Insufficient Quality

Peter Callow's vision of how the Church Street/Cookson Street junction used to look.

I’m going to do a bit of a Gazette here and and repeat some of a story I wrote the other day about car parking in Blackpool and follow it on with some comments about the latest mind blowing Council initiative! (Wow-whee!)

It appears that councillors are wanting to restore the Church Street/Cookson Street junction (the site of the Caunce Street car park) to it’s former glory, prior to the old pub there being obliterated.

It was stated, and I quote, “Councillors agreed to an enforcement notice being issued against the operators of the facility at the north east corner of Church Street and Cookson Street” because A REPORT deemed that “its appearance was of “insufficient quality” to meet policies to preserve the look of the area”.

I happen to think Peter Callow’s choice of tie is of insufficient quality to be found in a fucking charity shop, but Christ, it’s hardly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon round there, is it? Has it ever been nice? Why would a report be commissioned if the Council didn’t have an agenda? Hmm..

I think the Council have targetted this car park because they know that if people park there – and they do because it’s full every day – they can’t be ticketed by one of their super efficient gestapo. Apparently catching people only 1 or 2 minutes over their ticket time banks the Council £500,000 per year. They call it tough, I call it fucking cynical, unfair tax grabbing. They reckon 50,000 people a year are ticketed in Blackpool – that’s over 30% of the people in the town. Good job it’s not a criminal offence, else we’d all be in jail by now.

Today it was announced that traffic wardens would be lenient if motorists were “a few” minutes late. Yep, you read that right: traffic warden and lenient in the same sentence. It’s worth noting that “a few” minutes has not been explicitly defined, so essentially it’s no different to how it was. It’s up to the traffic warden. They’ll still be paid their commission for ticketing someone.

This isn’t a new scheme either. In fact about a year ago it was introduced in Westminster and no doubt other places too. There is always a trade off though, isn’t there? Yep, the Council are increasing the cost of parking across the board. It’s already cynically expensive and now it is to be even more so.

Jobsworth-in-Chief, Julian Kearsley, said that even though there has been a 12% increase in cars parking in town this didn’t make up the shortfall in fines received. Yeah, this means they all parked in the Caunce Street car park because it’s 30%  of the price of most Council operated, gestapo inhabited car parks.

What it did look like before the car park

I personally hate traffic wardens anyway. I had a small amount of respect when they were operated by the Police because some of them were fair. I believe they should not have targets, should not be incentivised to give out tickets or even better should be redeployed cleaning the streets of this dirty town.

I really wish the Council would stop this constant bombardment of nannying and bullying of anyone that owns anything from which a “tax” can be bled and focus on improving the place with the big wallet that they already have. It’s like having an old Labour council. Tax and spend, tax and spend.

Fines should be a punishment, not a source of revenue that can be milked.

Here is a suggestion, for free.

Sack most of the traffic wardens, add barriers to car parks where you get a ticket, you can stay as long as you want and you pay when you leave. That surely has to be a cost saving and means people can be assured they wont come back to their car to see a jobsworth with his stupid camera hawking around like a paparazzo.

The question is, is the Council really bothered about people, or does it only care about serving its coffers to pay for their first class jollies ?