Public has until July to answer consultation
A police officer tickets a car parked in the Steelyard, Bathgate in the winter of 2020. West Lothian council is set to assume control of parking enforcement(Image: Police Scotland)
West Lothian has launched a county-wide consultation on plans to introduce parking charges.
Councillors across the nine wards which cover the county are being briefed on the questionnaire which will form the basis of the plan for parking charges.
Roads officers hope to take the proposal to Holyrood later this year and it is likely it will be mid way through 2028 when the charges come into force.
Details including how the charges will be enforced have yet to be worked out, but the council will assume control of public parking and the levying of fixed penalties from Police Scotland.
The council has two options: either collect fines through its own directly employed wardens or hire an outside contractor to police the system, such as Edinburgh does.
In a report to local area committees this week Gordon Brown the council’s Roads and Transportation Manager said: “All nine Local Area Committees will be consulted detailing progress, direction and timescales to provide a consistent understanding of the work involved to introduce Decriminalised Parking Enforcement (DPE) and to collate and incorporate any local comments into the process.”
DPE is a system where the responsibility for enforcing parking regulations is transferred from the police to local authorities. The local authority retains the income generated from parking penalties to finance parking enforcement and other activities.
It is a civil enforcement system, meaning that penalties are collected by the local authority and not passed to the central government. Parking offences are no longer treated as criminal but civil, hence the name.
Currently in Scotland there are 23 Local Authorities that operate a DPE regime of parking enforcement and of these there are 16 that operate on street car parking charging and 20 that operate off street car parking charging. By charging minimal amounts for car parking, councils can use this to improve the road network and provide staff to enforce DPE powers.
Mr Brown told councillors: “The enforcement of parking restrictions and parking areas improves road safety for all road users.”
He added: “The implementation of DPE in Scotland involves a legal process that can take around two years to complete. The process would require the council to submit an application and business case to Transport Scotland for consideration and Ministerial approval.”
Answering a question from Councillor Moira McKee-Shemilt on Livingston South Local area Committee Mr Brown said that the results of the consultation would be presented to the late summer meeting of the Environment and Sustainability PDSP.
Roads officers hope to present their case to Holyrood by the end of the year. The timeline suggests that DPE could come into force 18 months later- the summer of 2028 .
The consultation asks the public for its views on where parking charges should be levied and where and indicative levels of hourly charges.
Mr Brown stressed that detailed proposals would be drawn up on the basis of the responses, and that no decisions on charging levels or any specific details of the scheme have yet been made.
As the Local Democracy Reporting Service has previously highlighted the projected strategy would be self financing and predicted that around 6,000 penalty charges would be issued annually.
The consultation launched on Monday and will run until 3 July. Paper copies of the questions can be obtained by attending at council offices.
To respond to the consultation online go to: https://www.westlothian.gov.uk/article/88805/Decriminalised-Parking-Enforcement-Consultation.
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