Transport Insights

A minister has told us all not to hold our breath waiting for the government to follow up on the issue of pavement parking outside London, following a consultation that closed five years ago.

LibDem Helen Maguire, who happens to be my MP, put down a parliamentary question:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what her planned timeline is for publishing the new research on the extent and impact of pavement parking.

Minister for local transport Simon Lightwood once again said that it is still thinking about the issue, fourteen months after coming to power:

The Department has been considering all the views expressed in response to the 2020 pavement parking consultation and is currently working through the policy options and the appropriate means of delivering them. We will announce the next steps and publish our formal response as soon as possible. The new research announced last week will not delay this; my officials are finalising its terms now. The Department will aim to publish within 12 weeks of agreeing final outputs, per Government Social Research protocols. Local authorities can make use of existing powers to manage pavement parking.

The last sentence is the key one for me, seeking to play down the importance of any new policy options, but “as soon as possible” is clearly untrue as they are undoubtedly stalling.

I’ve noted before that the previous roads minister, Lilian Greenwood, promised twice to do something about the issue “very soon” and may have been moved because she appeared to keen to do so.

The image is from the Tories’ 2020 consultation, which very definitely put forward policy proposals, rather than just asking people what they think in general about the issue.