Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

A popular call that always falls on deaf ears

It’s a call that pops up every couple of years here in South Shields and other parts of South Tyneside, the popular cry that we don’t shop here because it’s too expensive to park our car, we’d rather drive to Washington Galleries or the Metro Centre to buy a boatful of goods and park for free. Along with the parking charges is the concern that we have insufficient variety of shops in South Shields town centre, that things have quietly gone downhill since the demise of Binns and that we were probably expecting rather more than we got when Debenhams announced that they would be opening in Waterloo Square.

There is much to be said and thought about from these charges, there can be no doubt that place such as Washington, Dalton Park, the Royal Quays, and the Metro Centre do very well and attract thousands of visitors to a wide variety of shopping outlets, and free parking is one of the draws, yet we could have it in South Shields town centre too. On my visit to Ripon I found that the town centre was very busy, they get their fair share of tourists to the ancient market square and the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Wilfred and the car parks were full, mainly of shoppers parking for free! Yet everyone had to buy a parking ticket at the machine (see graphic.) Notices in the car parks and on the reverse of the ticket let you know that shoppers can enjoy two hours of free parking by using selected town centre shops.

The system works like this;

there is a sliding scale of parking charges starting at 50p for the first hour, 80p for the first two hours and then rising steeply to around £4 for all day, the machine provides a ticket in two parts, one to display in your car, the other to be taken to a participating shop. At the shop, if you spend more than £5 you get 80p (two hours worth of parking) refunded. In essence the motorist, the shop, and the local council are all sharing this 80p, except two of them will earn some interest or profit on it. So, if we had such a scheme in South Tyneside or South Shields town centre we would need to sign up as many large retailers as possible, Asda, Woolworths, Marks and Spencer, HMV, Superdrug etc. and they would be encouraged to submit part two of the parking ticket to the council on a monthly basis to claim their reimbursement. The council would have earned a little interest through holding on to the parking fees over the month and the retailers would be guaranteed custom from people expecting to spend more than £5 each.

As an added advantage other retailers would be more encouraged to come to the town knowing that shoppers would be happier to spend their money here rather than going elsewhere, this would drive more revenue to the local council via business ratings.

We would of course need to restructure our parking fees to ensure that the first couple of hours were by far the cheapest, and we could include the sea front car parks too, revenue should not be lost from longer term parking as only the first two hours would be refunded by retailers.

I think South Tyneside Council should give this scheme some serious consideration as part of it’s moves to encourage economic regeneration and to meet the aspirations of local shoppers and retailers.

Let’s not think of why we CAN NOT do it, let’s think of how we CAN do it!

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