to deal with the number of applications for on-street bays currently received annually, and did not cover off-street bays and car parks maintained by the Housing Department.  These were funded from a separate budget.  £40,000 was insufficient to allow the Council to carry out its duties outlined in the Disabled Persons’ Parking Places (Scotland) Act 2009, and it would be insufficient to meet either the demand for new parking places or the promotion of traffic orders to shift existing on-street spaces from advisory to regulatory, and also from individualised to public.  To date, no additional resources had been provided to carry out the duties set out in the Act and the mounting costs would place considerable pressure on the revenue budget.  Early estimates of the real impact of the work outlined in the report were such that costs as high as £550,000 were feared quite realistically.  Also, based on the figures given in the report, and assuming no new applications and no change in level of funding, the timescale to formalise the existing regime (again, to move it from advisory to regulatory and from individualised to public) would be in the order of 9-12 years.  This did not take into consideration existing off-street parking arrangements in car parks operated by the Housing Department, the number of which was unquantified at the time of writing. 

Also, the initial burden would be placed on the City Wardens as a great deal of the existing disabled persons’ spaces were in residential areas with very few other restrictions attracting obvious enforcement needs.  Finally, if supermarkets, etc. took up opportunities to enter into agreements with the Council, the wardens would have to turn their attention to parking bays in supermarket car parks, etc. which would result in more pressure in existing resources.

The Committee resolved:-

(i)         to reiterate its original view that, although some aspects of this legislation were well-intentioned and welcome, other aspects appeared to be misconceived, and likely to make things worse for people with disabilities rather than better;  and

(ii)        to approve the overall approach and recommended procedures in the circulated report, and to approve the first batch of locations for new on-street spaces for incorporation within a traffic order (as outlined in the report).