Edinburgh traffic: Call to revisit Workplace Parking Levy is thrown out

Councillors last year rejected a scheme which would have imposed an annual levy of around £650 per space on parking spaces provided by employers for their staff.

It would have been up to the employers to decide whether to pass on the charge to their employees and it could have brought in up to £12 million a year, but there were concerns it would hit low-paid workers and lead to increased parking in nearby residential streets.

Edinburgh councillors have rejected calls to revisit a Workplace Parking Levy

Green councillors wanted to revisit the proposals to help reach the council's target of cutting car kilometres in the Capital by 30 per cent by 2030.

And at Thursday’s transport committee, they pointed to a report by officers showing other powers to reduce car use were limited, with regulations still not in place to allow councils to introduce road user charging.

Green councillor Chas Booth said an Audit Scotland report had highlighted the Scottish Government failure to meet its car kilometre targets, partly due to a lack of political leadership. He said that failure was not just at Scottish Government level.

"It's absolutely clear the responsibility for achieving that car kilometre target lies both at Scottish Government level and here at council level as well. We can’t do it unless they give us all the powers, but we should be using the powers we already have.

"It's absolutely clear to me the objection to proceeding with a WPL was largely based on the impact that displacement parking would have and on the impact on certain group of workers, in particular shift workers, for whom there is often no opportunity to take public transport, and low income workers.

"It has been made clear in correspondence that we and the council have had with Transport Scotland that it is open to us to design a scheme that excludes people on certain shift patterns or workers on certain incomes.

"It is also open to us to design a scheme that is not introduced in areas where there is no existing parking restrictions in order to ensure we are not creating a problem of parking displacement."

He said he was not proposing to give a green light to a WPL straight away, but to launch a dialogue with trade unions and others on designing a scheme. "In the context of a climate crisis we cannot sit on our hands."

SNP transport spokesman Danny Aston said he regretted the previous decision not to go ahead with a WPL.

"We have heard time and time again from senior transport officers that if we are to meet our target of reducing car kilometres by 30 per cent by 2030 then we need additional demand management tools such as WPL or some sort of road user or congestion charging. We don't get there if we don't have one of those things."

But Labour transport convener Stephen Jenkinson said he did not believe a WPL would achieve what others claimed.

He said: "I've never been convinced by the WPL for a number of reasons. I believe it's a poorly drafted bit of legislation; and it's pre-Covid legislation - people's work habits have changed." He said it was not a priority for him, the council administration, his party or his trade union.

"The legislation as drafted does not stop the tax being passed onto the worker - that's the thing that in my view pretty much kills the policy stone dead because you end up penalising people who have to travel to work to deal with shift work or unsociable hours when unfortunately public transport isn't a viable option."

Lib Dem group leader Kevin Lang said the WPL had been rejected because councillors did not think it was going to work.

"It was going to have a whole range of exemptions and there was genuine doubt as to how much of a difference it was going to make - and we were going to see significant displacement parking from commercial sites onto residential streets. Ultimately I came to the conclusion, as did my group, that it was a bad scheme."

And he said the lack of powers to reduce car use was down to the Scottish Government, not the council. "When it comes to delivering the necessary mechanisms that would give local authorities the power to introduce road user charging if they wanted, if there is blame to be hurled about it is at the national level, not local authority level."

But Tory group leader Iain Whyte dismissed talk of the council bringing in congestion charging - rejected in Edinburgh in a referendum in 2005 - as "pie in the sky”.

He said: "If we are ever to have road user charging or pay per mile to tax car use instead of the current road fund licence or fuel duty, then it probably has to be done at a national level to make it far across the whole country.

"So this is pie in the sky the council talking about this - and we know from the past it would be a very unpopular policy with people in Edinburgh.

"I get there are those who love to say 'Let's put a barrier round Edinburgh and not allow anyone in from outside, but those are people who come here to work and make our economy grow, so we have to think about that too.".