We recently found out that the council had rushed through a decision to install Pay and Display (P&D) machines in three roads around Hornchurch Town Centre.

Fairkytes Avenue – (next to the Lidl car park where parking is currently free) 9 spaces

Fentiman Way (next to the council car park)  17 spaces

Mavis Grove – 3 spaces

The decision to install these and increase the P&D ‘On Street’ parking was taken as an urgent emergency decision, which allowed the council to rush these plans through the system without consulting your local ward councillors, without consulting the residents and bypassing the normal checks and measures that normal changes go through.  This even stopped your local councillors from ‘Calling in’ the plans which means they are given great scrutiny.

In total a further 29 car parking spaces are to be made available that benefit from the free 1 hour parking that has been rolled out from 3rd August for on street P&D parking during the Covid19 recovery phase.

Although normally a welcome addition, I believe these parking spaces are being installed as a knee jerk reaction from leader of the council after he made a statement reporting that he was doing everything in his power to help the people and businesses by giving away a free hour parking in the on-street parking facilities.

There are over 1000 on street P&D spaces across Havering (please do not confuse these with car park parking)  – I pointed out to the leader that there were only a handful of on street P&D parking spots in Hornchurch Town Centre – where as there were over 200 in Romford.

I had asked for him to give back the free half hour parking in Hornchurch as that would have a greater helpful effect on the recovery of the businesses in the area and encourage people to use the car parks (which were mostly empty since the loss of the free parking). He has flatly refused to answer my request.

I have been told that this is an emergency test running from 6-18 Months.

Instead of returning what was wrongly (maliciously?) taken from Hornchurch and Upminster, these changes are rushed through and with a poor choice of location.

We will be following this up.