Tempers fray as Edinburgh councillors debate Sunday parking charges

City centre parking charges will apply from 12.30pm until 6.30pm

TEMPERS frayed as councillors clashed on plans to introduce Sunday parking charges in the city centre.

Tory transport spokesman Nick Cook accused the SNP-Labour administration of ignoring public views on the proposals and claimed it fed public cynicism about politics.

But transport convener Lesley Macinnes hit back, claiming the Tories were trying to stop progress.

The two were involved in angry exchanges as the council’s transport and environment committee gave the go-ahead for the charges which will apply 12.30-6.30pm.

Cllr Cook said 91 per cent of those who responded to a consultation on the proposal were opposed to the move and called for the proposals to be paused..

He said the response should provide “a dose of humility” to the administration, but instead it was pressing ahead.

“It smacks of council knows best,” he said.

“We must be spending tens of thousands of pounds on public consultations and they seem to have no effect on the policy direction.

“There is a huge democratic deficit emerging and it makes me really uncomfortable.

“In any form of consultation over last four or five years there has always been a vigorous level of objection to introducing Sunday parking charges in this city.

“It has never been taken on board by this administration, who seem intent to progress with it anyway.

“If we have a response to a statutory consultation which 91 per cent opposed to what is being suggested and you decide to set aside these objections I think that sends precisely the wrong message to people as to why they should even bother to go out and vote.

“People have a little less faith in us every time we ignore them.”

He claimed the charges were unfair to people travelling into church.

“Many people who travel into city churches are older and are likely to be on fixed income. It costs £4.60 an hour to park in the city centre. This will disproportionately affect these people. It’s absolutely shameful.”

Labour backbencher Scott Arthur noted the starting time for the charges had been moved to 12.30pm to accommodate church services.

But he said: “Why don’t we have the same charging times each day but give those establishments some sort of permit to enable them to park during service? Then we could extend the same courtesy to people going to the mosque or the synagogue.

“Otherwise we seem to be cutting some slack to Christian community, of which I’m part, but not in a way which is really satisfied them at the end of the day. It seems no-one is happy with this solution.”

Green councillor Claire Miller said Cllr Cook should understand objecting to traffic orders was not the same as a referendum. “The reason fundamentally we have to change the way we charge for parking is we have to modernise our city,” she said.

And she added: “To bring the faith community into this as if churchgoers on a Sunday have a monopoly on this is really disrespectful to other faith groups who participate in religious services on other days of the week.

“I have never received a complaint from anybody who attends the mosque at the end of my street for Friday prayers and paying to park, which they do every week.”

Cllr Macinnes accused the Tories accused the Tories of delaying tactics.

“It is becoming a very familiar reaction to any degree of progress,” she said.

And on the claim the administration was ignoring the views of the public, she told Cllr Cook: “If you bother to lift your head and look at the wider panoply of transport policies you will see that what we have done around the city centre transformation plans and the tram extension design has involved a phenomenal amount of community engagement and it has produced changes.

“We have gone out with proposals and come back with changes based on that community input.

“To lay the charge that this administration does not listen to the people of Edinburgh is something I find frankly offensive.”