Newpaper Articles - Waltham Forest have been in the news before....

Had a look around for some articles on the Guardian site (happened to be on there, will look in other papers too!) and found some really interesting ones. Take a look at the new links to the left - Waltham Forest get a mention for the massive hike in permit costs last year.

Did you know that in some areas all residents in the Zones get 200 hours of free visitor parking? Seems some councils are interested in their residents well being and others are only interested in the cash....

There is an email address for Rupert Jones who wrote the 2007 article - I'm happy to drop him a line and see if he would like to follow up with a piece on how Waltham Forest are now treating us.... Comments?

from the Muswell Hill 2001 article.....
"In Enfield, north London, a survey was sent to households. All people who declared that there was a local parking problem were considered to be in favour of a CPZ. In neighbouring Haringey, a survey was so confusing that, after a critical report from the district auditor and legal threats from local residents, the council decided to scrap an existing CPZ in the Bounds Green neighbourhood" (who is our district auditor? Should we find out?)

"Brophy, in Muswell Hill, recalls: "We were horrified when we found documents which showed that the council had been planning the CPZs for five years without telling anyone. They'd even worked out how much paint they needed to put on the roads and made extensive forecasts of how much profit they would make. It destroyed our faith in the council." (I think that an FOI request for this sort of thing is in order)

from the stealth tax 2007 article - we get a mention!
"This week, residents of the London borough of Waltham Forest were hit with a 50% increase in the price of their annual parking permits, and a trebling in the cost of visitor permits. Until Monday, it cost £30 a year for a resident living in a controlled area to park their car in the street; now it is £45. Meanwhile, the price of a book of 10 five-hour visitor permits has jumped from £7 to £21. That's £4.20 for one day's parking (two five-hour permits) - which adds up to a lot if, say, your mum regularly drives over to babysit while you are at work, or you regularly have tradespeople in.
A council spokesman says this is the first rise in permit costs for two years, and adds: "The vast majority of people are not covered by CPZs. The only people who are going to object to it are the people who live in those areas." So that makes it all right, then."

"But even if you don't own a car, if you live in a CPZ, you will usually still have to buy visitor permits. In some areas, less well-off residents say it means they have to ask the doctor and other callers to visit in the evening, after the restrictions have ended.

Contrast the approaches of Waltham Forest and Islington (which charges £18 for a book of 10 three-hour vouchers) with that of Sutton in Surrey, where all households within a CPZ are entitled to 200 hours of free visitor parking per year. And in Salisbury, Wiltshire, daily visitor vouchers cost just 20p each."