My Lords, I put my name to this amendment, although it is not shown here. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, is in another meeting in your Lordships’ House and is unable to be here today. He has asked me to move this amendment, which stands in his name, and I am of course very happy to do so; first, because I have some experience of the issue but secondly because the amendment repeats very closely the wording of the Private Member’s Bill introduced by my honourable friend Martin Horwood in the other place, which is supported by all parties including Plaid Cymru and the Greens. I am very pleased to be able to move it.
On the last amendment, I rehearsed at some length my experience of parking in a London borough and the nature of the ward that I represented in that borough. Coincidentally, the year of my election was the year that Greater London acquired the power to ban pavement parking—for simplicity’s sake in this discussion, I will simply refer to pavement parking, because that is the way it is most easily understood
and that is what it is about. As a result, pavement parking has been illegal for some years now throughout Greater London except where a street is specifically exempted from that ban.
I believe, certainly, in my own borough—a number of roads in what used to be my ward had to be so exempted, or nobody would have moved in them—the exemptions are strictly controlled. Nearly all of the rest of the country is not in that fortunate position. Although Exeter and Worcester have bans, the rest do not. It is an inconsistent situation throughout the country. One of the purposes of the amendment and my honourable friend’s Private Member’s Bill is to deal with that inconsistency.
The need for the ban is, I am sure, obvious to all of us here, not just for consistency but because parking on pavements is extremely dangerous to many people: very obviously to people who are blind or partially sighted, to people who have a mobility difficulty whether they are using a wheelchair or not and to people pushing prams and pushchairs. Indeed, I would say that it is dangerous to every pedestrian who is forced into the road. That is the primary reason why we should now take this opportunity to introduce a pavement parking ban on a consistent basis throughout the rest of the country outside London, within which it already exists.
The campaign for a pavement parking ban has the support of 20 organisations: Guide Dogs for the blind, the Local Government Association, the British Parking Association, the Campaign for Better Transport, Age UK, Living Streets, the National Association of Local Councils, Whizz-Kidz, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, Sense, Civic Voice, the Design Council, Keep Britain Tidy, Transport for All, the Thomas Pocklington Trust, the Macular Society, the Glass-House, the National Pensioners Convention, the National Federation of Occupational Pensioners and Deafblind UK. I hope that the Minister’s experience in trying to deal with Clause 38 just now would suggest to him that it might be as well to give in and accept the amendment, or one very like it, now.
The amendment is long overdue. The primary reason is what I have already said: the dangerous nature of parking on pavements for pedestrians; particularly for those I have described, but quite seriously for all pedestrians—although clearly much more so for some than for others. I have a local authority background; indeed, maybe I should declare again my vice-presidency of the Local Government Association. Another reason is the cost of pavement parking. Parking on pavements breaks up the pavements, which are not built or designed to have people parking on them. It adds a considerable cost to local authorities having to repair them. Increasingly, I am sorry to say, budget restraints mean that those pavements do not get repaired, so even walking on the pavement can now be quite difficult and dangerous.
This campaign is supported by the overwhelming majority of local authorities for the reasons I have said and the need to get consistency. Current laws and practice around the country are simply not consistent. We therefore need a new law, long overdue, that, although it is quite a complex issue, makes it clear in simple terms that parking on pavements is not just wrong—it is, or should be, illegal. I beg to move.