Council earned over £5.2million from car parks over two years

According to Freedom of Information requests by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Doncaster Council spent £4.8million over the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years running the 14 city car parks it owns.

The figures show the authorities car parks will cover their own costs overall, with the Mayor of Doncaster adding the money made helps fund other vital council services.

New Markets Car Park was the Council’s biggest earner. It brought in over £1m in 2024/25 and over £900k the year before.

Comparatively, the lowest earner was the Council’s Irish Club car park – earning £1,341 over the two years.

Mayor of Doncaster Ros Jones said: “City of Doncaster Council is committed to making sure that residents and visitors alike can enjoy all that our city has to offer as a great place to live, visit and work. Having convenient access to well-maintained car parks is obviously key to this and we’re pleased to see that usage of these sites has increased healthily over the past year, as more and more people have been traveling into Doncaster.

“In addition to improving access into and around Doncaster, the revenue from these council-owned car parks supports vital frontline services such as social care and bin collections.

“We therefore hope that the public will continue to use these sites as they frequent Doncaster’s amazing businesses, take advantage of its fantastic leisure and culture offer, and attend its exciting events.”

In 2023/24, the expenditure for authority car parks exceeded gross income by £38,000. It cost the council £2.504m to run its 14 sites, generating an income of £2.466m.

Car park expenditure can largely be attributed to repairs, maintenance, enforcement and administrative / accountancy charges.

A “one-off” accountancy charge in 2023/24 is said to be the reason for the higher costs that year. The cost was owed to “depreciation”, following a valuation change to one of the car parking sites.

In 2023/24, administrative costs for council owned car parks were £449k – significantly higher than the £192k the following year.

2024/25 saw Doncaster Council bring in £2.8m from its car parks, exceeding the £2.3m cost to run them.

According to the data, the biggest cost associated with council owned car parks is staffing.

Staffing car parks cost the authority £594k in 2023/24 and £689k in 2024/25.