Workplace parking levy could meet barriers – Ian Swanson

IT’S an effective measure to cut pollution and congestion and encourage people to switch from car to public transport – or it’s an unfair car park tax which ­penalises motorists.

The idea of a Workplace Parking Levy is potentially almost as polarising as Brexit.

The SNP agreed with the Greens as part of their budget deal that councils across Scotland should be given the power to introduce such a levy if they wanted. Some authorities like Borders and Dumfries & Galloway have already ruled it out. But Edinburgh and Glasgow are keen to explore the possibility.

It has been branded the “poll tax on wheels”. The Tories have claimed tens of thousands of motorists will be “fleeced” for hundreds of pounds a year. Even Labour and the Liberal Democrats have criticised it – despite it being a UK Labour ­government which brought in the ­legislation allowing the levy in England, a Labour-controlled council which introduced the scheme in Nottingham, the only city currently to operate a WPL, and a Labour-Lib Dem coalition here in Scotland which wanted to allow a levy nearly 20 years ago.

Giving councils the right to introduce a Workplace Parking Levy was one of the earliest measures proposed under devolution. It was included, along with similar powers for road-user charging, in the first legislative programme announced by Donald Dewar in June 1999 and put before the Scottish Parliament in the first ­Transport Bill the following year.

The then Transport Minister Sarah Boyack, who was Labour MSP for Edinburgh Central, was eventually forced to drop the WPL part of the Bill after business lobbied against it.

The idea, however, never went away and Edinburgh Labour’s manifesto for the 2017 local elections included a promise to campaign for the power to introduce a tax on workplace parking spaces.

Although the current proposal only emerged publicly as part of a last-minute deal, hours before the budget vote, insiders say the parking levy was one of the early concessions made by the SNP in its talks with the Greens – even before the tourist tax.

But when SNP ministers have been challenged over the policy, they have been notably reluctant to defend it on its merits or talk about what it could achieve, preferring simply to point out that, as a minority government, they had to do a deal with somebody to get their budget through and the Greens were the only ones who were prepared to talk.

The WPL power is to be introduced as an amendment to the Transport Bill currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament. The wording of that amendment has yet to be agreed – and that could be a source of some concern to supporters of the measure in case the SNP takes fright at the ferocity of the opposition attacks and attempts to hedge the measure with qualifications and limits.

The agreement reached between the SNP and the Greens already says hospitals and other NHS sites will be exempt. The rest of the details of any scheme are supposed to be left to local authorities to decide if and when they choose to introduce a levy. But there is already pressure to add teachers to the exempt category and there could be other attempts to restrict the levy.

It is not clear when a WPL might be introduced, but whether it is in force or still pending, it is almost certain to be a big issue when it comes to the next council elections in 2022.