Lack of time at last night's Wokingham Borough Council meeting prevented Cllr Pauline Jorgensen, Executive Member for Highways and Transport from giving this speech to keep residents informed of her work
“I would like to give you all an update on our proposed changes to help deal with car meets in Carnival car park.
"Following a series of ASB episodes affecting Carnival multi story car park Thames valley police made recommendations to the public protection partnership, Chief Executive and parking services. Amongst their proposals were that the time periods in which the car parks operate should be increased as a deterrent to anti-social behaviour and that we should install CCTV.
"We have installed the CCTV in the car park, the evidence from which has been shared with the police to aid the identification of the culprits. We used this process last Summer and it has proved very effective up until this latest incident.
"We are also setting up a new dedicated anti-social behaviour enforcement team as part of the transfer of PPP back to the Wokingham Borough. This will enable us to be more proactive and address any issues as they occur.
"There has been some talk that the introduction of barriers would be a solution to the problem, the council do not think that this would help for the following reasons: A barrier on entry would simply require you to take a ticket, the car park doesn’t charge in the evenings so there is no requirement to pay on exit, a barrier would therefore serve no deterrent. The car park is open in the evenings to service the evening economy in the town, it is used widely by people enjoying pubs and restaurants, returning from work on late trains and visiting relatives. Issuing tokens to exit the car park would therefore not be workable. The barriers are required to be flimsy to allow exit in the event of an emergency.
"As I mentioned one of the other things the police and our ASB team suggested we do was to increase the operational hours of the car park to 24 hours, this will allow for additional enforcement powers to be used against anybody found to be utilising Carnival Pool Car Park for any purpose other than to lawfully park their vehicle.
"The change to extend the car park operational hours was planned for December 2021 but unfortunately, despite the reasons being stated at the public meeting held to approve the Individual Executive Member decision (IEMD) containing this change, the opposition chose to call in the IEMD and delay the implementation citing disproportionality.
"We hope that they will reconsider this enabling us to implement the change requested by the police and ASB team."
