‘Car parking charges in Horsham are competitive’

In response to the recent West Sussex County Times article regarding the Council’s car park income and how this money is utilised.

Public anger over £4 million raked in by Horsham council from car parking

The tariffs charged in all car parks are benchmarked against neighbouring towns and communities so as to be competitive.

Multi storey car parks are expensive to maintain but are an efficient use of space in a town.

District councils are not profit-making organisations and any surplus funds are redirected to other council services.

These other services include our parks and countryside facilities, the housing and community development work we do, and our highly utilised leisure services. It also helps keep our overall Council Tax at one of the lowest levels in West Sussex.

For car parks specifically, we have just invested £8.3m in Piries Place, and so far £1m to improve the car parks across our rural towns.

We are also improving the service by the introduction of more Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems in Swan Walk, the Forum and Hurst road car parks.

There continues to be a rolling program across rural car parks to maintain and upgrade them – putting in electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure for example.

With regard to the Forum car park in Horsham: there is a specific problem that is highlighted with the lifts, this is an ongoing problem.

I apologise that it has not yet been fixed. This is despite pursuing a number of solutions with the lift contractors to fix the problem but it still has not been resolved.

I fully understand the inconvenience this causes the users of this car park and we are working to find a permanent solution to this problem area.