From July 31, Hertsmere Borough Council is cutting one-hour free parking in front of the shops in Watling Street, Radlett, to half-an-hour and introducing a charge of 20 pence for an hour in an attempt to speed up the turnover of cars.

It is obvious this idea has not been clearly thought through.

Half-an-hour is not long enough for Radlett’s large population of elderly residents, or parents with small children or pushchairs, to visit virtually any shop in Radlett.

It will merely have the effect of forcing almost everybody to pay the 20 pence for an hour and wipe out the speeding up of turnover of cars.

The 20 pence charge will almost certainly increase in the next year or two, which will deter people from visiting our shops and force closures, as predicted in 2005, when similar increases were last rejected.

Hertsmere Borough Council is keeping the one-hour free in Newberrries car park to encourage more shoppers to use it and reduce the amount of traffic backing up in front of the war memorial and across the roundabout at the bottom of Shenley Hill, because of people waiting for spaces in the service road.

This problem, which was anticipated at the inception of the CPZ scheme, is actually nothing like as bad as it is often suggested.

From July 31, the borough council is also imposing a £15 administration charge on the issue of residents’ parking permits, which have been free since the introduction of the CPZ scheme in 1995, to recoup the costs hitherto paid by the borough.

To expect people to pay to park outside their homes in a village in Hertfordshire, not a suburb of London, is unacceptable.

A number of the roads in Rad-lett’s CPZ zone have parking restrictions between 2pm and 3pm to prevent people from parking all day to go to London. This means anybody else from Radlett or elsewhere, can park free of charge, using our valuable parking spaces, which we will have paid for. This is blatantly unfair.

It would appear nobody seems to want to take responsibility for admitting they got it wrong.

Hertsmere Borough Council intends to continue throwing money down the drain by issuing permits annually, while residents who live in the conservation area within the CPZ zone, whose houses were built long before most people had cars, are lumbered with subsiding free parking for everybody else, which cannot be right.

The parish council appears to be in two minds as to whether it agrees with these charges and does not seem to have the power to recommend the overturning of the decision.

What is clear is that the public consultation was a sham and a waste of time and money because none of the shopkeepers, shoppers or residents knew anything about the proposed increases at the beginning of April when the consultation apparently ended.

I brought it to their attention at this time and all were against it.

Furthermore, my own public consultation with members of the public and residents in the CPZ zone since April has revealed nobody is in favour of these unfair and outrageous changes.

Hertsmere Borough Council clearly needs to have a rethink.

Stephen Oakes-Monger
Park Road, Radlett