So a car parking levy is going to pay for the new tram line in West Yorkshire? No wonder office workers would rather stay at home - David Behrens
Did you have a good journey into work yesterday? Of course you didn’t. There are only two types of commute available in the North of England: awful and near-apocalyptic.
It doesn’t matter whether you go by road or rail; if the strikes and points failures don’t catch you out, the temporary traffic lights will. No wonder nearly half of us choose to stay in our living rooms whenever we can – mouse in one hand, spoonful of Weetabix in the other. The latest government estimate puts the figure of home workers at 44 per cent – and when did a government ever underestimate anything?
If you do still drive to the office, the benefits are being able to park on the doorstep and not have to walk the last half mile in the rain. But not for much longer.
On Wednesday came the news that city centre workers in Leeds may have to take a £2,000 pay cut if they want to keep their parking spaces. Naturally the council didn’t phrase it in those terms. They wouldn’t, would they? But that’s what their plan to raise the cash for West Yorkshire’s proposed new tram line amounts to.
What’s that you say? You thought the money was coming from the Government? Understandable you should think so, since Rachel Reeves made a fuss of promising £2bn four months ago. But the small print requires that 15 to 20 per cent of the money for any ‘mass transit system’ must come from local sources – and the council’s Big Idea to raise its share is to tax precisely the people who will never use it.
It wants to do this through something known as the Workplace Parking Levy, a mechanism that makes ULEZ zones seem like a street party. Half a dozen cities have looked at imposing these levies but just one, Nottingham, has actually done so and it charges little more than a quarter of the fee proposed in Leeds.
It works like this: any company with a car park of more than 10 spaces will have to pay £2,080 a year for each space, with the money typically taken from the employee to whom it is allocated. Only disabled spaces and hospital car parks will be exempt.
You can imagine how this went down in Nottingham. Around eight in 10 employers passed the charges on to their staff; others simply declared their car parks closed. As a result, the scheme brought in a fraction of the money the council anticipated and succeeded only in putting everyone’s backs up. This was 13 years ago, incidentally; the fact that no other council has followed suit tells its own story.
In West Yorkshire the idea is to build a tram that connects the centres of Leeds and Bradford, but only workers in Leeds are being asked to help fund it – presumably because that’s where more people want to work. But not for much longer if the city prices itself out of the market.
Of course, free office parking is a perk and an increasingly rare one. At the insistence of city planners, office blocks today are built with little or no on-site parking and the people who work there have to pay for public spaces, or slum it on the train. To them the levy will make little difference. But the hostility local government directs at drivers diminishes the attraction of city life for all workers and their employers. Who wouldn’t prefer to earn £2,000 more or pay lower business rates?
And it’s all very well to point to the benefits of a new tram system but that won’t arrive until at least the mid-2030s, with most of the system even further down the line. The levy, on the other hand, could be imposed in 18 months if the council gets its way. So workers are being asked to pay upfront for benefits they won’t see in their working lives. At least in Nottingham they built the tram system before they imposed the levy.
In the meantime, public transport in West Yorkshire remains a festering sore. Leeds, as is well known, is the largest city in Europe without some sort of light rail system; its train station is among our most congested and only this week it was reported that many women and minorities went out of their way to avoid the network because they didn’t feel safe on board. It would be nice to sort some of that out first.
The Leeds Business Improvement District says the levy has caught many of its members off guard. Indeed, a tucked-away council survey to gauge reaction has only a week left to run... so if you don’t like it you’d better say so quickly.
Meanwhile, the council – whose job is to attract people to Leeds, not turn them away – has tried to brush off criticism by pointing to an earlier consultation in which three-quarters of people supported the idea of a tram network. Ah, but that was before they knew they’d be paying for it themselves.